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Sugar is fuelling the biggest health crisis of our time
Death by sugar
How the sweet killer is fuelling the biggest health crisis of our time
Kate Lunau
May 6, 2014
Health Canada has announced a new food label proposal that would, among other changes, group all types of sugar together on a label. The idea is to make the amount of sugar in packaged foods more clear to consumers. The proposal would also set a recommendation of a daily maximum intake of 100 grams of sugar per day, something that did not exist before. However, the proposed changes have to make it through a series of public consultations before they come into effect.
In May, Kate Lunau wrote about the staggering amount of sugar Canadians consume on an annual basis.
Here’s her story:
At just 12 years old, Maggie Valentine weighs over 200 lb. “My doctor said I’m a statistic,” says Maggie, who has short, wavy blond hair. “I think it has something to do with my weight.” She’s trying hard to shed pounds, following the same advice we’ve all heard countless times. Maggie jogs and kayaks; she regularly swims laps, and walks her dogs. She also does her best to watch what she eats. Her mom buys her “reduced fat foods” in the supermarket, like Triscuit crackers and certain cereals. Despite their best efforts, though, Maggie’s weight stays the same. “Sometimes, it gets a little bit frustrating,” the preteen says quietly.
Maggie is one of several kids and teens featured in Fed Up, a new documentary from executive producer Laurie David, who was behind the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth.
At just 12 years old, Maggie Valentine weighs over 200 lb. “My doctor said I’m a statistic,” says Maggie, who has short, wavy blond hair. “I think it has something to do with my weight.” She’s trying hard to shed pounds, following the same advice we’ve all heard countless times. Maggie jogs and kayaks; she regularly swims laps, and walks her dogs. She also does her best to watch what she eats. Her mom buys her “reduced fat foods” in the supermarket, like Triscuit crackers and certain cereals. Despite their best efforts, though, Maggie’s weight stays the same. “Sometimes, it gets a little bit frustrating,” the preteen says quietly.
Maggie is one of several kids and teens featured in Fed Up, a new documentary from executive producer Laurie David, who was behind the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth.
It is a powerful call to arms about obesity—a message we’ve been hearing for years, and apparently have yet to heed. Between 1985 and 2011, the obesity rate among Canadian adults more than tripled; by 2019, overweight and obese adults will outnumber those of normal weight in half of our provinces, predicts a new report in Canadian Medical Association Journal Open.
Childhood obesity, too, has risen significantly in the past few decades. Obesity is now seen in babies as young as six months old, and it’s become a global crisis. We all know we’re supposed to eat less and exercise more, but that mantra doesn’t seem to be working.
What if the accepted wisdom on obesity—that to lose weight, we simply need to burn off more calories than we consume—is dead wrong?
That’s the case presented in Fed Up, and by a number of doctors and experts. Despite what we’ve heard for years, they say that not all calories are created equal, and that some may be worse for us than others.
That’s the case presented in Fed Up, and by a number of doctors and experts. Despite what we’ve heard for years, they say that not all calories are created equal, and that some may be worse for us than others.
Beyond that, one of our favourite ingredients might be making us sick. It’s something we’re hard-wired from birth to seek out, and it’s been described as addictive.
Yet it seems to be spurring on not only obesity, but—if the emerging science is right—other plagues of modern society like heart disease, diabetes, and perhaps even Alzheimer’s. The culprit, these doctors and scientists say, is sugar.
Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, who appears in Fed Up, is the most vocal and visible proponent of this way of thinking: that sugar is, as he puts it, a “toxin.” Even a “poison.” If that’s true, we’re in trouble. We consume it in astounding quantities. According to the latest Statistics Canada figures, Canadians downed 110 grams of sugar a day in 2004, from all sources.
That’s the equivalent of 26 teaspoons, amounting to over 21 per cent of our daily calorie intake, and it’s surely gone up since then. Canadianseat, on average, 88 lb. of sugar per year; the average nine-year-old boy will consume a whopping 123 lb. of sugar per year, and male teens, 138 lb. A Canadian teen’s primary source of sugar, according to the report, is soft drinks. Americans, meanwhile, have a mean daily intake of about 28 teaspoons; over a year, they’ll consume 96 pounds of sugar, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson.
Even for people with the best of intentions, who refrain from eating ice cream, candy and chocolate bars, sugar is almost impossible to avoid. According to Fed Up, of the 600,000 food items sold in U.S. grocery stores, 80 per cent have added sugar. S
Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, who appears in Fed Up, is the most vocal and visible proponent of this way of thinking: that sugar is, as he puts it, a “toxin.” Even a “poison.” If that’s true, we’re in trouble. We consume it in astounding quantities. According to the latest Statistics Canada figures, Canadians downed 110 grams of sugar a day in 2004, from all sources.
That’s the equivalent of 26 teaspoons, amounting to over 21 per cent of our daily calorie intake, and it’s surely gone up since then. Canadianseat, on average, 88 lb. of sugar per year; the average nine-year-old boy will consume a whopping 123 lb. of sugar per year, and male teens, 138 lb. A Canadian teen’s primary source of sugar, according to the report, is soft drinks. Americans, meanwhile, have a mean daily intake of about 28 teaspoons; over a year, they’ll consume 96 pounds of sugar, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson.
Even for people with the best of intentions, who refrain from eating ice cream, candy and chocolate bars, sugar is almost impossible to avoid. According to Fed Up, of the 600,000 food items sold in U.S. grocery stores, 80 per cent have added sugar. S
ugar and its ilk (including high-fructose corn syrup) are added to nearly everything we consume. Pasta sauce. Bread. Salad dressing. Peanut butter. One tablespoon of ketchup can contain as much as a teaspoon of sugar. “Low fat” products, especially those intended for kids, are often the biggest sugar bombs of all. Sugar-laden processed foods are everywhere: even at the local health food store, it’s truly a matter of buyer beware. Honey, agave syrup, fruit juices, and other sweeteners that often appear in “healthier” options—all are sugars.
Amid growing alarm about sugar, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently released new draft guidelines on how much of it we should consume. Sugars should make up less than 10 per cent of our total energy intake per day, it states, a number we already exceed. It further adds that cutting this below five per cent—less than half what Canadians currently consume—would have “additional benefits.” (The guidelines refer to almost all sugars in our diet, not including what’s in whole fruits, vegetables, or dairy.) “The evidence [against sugar] is expanding by the day,” the WHO’s Dr. Francesco Branca said of the new recommendations, voicing particular concern about the “hidden” sugars in processed foods.
Woe to the average Canadian, who almost reaches the WHO’s upper 10 per cent limit with just one can of regular pop, and gets within spitting distance of the five per cent lower cutoff after a four-ounce serving of regular Activia yogourt. Still, they wouldn’t know it from checking the nutrition information listed on the product. On the “nutrition facts” panel on Canadian food labels, the grams of sugar in a serving is listed. But what percentage that represents of our daily intake remains a vacant space, as it does in the U.S. Health Canada doesn’t set a recommended limit on sugar consumption (although it says it’s reviewing the WHO’s proposal). A number of experts and groups, like the Childhood Obesity Foundation, are calling on Health Canada to set a daily recommended sugar limit.“It’s so revealing of how the processed-food companies are more powerful than the regulators, supposedly watching them on our behalf,” says Michael Moss, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Salt Sugar Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us. “Look at that nutrition fact box—there’s a huge gaping hole next to sugar. They’ll tell you how much is in the product, but not how much is added, and how much is natural. And they won’t tell you how much sugar to eat.”
Industry maintains there’s good reason for this. “Science hasn’t found a specific level of sugar that causes harm,” says Sandra Marsden, president of the Canadian Sugar Institute (CSI), which represents our country’s sugar manufacturers. As part of the WHO’s public consultation, which wrapped up in March and will lead to a final report, the CSI swiftly submitted comments listing perceived problems with the new guidelines, as did other industry groups, including the Canadian Beverage Association (CBA) and Food and Consumer Products of Canada (FCPC). “There is no evidence for a five per cent limit,” adds Maisie Vanriel of FCPC, which represents our food product manufacturers. “Even as a dietician, it would be a toughie for me.”
How much sugar do you eat in a year? Click to view our infographic.
Critics accuse food and drink companies of putting the bottom line ahead of consumer health. The fiercest critics draw a comparison they surely dread. “The industry is responding to obesity exactly how tobacco responded to concerns about lung cancer,” says New York University dietician Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. “Attack the science, undermine the critics, [pay for] industry-funded studies.” In a study published in PLOS Medicine in December, researchers looked at 17 papers on sugar-sweetened drinks and their relationship to weight gain and obesity. They concluded that those papers in which authors had a “financial conflict of interest with [the] food industry” were five times more likely to find no association between sugary drinks and obesity.
David Moran of Coca-Cola Canada counters: “Tobacco cannot be consumed in a healthy manner whatsoever. We’re a beverage company. Beverages fit into a healthy lifestyle, but it depends on how active you are, and how many calories you consume.”
There’s a war under way, and consumers are at the heart of it. Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo Books & Music and an executive producer of Fed Up, is hoping to spark a cross-country movement toward healthier eating, a decision that will impact her company’s bottom line. “We’re eating way more [sugar] than we used to, and it has this really bad effect,” she says. Indigo is removing all sweets from its impulse section (although they will still be sold further back, with teas), which is expected to cost the company $3 million per year. “We know that has a financial impact,” says Reisman. “It’s a small step we can take to show leadership.”
The danger that sugar presents “has nothing to do with the calories,” Lustig says in a YouTube video called “The bitter truth,” which has been viewed over 4.6 million times. “It’s a poison by itself.” Poison or not, we’re programmed to seek it out, and our brains are wired to crave more. It’s a craving that industry understands and anticipates.
Forty years ago, a similar fear gripped consumers in Canada and the U.S., but back then, the enemy was dietary fat. With heart disease rampant, groups like the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association called for a reduction in fats. Food companies rolled out new lines of health-conscious, “low fat” products. (A low-fat label, it turns out, persuades us to eat as much as 50 per cent more, according to Cornell University’s food and brand lab.)
The problem was, these new foods tasted “like cardboard,” Lustig says. To make their offerings more appealing, manufacturers added sugar, or high-fructose corn syrup (“glucose-fructose” on Canadian food labels), which made its appearance on North American store shelves in the 1970s. Not only is high-fructose corn syrup much sweeter than refined sugar, it’s also way cheaper, and soon it was in all sorts of foods that shoppers might not expect, from pretzels to deli meat to processed cheese.
It’s human nature to seek out a sugar rush. High-calorie food stimulates the same parts of our brain as drugs and alcohol, brain-scan studies have shown. “Sugar, fat and salt are the basic drivers for survival,” says Dr. David Jenkins of the University of Toronto, who holds the Canada Research Chair in nutrition and metabolism. For most of our history, “we’ve struggled like mad to get sugar,” and now, within just a few decades, we’ve become buried in it. Before food processing, when we got sugar mainly from fruits and vegetables, we consumed about 30 grams per day of it, according to Lustig’s estimates. By 1977, Americans consumed more than 70 grams per day, and by 1994, it was 110 grams.
With food scientists focused on how to make their products tastier, cheaper and more convenient, resisting the lure of processed food became all but impossible. “It starts with the bench chemists,” says Moss, who’s spent years investigating the inner workings of the food industry. “Through trial and error, they determine the perfect amount of sugar, salt and fat.” Moss describes his encounters with Howard Moskowitz, the mastermind behind bestselling Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper and other blockbusters. “He coined the term ‘bliss point,’ ” Moss says, “that perfect amount of sugar that’ll send us over the moon, and will send products flying off the shelves.”
But sugar isn’t just incorporated into food and drink as a taste enhancer. “It provides so much more,” Moss continues. “It’s the preservative that allows [foods] to sit in the warehouse for months. Or the cheap substitution for other ingredients, like fresh herbs and spices, or fully ripened tomatoes.”
Soon enough, people were consuming sugar—whether they knew it or not—at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Food manufacturers “added sugar to things that didn’t used to be sweet,” Moss continues. “Flavoured yogourt can have as much sugar as ice cream,” making plain yogourt taste unforgivably bland by comparison. “It teaches us to expect sweetness all the time,” he says.
All sugar, even high-fructose corn syrup (now vilified as “unnatural”), is processed by the body in pretty much the same way. “Physiologically, sugar is sugar,” Nestle says. Refined sugar consists of glucose and fructose molecules bonded together. Sugar’s fructose component is metabolized mainly by the liver, which is what Lustig and others believe makes it uniquely dangerous. When it hits in a rapid dose, say a soft drink or a Twinkie, it’s quickly converted to fat in that organ. Doctors don’t worry about fruits and veggies, because they’re full of fibre and digest more slowly, giving the body a chance to use up stored energy. And fibre leaves us feeling full, unlike a handful of candy. (The jury’s still out on artificial sweeteners, but studies have linked them to weight gain, suggesting they prime the brain to seek out high-calorie sweets later.)
Infographic: How much sugar is in that bowl of cereal—or bottle of vitamin water? Click to view.
Of course, as a source of calories, eating lots of sugar leads to extra pounds. But it’s more complicated than that. While sugar isn’t the direct cause of diabetes, for example, it seems to spark a cascade of effects that wreak havoc in the body. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, explains: “Fat in your liver is linked to insulin resistance,” when the body no longer makes good use of that critical hormone, which helps cells throughout the body absorb glucose and use it for energy. Glucose then builds up in the bloodstream, raising the risk of Type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is now common, most alarmingly among kids—which was all but unheard of less than three decades ago. By the year 2050, according to Fed Up, one in three Americans will have diabetes.
Metabolic syndrome affects 20 per cent of Canadians. It’s a cluster of risk factors, from having a big waistline and fat packed around the abdomen, to high blood pressure, both of which raise the risk of cardiovascular disease—and again, Type 2 diabetes. In February, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that consuming added sugar was associated with increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease. (Although the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada takes a position on several issues around nutrition, from sodium to trans fats, it has yet to make a recommendation about sugar intake. It’s working on one.)
Even the rising Alzheimer’s epidemic could be linked, at least in part, to our modern diets. Suzanne de la Monte, professor of neurosurgery at Brown University, suggests that Alzheimer’s might be a form of insulin resistance in the brain—a “Type 3 diabetes,” as she calls it. Insulin, she explains, is “the master hormone” throughout the body, including in the brain, where it plays a crucial role in plasticity, and stimulates brain cells to take up and metabolize glucose for energy. While Alzheimer’s does have a genetic component, “you can’t really explain this soaring increase in Alzheimer’s disease on the basis of genes alone,” de la Monte says. “It has to be the environment, because we’ve changed the environment and what we eat so drastically.”
Still, there’s roiling debate among scientists about whether the fructose in sugar really is the devil that Lustig and others make it out to be. Dr. John Sievenpiper, a scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital’s Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute in Toronto, has published a series of papers concluding that excess calories from fructose aren’t any worse from other sources. He believes science doesn’t justify recommending a daily limit for sugar consumption: “I don’t care if it’s five grams or 100 grams,” says Sievenpiper. “If it’s providing excess calories, it’s a problem.”
Others fire back that sugar can be a danger, but add that refined starches are just as bad, and of course we consume those in huge quantities, too. Unlike sugars, these are only made up of glucose, which isn’t metabolized like fructose in the liver. Yet if it comes in a rush, from a piece of white bread, for example, it’s converted to fat in the liver, too, says Mozaffarian. He was lead author on a 2011 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, finding that some foods are more likely to pack on pounds—and undermining the notion that all calories contribute equally to weight gain. In his paper, the foods most associated with extra weight were potato chips, sugary drinks, and the old staple of many dinner tables: potatoes. Fibre-rich foods like fruits, veggies and nuts had the opposite effect. “Eating a piece of white bread is no different than Skittles,” Mozaffarian says. “It’s basically sugar.”
Investigative health and science journalist Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It, thinks that when it comes to obesity and other conditions, “sugar is probably the primary problem,” pointing to traditional Asian cultures, where white rice is a staple, and which had low rates of obesity and diabetes until recently. He’s co-founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative, a non-profit funding two upcoming studies that will track overweight and obese people, while tinkering with their diets (in the second study, virtually all carbs will be replaced with fat). These studies, Taubes says, are intended to test what he calls “the central dogma of obesity, that a calorie is a calorie.”
It’s a message we hear from the food and drink industry over and over again: that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, and that the true cause of obesity is a failure to burn them off. “Sugar is like any source of calories,” says Marsden, of the Canadian Sugar Institute. To lower the risk of obesity, she says, “you need to focus on total calories and activity.” “It’s always been very important to the sugar industry that a calorie is a calorie,” says Taubes. “As long as people think we get fat [just because] we eat too much, industry can say, eat in moderation, and exercise more,” but don’t abandon a beloved product.
The worry is that much of the debate around sugar plays right into industry’s hands. Like a game of Whac-A-Mole, as soon as one ingredient—whether it’s gluten, peanuts, trans fats, or something else—is pegged as particularly harmful, companies rush out a line of products with a reduced amount of that “problem” ingredient, but these new products aren’t necessarily healthier. “Industry loves it when we concentrate our concern on one thing, whether it’s sugar, fat or salt, because they can adjust,” Moss says. “They can lower the amount of sugar, and boost fat and salt, and put it on shelves next to the regular version. It will increase sales,” he says, “not diminish them.”
When it comes to the food industry, a consumer can feel a bit like David before Goliath. Designing the perfect products to reel us in, scientists consider everything from the ideal noise level for the crunch of a chip, to something called “vanishing caloric density,” that feeling when a food hits the tongue (think ice cream or Cheetos) and all but disappears, leaving an insatiable craving for more. Laden with sugar, fat and salt, these products are palatable, convenient and cheap.
The companies’ genius extends from the lab to the shelves of our local grocery store. Take the cereal aisle. In a new study that looked at 65 cereals in 10 different U.S. supermarkets, researchers from Cornell found that those intended for kids are placed half as high on shelves: about 58 cm, compared to 122 for adults. What’s truly unnerving, though, is their second finding—that the colourful mascots on those boxes gaze downward, on average, at a 9.6-degree angle, so their eyes essentially follow kids. (Characters on adult cereal, meanwhile, mostly stare straight ahead, locking eyes with us.)
Marketing to children has been, and remains, one of the most controversial practices of the food industry. In the U.S., it’s extremely hard to limit, says Kelly Brownell of Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “The first amendment protects speech, and one form is commercial speech,” he explains. Since 1980, Quebec has banned all marketing to kids under 13, and the province “is ahead in that regard,” says obesity expert Yoni Freedhoff, medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, and author of The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work.
But even without Cap’n Crunch peering down from the cereal aisle, processed food, for kids, is nearly impossible to avoid. Fed Up explores its encroachment into U.S. schools where, because of cutbacks and industry pressure, fast food lunches are the norm. (In the documentary, Duke University’s Brownell compares schools to “a 7-Eleven with books.”) School lunches “are horrendous here, too,” says Freedhoff, an adviser on Fed Up, who decries “the use of junk food in fundraising, and to reward, pacify and entertain kids. It’s so normal now,” he continues, “that when we speak up against it, people get mad.”
Efforts to reduce sugar consumption can lead to friction with big companies. In 2012, Coca-Cola sent letters to Ottawa city councillors over a public health campaign urging people to cut back on sugar-sweetened drinks. Stephanie Baxter of the Canadian Beverage Association explains: “No one single food or beverage is responsible for weight gain and obesity. By targeting one category, you’re creating a false sense [of security] for consumers.” Following a meeting between public health officials, Coke representatives and the CBA, the Ottawa campaign, which emphasizes nutrition and activities like walking, continues. “At the time, there was some misinterpretation we were targeting particular companies or products, which was unfortunate,” says Sherry Nigro of Ottawa Public Health.
Brownell is buoyed by a renewed push to remove junk food from U.S. schools—one that began at the local level, with individual districts. Ontario, too, introduced its new school food and beverage policy in 2011, which includes beefed-up nutrition standards.
Although New York’s famous “soda ban,” which would have limited the size of sugary drinks, is stalled before the courts, the ideas of taxes and bans are no longer so far-fetched. In November, for example, voters in San Francisco will decide whether to support a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.
Last year, for the first time, Coca-Cola addressed obesity in a global television campaign. Its ad highlights the company’s more than “70 low- and no-calorie choices,” smaller portion sizes, and the move to post calorie content on the front of the can or bottle. (This initiative was launched by the Canadian beverage industry in 2011.) In schools, Coke offers healthier choices like water, juice and diet drinks, it notes. The ad concludes with a familiar message. “All calories count,” the female narrator says over images of kids and teens dancing, jogging and playing hockey. “No matter where they come from, including Coca-Cola and everything else with calories. If you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you’ll gain weight.”
Observers like Freedhoff insist we can’t expect the food and drink industry to solve the obesity crisis. Companies are out to make a profit—and will keep selling us products we’re willing to buy. “These aren’t social service organizations,” he says. Change has to come, Freedhoff maintains, from “empowering the individual to understand the marketplace, whether it’s calorie counts on menu boards, banning certain claims on the front of packages,” or issuing clear guidelines on how much sugar we should have in a day.
Following its public consultation, the WHO is now finalizing its updated guidelines on sugar. Earlier this year, Health Canada launched a public consultation of its own: one aimed at improving our country’s nutrition labels. Many will be watching to see what is said about sugar. For now, though, that space on every nutrition label in the country remains troublingly blank.
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ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Kate Lunau
Kate Lunau is a health and science writer at Maclean's Magazine, who previously reported for the Montreal Gazette. She's the recipient of several journalism awards, including the 2014 Yves Fortier Earth Science Journalism Award, and has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards. Like Elon Musk, she hopes to retire on Mars.
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Infographic: How much sugar do you eat in a year?
How much sugar is in that bowl of cereal—or bottle of vitamin water?
Amid growing alarm about sugar, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently released new draft guidelines on how much of it we should consume. Sugars should make up less than 10 per cent of our total energy intake per day, it states, a number we already exceed. It further adds that cutting this below five per cent—less than half what Canadians currently consume—would have “additional benefits.” (The guidelines refer to almost all sugars in our diet, not including what’s in whole fruits, vegetables, or dairy.) “The evidence [against sugar] is expanding by the day,” the WHO’s Dr. Francesco Branca said of the new recommendations, voicing particular concern about the “hidden” sugars in processed foods.
Woe to the average Canadian, who almost reaches the WHO’s upper 10 per cent limit with just one can of regular pop, and gets within spitting distance of the five per cent lower cutoff after a four-ounce serving of regular Activia yogourt. Still, they wouldn’t know it from checking the nutrition information listed on the product. On the “nutrition facts” panel on Canadian food labels, the grams of sugar in a serving is listed. But what percentage that represents of our daily intake remains a vacant space, as it does in the U.S. Health Canada doesn’t set a recommended limit on sugar consumption (although it says it’s reviewing the WHO’s proposal). A number of experts and groups, like the Childhood Obesity Foundation, are calling on Health Canada to set a daily recommended sugar limit.“It’s so revealing of how the processed-food companies are more powerful than the regulators, supposedly watching them on our behalf,” says Michael Moss, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Salt Sugar Fat: How The Food Giants Hooked Us. “Look at that nutrition fact box—there’s a huge gaping hole next to sugar. They’ll tell you how much is in the product, but not how much is added, and how much is natural. And they won’t tell you how much sugar to eat.”
Industry maintains there’s good reason for this. “Science hasn’t found a specific level of sugar that causes harm,” says Sandra Marsden, president of the Canadian Sugar Institute (CSI), which represents our country’s sugar manufacturers. As part of the WHO’s public consultation, which wrapped up in March and will lead to a final report, the CSI swiftly submitted comments listing perceived problems with the new guidelines, as did other industry groups, including the Canadian Beverage Association (CBA) and Food and Consumer Products of Canada (FCPC). “There is no evidence for a five per cent limit,” adds Maisie Vanriel of FCPC, which represents our food product manufacturers. “Even as a dietician, it would be a toughie for me.”
How much sugar do you eat in a year? Click to view our infographic.
Critics accuse food and drink companies of putting the bottom line ahead of consumer health. The fiercest critics draw a comparison they surely dread. “The industry is responding to obesity exactly how tobacco responded to concerns about lung cancer,” says New York University dietician Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. “Attack the science, undermine the critics, [pay for] industry-funded studies.” In a study published in PLOS Medicine in December, researchers looked at 17 papers on sugar-sweetened drinks and their relationship to weight gain and obesity. They concluded that those papers in which authors had a “financial conflict of interest with [the] food industry” were five times more likely to find no association between sugary drinks and obesity.
David Moran of Coca-Cola Canada counters: “Tobacco cannot be consumed in a healthy manner whatsoever. We’re a beverage company. Beverages fit into a healthy lifestyle, but it depends on how active you are, and how many calories you consume.”
There’s a war under way, and consumers are at the heart of it. Heather Reisman, CEO of Indigo Books & Music and an executive producer of Fed Up, is hoping to spark a cross-country movement toward healthier eating, a decision that will impact her company’s bottom line. “We’re eating way more [sugar] than we used to, and it has this really bad effect,” she says. Indigo is removing all sweets from its impulse section (although they will still be sold further back, with teas), which is expected to cost the company $3 million per year. “We know that has a financial impact,” says Reisman. “It’s a small step we can take to show leadership.”
The danger that sugar presents “has nothing to do with the calories,” Lustig says in a YouTube video called “The bitter truth,” which has been viewed over 4.6 million times. “It’s a poison by itself.” Poison or not, we’re programmed to seek it out, and our brains are wired to crave more. It’s a craving that industry understands and anticipates.
Forty years ago, a similar fear gripped consumers in Canada and the U.S., but back then, the enemy was dietary fat. With heart disease rampant, groups like the American Medical Association and the American Heart Association called for a reduction in fats. Food companies rolled out new lines of health-conscious, “low fat” products. (A low-fat label, it turns out, persuades us to eat as much as 50 per cent more, according to Cornell University’s food and brand lab.)
The problem was, these new foods tasted “like cardboard,” Lustig says. To make their offerings more appealing, manufacturers added sugar, or high-fructose corn syrup (“glucose-fructose” on Canadian food labels), which made its appearance on North American store shelves in the 1970s. Not only is high-fructose corn syrup much sweeter than refined sugar, it’s also way cheaper, and soon it was in all sorts of foods that shoppers might not expect, from pretzels to deli meat to processed cheese.
It’s human nature to seek out a sugar rush. High-calorie food stimulates the same parts of our brain as drugs and alcohol, brain-scan studies have shown. “Sugar, fat and salt are the basic drivers for survival,” says Dr. David Jenkins of the University of Toronto, who holds the Canada Research Chair in nutrition and metabolism. For most of our history, “we’ve struggled like mad to get sugar,” and now, within just a few decades, we’ve become buried in it. Before food processing, when we got sugar mainly from fruits and vegetables, we consumed about 30 grams per day of it, according to Lustig’s estimates. By 1977, Americans consumed more than 70 grams per day, and by 1994, it was 110 grams.
With food scientists focused on how to make their products tastier, cheaper and more convenient, resisting the lure of processed food became all but impossible. “It starts with the bench chemists,” says Moss, who’s spent years investigating the inner workings of the food industry. “Through trial and error, they determine the perfect amount of sugar, salt and fat.” Moss describes his encounters with Howard Moskowitz, the mastermind behind bestselling Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper and other blockbusters. “He coined the term ‘bliss point,’ ” Moss says, “that perfect amount of sugar that’ll send us over the moon, and will send products flying off the shelves.”
But sugar isn’t just incorporated into food and drink as a taste enhancer. “It provides so much more,” Moss continues. “It’s the preservative that allows [foods] to sit in the warehouse for months. Or the cheap substitution for other ingredients, like fresh herbs and spices, or fully ripened tomatoes.”
Soon enough, people were consuming sugar—whether they knew it or not—at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Food manufacturers “added sugar to things that didn’t used to be sweet,” Moss continues. “Flavoured yogourt can have as much sugar as ice cream,” making plain yogourt taste unforgivably bland by comparison. “It teaches us to expect sweetness all the time,” he says.
All sugar, even high-fructose corn syrup (now vilified as “unnatural”), is processed by the body in pretty much the same way. “Physiologically, sugar is sugar,” Nestle says. Refined sugar consists of glucose and fructose molecules bonded together. Sugar’s fructose component is metabolized mainly by the liver, which is what Lustig and others believe makes it uniquely dangerous. When it hits in a rapid dose, say a soft drink or a Twinkie, it’s quickly converted to fat in that organ. Doctors don’t worry about fruits and veggies, because they’re full of fibre and digest more slowly, giving the body a chance to use up stored energy. And fibre leaves us feeling full, unlike a handful of candy. (The jury’s still out on artificial sweeteners, but studies have linked them to weight gain, suggesting they prime the brain to seek out high-calorie sweets later.)
Infographic: How much sugar is in that bowl of cereal—or bottle of vitamin water? Click to view.
Of course, as a source of calories, eating lots of sugar leads to extra pounds. But it’s more complicated than that. While sugar isn’t the direct cause of diabetes, for example, it seems to spark a cascade of effects that wreak havoc in the body. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, explains: “Fat in your liver is linked to insulin resistance,” when the body no longer makes good use of that critical hormone, which helps cells throughout the body absorb glucose and use it for energy. Glucose then builds up in the bloodstream, raising the risk of Type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is now common, most alarmingly among kids—which was all but unheard of less than three decades ago. By the year 2050, according to Fed Up, one in three Americans will have diabetes.
Metabolic syndrome affects 20 per cent of Canadians. It’s a cluster of risk factors, from having a big waistline and fat packed around the abdomen, to high blood pressure, both of which raise the risk of cardiovascular disease—and again, Type 2 diabetes. In February, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that consuming added sugar was associated with increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease. (Although the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada takes a position on several issues around nutrition, from sodium to trans fats, it has yet to make a recommendation about sugar intake. It’s working on one.)
Even the rising Alzheimer’s epidemic could be linked, at least in part, to our modern diets. Suzanne de la Monte, professor of neurosurgery at Brown University, suggests that Alzheimer’s might be a form of insulin resistance in the brain—a “Type 3 diabetes,” as she calls it. Insulin, she explains, is “the master hormone” throughout the body, including in the brain, where it plays a crucial role in plasticity, and stimulates brain cells to take up and metabolize glucose for energy. While Alzheimer’s does have a genetic component, “you can’t really explain this soaring increase in Alzheimer’s disease on the basis of genes alone,” de la Monte says. “It has to be the environment, because we’ve changed the environment and what we eat so drastically.”
Still, there’s roiling debate among scientists about whether the fructose in sugar really is the devil that Lustig and others make it out to be. Dr. John Sievenpiper, a scientist at St. Michael’s Hospital’s Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute in Toronto, has published a series of papers concluding that excess calories from fructose aren’t any worse from other sources. He believes science doesn’t justify recommending a daily limit for sugar consumption: “I don’t care if it’s five grams or 100 grams,” says Sievenpiper. “If it’s providing excess calories, it’s a problem.”
Others fire back that sugar can be a danger, but add that refined starches are just as bad, and of course we consume those in huge quantities, too. Unlike sugars, these are only made up of glucose, which isn’t metabolized like fructose in the liver. Yet if it comes in a rush, from a piece of white bread, for example, it’s converted to fat in the liver, too, says Mozaffarian. He was lead author on a 2011 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, finding that some foods are more likely to pack on pounds—and undermining the notion that all calories contribute equally to weight gain. In his paper, the foods most associated with extra weight were potato chips, sugary drinks, and the old staple of many dinner tables: potatoes. Fibre-rich foods like fruits, veggies and nuts had the opposite effect. “Eating a piece of white bread is no different than Skittles,” Mozaffarian says. “It’s basically sugar.”
Investigative health and science journalist Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It, thinks that when it comes to obesity and other conditions, “sugar is probably the primary problem,” pointing to traditional Asian cultures, where white rice is a staple, and which had low rates of obesity and diabetes until recently. He’s co-founder of the Nutrition Science Initiative, a non-profit funding two upcoming studies that will track overweight and obese people, while tinkering with their diets (in the second study, virtually all carbs will be replaced with fat). These studies, Taubes says, are intended to test what he calls “the central dogma of obesity, that a calorie is a calorie.”
It’s a message we hear from the food and drink industry over and over again: that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, and that the true cause of obesity is a failure to burn them off. “Sugar is like any source of calories,” says Marsden, of the Canadian Sugar Institute. To lower the risk of obesity, she says, “you need to focus on total calories and activity.” “It’s always been very important to the sugar industry that a calorie is a calorie,” says Taubes. “As long as people think we get fat [just because] we eat too much, industry can say, eat in moderation, and exercise more,” but don’t abandon a beloved product.
The worry is that much of the debate around sugar plays right into industry’s hands. Like a game of Whac-A-Mole, as soon as one ingredient—whether it’s gluten, peanuts, trans fats, or something else—is pegged as particularly harmful, companies rush out a line of products with a reduced amount of that “problem” ingredient, but these new products aren’t necessarily healthier. “Industry loves it when we concentrate our concern on one thing, whether it’s sugar, fat or salt, because they can adjust,” Moss says. “They can lower the amount of sugar, and boost fat and salt, and put it on shelves next to the regular version. It will increase sales,” he says, “not diminish them.”
When it comes to the food industry, a consumer can feel a bit like David before Goliath. Designing the perfect products to reel us in, scientists consider everything from the ideal noise level for the crunch of a chip, to something called “vanishing caloric density,” that feeling when a food hits the tongue (think ice cream or Cheetos) and all but disappears, leaving an insatiable craving for more. Laden with sugar, fat and salt, these products are palatable, convenient and cheap.
The companies’ genius extends from the lab to the shelves of our local grocery store. Take the cereal aisle. In a new study that looked at 65 cereals in 10 different U.S. supermarkets, researchers from Cornell found that those intended for kids are placed half as high on shelves: about 58 cm, compared to 122 for adults. What’s truly unnerving, though, is their second finding—that the colourful mascots on those boxes gaze downward, on average, at a 9.6-degree angle, so their eyes essentially follow kids. (Characters on adult cereal, meanwhile, mostly stare straight ahead, locking eyes with us.)
Marketing to children has been, and remains, one of the most controversial practices of the food industry. In the U.S., it’s extremely hard to limit, says Kelly Brownell of Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “The first amendment protects speech, and one form is commercial speech,” he explains. Since 1980, Quebec has banned all marketing to kids under 13, and the province “is ahead in that regard,” says obesity expert Yoni Freedhoff, medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, and author of The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How to Make Yours Work.
But even without Cap’n Crunch peering down from the cereal aisle, processed food, for kids, is nearly impossible to avoid. Fed Up explores its encroachment into U.S. schools where, because of cutbacks and industry pressure, fast food lunches are the norm. (In the documentary, Duke University’s Brownell compares schools to “a 7-Eleven with books.”) School lunches “are horrendous here, too,” says Freedhoff, an adviser on Fed Up, who decries “the use of junk food in fundraising, and to reward, pacify and entertain kids. It’s so normal now,” he continues, “that when we speak up against it, people get mad.”
Efforts to reduce sugar consumption can lead to friction with big companies. In 2012, Coca-Cola sent letters to Ottawa city councillors over a public health campaign urging people to cut back on sugar-sweetened drinks. Stephanie Baxter of the Canadian Beverage Association explains: “No one single food or beverage is responsible for weight gain and obesity. By targeting one category, you’re creating a false sense [of security] for consumers.” Following a meeting between public health officials, Coke representatives and the CBA, the Ottawa campaign, which emphasizes nutrition and activities like walking, continues. “At the time, there was some misinterpretation we were targeting particular companies or products, which was unfortunate,” says Sherry Nigro of Ottawa Public Health.
Brownell is buoyed by a renewed push to remove junk food from U.S. schools—one that began at the local level, with individual districts. Ontario, too, introduced its new school food and beverage policy in 2011, which includes beefed-up nutrition standards.
Although New York’s famous “soda ban,” which would have limited the size of sugary drinks, is stalled before the courts, the ideas of taxes and bans are no longer so far-fetched. In November, for example, voters in San Francisco will decide whether to support a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.
Last year, for the first time, Coca-Cola addressed obesity in a global television campaign. Its ad highlights the company’s more than “70 low- and no-calorie choices,” smaller portion sizes, and the move to post calorie content on the front of the can or bottle. (This initiative was launched by the Canadian beverage industry in 2011.) In schools, Coke offers healthier choices like water, juice and diet drinks, it notes. The ad concludes with a familiar message. “All calories count,” the female narrator says over images of kids and teens dancing, jogging and playing hockey. “No matter where they come from, including Coca-Cola and everything else with calories. If you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, you’ll gain weight.”
Observers like Freedhoff insist we can’t expect the food and drink industry to solve the obesity crisis. Companies are out to make a profit—and will keep selling us products we’re willing to buy. “These aren’t social service organizations,” he says. Change has to come, Freedhoff maintains, from “empowering the individual to understand the marketplace, whether it’s calorie counts on menu boards, banning certain claims on the front of packages,” or issuing clear guidelines on how much sugar we should have in a day.
Following its public consultation, the WHO is now finalizing its updated guidelines on sugar. Earlier this year, Health Canada launched a public consultation of its own: one aimed at improving our country’s nutrition labels. Many will be watching to see what is said about sugar. For now, though, that space on every nutrition label in the country remains troublingly blank.
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ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Kate Lunau
Kate Lunau is a health and science writer at Maclean's Magazine, who previously reported for the Montreal Gazette. She's the recipient of several journalism awards, including the 2014 Yves Fortier Earth Science Journalism Award, and has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards. Like Elon Musk, she hopes to retire on Mars.
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Infographic: How much sugar do you eat in a year?
How much sugar is in that bowl of cereal—or bottle of vitamin water?
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Western Diet
Step away from the burger:
Why a 'Western' diet is bad for your health
Meera Senthilingam, for CNN
Sugary drinks are the epitome of the fast food diet. Their high sugar content increases likelihood of obesity, diabetes and other health conditions.
The Mediterranean diet is renowned for its health benefits. It contains low levels of red meat, sugar and saturated fats and is high in fish, unsaturated fats such as olive oil, fruits, vegetables and legumes.
Diets low in fruit and vegetables can be low in vitamins, minerals and fiber crucial to growth and health.
The Japanese diet is also known for its healthy components -- high in soy protein and vegetables. Japanese people are more likely to reach 100 years old than anyone else in the world.
The longest-lived population live on the Southern Japanese Okinawa islands, where diets contain large amounts of fish, whole grains, soy protein and vegetables.
The "Western" diet is spreading across the world. It's characterized by a high intake of red meat, refined sugars and saturated fat -- but little fiber.
A common feature of Western diets is processed fast food. Pictured, a pepperoni pizza high in fat and carbohydrate and topped with cured, processed meat.
Candy bars have been highlighted as a key example of processed foods. Ingredients such as fructose and palmitic acid mean may initiate a low-level immune response in the body distracting the immune system from other infections.
Some studies have linked eating too much red meat with a shortened lifespan.
Sugary drinks are the epitome of the fast food diet. Their high sugar content increases likelihood of obesity, diabetes and other health conditions.
The Mediterranean diet is renowned for its health benefits. It contains low levels of red meat, sugar and saturated fats and is high in fish, unsaturated fats such as olive oil, fruits, vegetables and legumes.
Diets low in fruit and vegetables can be low in vitamins, minerals and fiber crucial to growth and health.
Meera Senthilingam, for CNN
Sugary drinks are the epitome of the fast food diet. Their high sugar content increases likelihood of obesity, diabetes and other health conditions.
The Mediterranean diet is renowned for its health benefits. It contains low levels of red meat, sugar and saturated fats and is high in fish, unsaturated fats such as olive oil, fruits, vegetables and legumes.
Diets low in fruit and vegetables can be low in vitamins, minerals and fiber crucial to growth and health.
The Japanese diet is also known for its healthy components -- high in soy protein and vegetables. Japanese people are more likely to reach 100 years old than anyone else in the world.
The longest-lived population live on the Southern Japanese Okinawa islands, where diets contain large amounts of fish, whole grains, soy protein and vegetables.
The "Western" diet is spreading across the world. It's characterized by a high intake of red meat, refined sugars and saturated fat -- but little fiber.
A common feature of Western diets is processed fast food. Pictured, a pepperoni pizza high in fat and carbohydrate and topped with cured, processed meat.
Candy bars have been highlighted as a key example of processed foods. Ingredients such as fructose and palmitic acid mean may initiate a low-level immune response in the body distracting the immune system from other infections.
Some studies have linked eating too much red meat with a shortened lifespan.
Sugary drinks are the epitome of the fast food diet. Their high sugar content increases likelihood of obesity, diabetes and other health conditions.
The Mediterranean diet is renowned for its health benefits. It contains low levels of red meat, sugar and saturated fats and is high in fish, unsaturated fats such as olive oil, fruits, vegetables and legumes.
Diets low in fruit and vegetables can be low in vitamins, minerals and fiber crucial to growth and health.
The Japanese diet is also known for its healthy components -- high in soy protein and vegetables. Japanese people are more likely to reach 100 years old than anyone else in the world.
The longest-lived population live on the Southern Japanese Okinawa islands, where diets contain large amounts of fish, whole grains, soy protein and vegetables.
The "Western" diet is spreading across the world. It's characterized by a high intake of red meat, refined sugars and saturated fat -- but little fiber.
A common feature of Western diets is processed fast food. Pictured, a pepperoni pizza high in fat and carbohydrate and topped with cured, processed meat.
Candy bars have been highlighted as a key example of processed foods. Ingredients such as fructose and palmitic acid mean may initiate a low-level immune response in the body distracting the immune system from other infections.
Some studies have linked eating too much red meat with a shortened lifespan.
Sugary drinks are the epitome of the fast food diet. Their high sugar content increases likelihood of obesity, diabetes and other health conditions.
Story highlights
The longest-lived population live on the Southern Japanese Okinawa islands, where diets contain large amounts of fish, whole grains, soy protein and vegetables.
The "Western" diet is spreading across the world. It's characterized by a high intake of red meat, refined sugars and saturated fat -- but little fiber.
A common feature of Western diets is processed fast food. Pictured, a pepperoni pizza high in fat and carbohydrate and topped with cured, processed meat.
Candy bars have been highlighted as a key example of processed foods. Ingredients such as fructose and palmitic acid mean may initiate a low-level immune response in the body distracting the immune system from other infections.
Some studies have linked eating too much red meat with a shortened lifespan.
Sugary drinks are the epitome of the fast food diet. Their high sugar content increases likelihood of obesity, diabetes and other health conditions.
Story highlights
A 'Western' diet is high in sugars, saturated fats, and animal protein yet low in fiber.
Highly processed and refined foods are disliked by the body, creating an immune response
Eating processed foods can cause the good bacteria in your gut to be pushed out
Recent studies have linked Western diets with increased risks of colon and prostate cancer
Vital Signs is a monthly program bringing viewers health stories from around the world.
(CNN)The developing world is seeing rapid urbanization, with more than half of the world's population now living in cities and this figure expected to reach 70% by 2050.
But with this progression comes an urban lifestyle -- often meaning less physical activity and the consumption of a "Western" diet.
"[There's a] nutrition transition occurring around the world," says David Tilman, professor of Ecology at the University of Minnesota. In a recent study, Tilman explored global trends in diet choices and the link between these diets and health.
"People around the world, as incomes go up, choose more calories and meat in their diet," says Tilman. The result? Potentially disastrous consequences on health and an increased risk of disease.
"We have a whole new group of people who are malnourished because they eat foods that are no good for them, that have no nutritional benefit," says Tilman. The trend contradicts the more traditional causes of malnutrition.
Also on the rise is access to, and consumption of, processed foods.
"Processed foods have low nutritional value," says Tilman, who describes processed food as having empty calories. "Diets low in fruit and vegetables have a strong negative health impact," he says.
And a diet high in processed foods -- and generally a modern "Western" diet -- is even worse.
What is a Western diet?
"The biggest features [of a Western diet] are overconsumption of over-refined sugars, highly refined and saturated fats, animal protein and a reduced intake of plant-based fibers," says Ian Myles, from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. This translates to a diet high in fat, red meat, salt and sugars, and low in fiber.
"Too many calories in general," says Myles -- a trend aided by the move towards a culture of fast food.
But what impact can this diet have on your health?
Increasing your risk of infection
According to Myles, highly processed and refined foods, common to Western meals, are disliked by the body. "It throws your immune system off kilter," he says.
The biggest culprits in Myles' eyes are foods containing fructose and palmitic acid -- ingredients found commonly in candy bars -- which can kick-start an immune reaction.
"[Palmitic acid] can be confused by the body with bacteria like E.Coli," says Myles. The body then starts an immune attack against the supposed bacteria, which results in a low level of inflammation.
Distracting the immune system in this way means immune cells won't be as ready to attack when facing a real infection. "It throws off the way your body responds...and by the time you recognize it, it will have gotten worse," says Myles.
However, the effect is reversible.
A change in diet to remove exposure to these food components can restore immune activity back to its normal state, according to Myles. "That low-grade inflammation will change," he says.
Changing your gut bacteria
Your gut microbes play a crucial role in the health and wellbeing of not only your gut, but your whole body.
"Every person carries about 1kg of microbes inside them," says Jeremy Nicholson, head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London. According to Nicholson, the body's gut microbes are heavily connected with the control of the immune system, which in turn controls inflammation.
Eating processed foods can cause the good bacteria in your gut to be pushed out -- leaving you more exposed to the bad ones. "The good bacteria don't survive as well," says Myles.
Obesity and diabetes
The global increase in diets high in fat and calories is seeing rates of obesity and diabetes rise rapidly across the world. "There is soaring obesity," says Nicholson.
In 2014, more than 600 million adults were obese globally, and almost 2 billion adults were overweight, according to the World Health Organization.
"Obesity predisposes you to disease," says Nicholson. Inflammation within the body is also high in obese individuals, increasing their risk of developing diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and joint conditions such as arthritis. "All of these are inflammatory conditions," says Nicholson.
Increased obesity levels are also thought to contribute to a rise in cases of joint conditions and replacements, due to the extra pressure and wear placed on the joints. "Obese people need hip and knee replacement much earlier in their lives," says Nicholson.
Linked to obesity, another disease with rates now soaring globally is diabetes, affecting 374 million people in 2014. The development of Type II diabetes is linked with diet and numbers are rising in every country, according to the IDF diabetes atlas.
Cancer risk
Recent studies have linked Western diets with increased risks of colon and prostate cancer. Men eating mostly a Western diet were found to have 2.5 times the risk of dying from prostate cancer whilst the risks associated with colon cancer again linked back to inflammation and a change in the activities of gut bacteria.
"In obese individuals you get different microbial compositions to produce something that can impact cancer," says Nicholson, who led the recent research exploring risks of colon cancer. In his study, he compared the impact of diet in a group of South Africans and African Americans and found the African Americans to have 50 times more risk of developing colon cancer. "The implications is that ... this is related to their Western diet," he says. By working with African Americans, the team reduced the impact of genetic variation which also plays a role in disease development.
Increased inflammation levels can also damage cells in the region affected -- such as the colon -- causing higher turnover of cells. The more cells replicate, the more chances there are for mutations in the genes they contain -- which increases the risk of cancer.
"Cancer arrives more readily in cells with relatively high turnover," explains Nicholson.
But Nicholson warns that cancer is not a simple disease: "Hundreds of genes are involved," he says. "Your microbes are part of the process but not entirely the cause."
Choices
Clearly, diet plays a large role in the health of a population and when it comes to improving personal health, experts stress the need for people to take more note of what they are eating.
"This is going to have to be voluntary choices people make," says Tilman.
What will you choose?
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/07/health/western-diet-health/index.html
Friday, May 22, 2015
Fast Food Tattoos
Not really sure what to say about this guy! Is he sharing his obviously love for unhealthy junk food or is he being paid as a human advertising board by the many chains?
Monday, May 11, 2015
Refridgerate Chocolat
"Fat bloom" in chocolate
An article at Chemistry Matters explains that chocolate tastes better if it is kept in a refrigerator.
This is all to do with a phenomenon known as polymorphism, which is the ability for a solid to exist in more than one crystal structure. Each crystal structure is called a polymorph, and each polymorph has its own set of distinct properties. The main ingredient in chocolate, cocoa butter, has six polymorphs which can be distinguished between each other by measuring their melting points...
...at room temperature, the fatty molecules in polymorph V have enough energy to slowly (days/weeks scale) convert to polymorph VI. This transformation in in the crystal structure is facilitated by the vibrational energy stored in the molecules which allow the molecules to wriggle about and realign with each other. This can be stopped by keeping your chocolate in a cool, dark place...Next the "fat bloom" is described
The change in crystal structure is usually accompanied by something called ‘fat bloom,’ which is where the chocolate begins to look dusty, and pale spots appear on the surface... It’s off putting, but still safe to eat. It happens because of partial melting in the solid which cases the fats within it to rise to the surface.
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
Karen Armstrong Julian Barnes
Violence and religion: Piety and politics. Karen Armstrong’s attempt to exonerate religion as a... http://phin.ws/1cfoShY #philosophynws
Julian Barnes on art: Oh, the glory of being a budding modernist in 1964. Picasso, Eliot, Pound... http://phin.ws/1cfoShW #philosophynws
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
International Vegetarian Union
| International Vegetarian Union (IVU) | |
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 | North America: early 20th Century Albert Einstein (1879-1955) |
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IVU on Facebook:  |
 Physicist, Nobel Prize winner 1921The latest indications we have suggest that Einstein was vegetarian only for the last year or so of his life, though he appears to have supported the idea for many years before practising it himself. "So I am living without fats, without meat, without fish, but am feeling quite well this way. It always seems to me that man was not born to be a carnivore."This was from a letter written to Hans Muehsam, and dated March 30, 1954, which was about 1 year before Einstein died. This indicates he adopted a vegetarian diet at the end of his life. Previously, on August3, 1953 Einstein had written the following in a letter to Max Kariel, suggesting that he was still eating meat at that time: "I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience."The above quotes are from: The Expanded Quotable Einstein, collected and edited by Alice Calaprice. The book flap of Ms. Calaprice's book says: "Alice Calaprice is a Senior Editor at Princeton University Press, where she has specialized in the sciences and worked with the Einstein Papers for over twenty years." The following quote originated from Ms. Joan Gilbert (USA) who provided it to Jon Wynne-Tyson (UK) for his book, THE EXTENDED CIRCLE, published in 1985. It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind. - Letter to 'Vegetarian Watch-Tower', 27 December 1930David Hurwitz, who contributed the quotes at the top of this page, has added the following: Alice Calaprice, has released the latest edition of her collected and edited quotes by Albert Einstein entitled, "The New Quotable Einstein." Now there is a solid source for the quote, complete with a document number in the Einstein Archive.  A biography of Einstein says that he was still living in Germany in 1930, only emigrating to the USA in 1932. It also says that he suffered a health breakdown in the late 1920s which would be consistent with giving some thought to his diet, but we have no indications that he actually became vegetarian himself at this time.Between 1882 and 1935 the Deutscher Vegetarier-Bund (German Vegetarian Federation) publishedVegetarische Warte. The picture on the right is the cover of the December 15, 1898 issue. An English/German dictionary translates 'Warte' as: observation point, viewpoint, control room - it seems likely that this is the 'Vegetarian Watch-Tower' (a slightly odd translation but quite possible). The date of the letter and that given to the magazine are identical - December 27, which could suggest that the attribution to a magazine was mistaken as it would have appeared some time later than the letter. It seems likely that the magazine printed the date of the letter and that got confused, with the date of the later magazine. Hildegund Scholvien, of the Vegetarier-Bund Deutschlands (re-formed in 1945), has most of the old issues of theVegetarische Warte. She sent the following comments: I tried to find that Einstein quotation in the "Vegetarische Warte", issue 12, Dez. 1930, but I could not find it. However I do not have the original magazine, only copies of the articles. The pages are complete, 365-392, only the cover is missing. Maybe the quotation, due to its importance, was on the front cover. These quotes give some insight into other aspects of Einstein's thinking: "What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life." - Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934.The following quotes are completely unverified, information about the sources of any of them would also be useful: "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." (this looks like a bad translation from German of the one above, we can find no other source for it...) "Only a life lived for others is a life worth living!" Source:http://www.ivu.org/history/northam20a/einstein.html |
The Future of Medicine
Thursday April 16, 2015
The 2014 BBC Reith Lectures -
The Future of Medicine, Part 1
Dr. Atul Gawande (Tim Llewellyn)
LISTEN TO FULL EPISODE 53:59
**Originally aired on January 26, 2015.
Surgeon, professor and author Atul Gawande dissects a field defined by what he calls "the messy intersection of science and human fallibility."
In hour one, Why Do Doctors Fail? about imperfection in medicine, andThe Century of the System about the dominance of treatment systems. In hour two, The Problem of Hubris about the limits of what professionals can do, and The Idea of Well-being, about shifting focus from medical survival to general well-being. Part 2 airs on Thursday, April 23
"We have 13 different organ systems and at the latest count we've identified more than 60,000 ways that they can go awry. The body is scarily intricate, unfathomable, hard to read. We are these hidden beings inside this fleshy sack of skin and we've spent thousands of years trying to understand what's been going on inside. So the story of medicine to me is the story of how we deal with the incompleteness of our knowledge and the fallibility of our skills."
- Dr. Atul Gawande
Dr. Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery in Boston. That's when he's not teaching at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Medical School. Or writing books. Or conducting research or analyzing health policy, or lecturing. In this talk, he's putting medicine itself on the operating table, to see how it works, and how it might work better.
Dr. Atul Gawande delivered the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures in the fall of 2014. In this episode, we present Atul Gawande's first two lectures about The Future of Medicine. Dr. Gawande delivered the first one at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. His second lecture was delivered at the Wellcome Collection in London.
It's named after the medical pioneer Sir Henry Wellcome.
Related Websites:
The BBC Reith Lectures
Dr. Atul Gawande's website
Dr. Atul Gwanade's TED Talk - How do we heal medicine?
Comments on this story are moderated according to our Submission Guidelines. Comments are welcome while open. We reserve the right to close comments at any time.
Surprising Things That Can Damage Your Liver
Sugar
Too much sugar isn’t just bad for your teeth. It can harm your liver, too. The organ uses one type of sugar, called fructose, to create fat. Too much refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup cause a fatty buildup that can lead to liver disease. Some studies show that sugar can be as damaging to the liver as alcohol, even if you’re not overweight. One more reason to limit foods with added sugars, like soda, pastries, and candy.
MSG (Monosodium Glutamate)
MSG enhances the flavor of many packaged and prepared foods, from chips to diet drinks. (You might see it on a food label as “hydrolyzed vegetable protein,” “yeast extract,” or “soy extract.”) Still, some studies of animals suggest that the chemical may make the liver fatty and inflamed, which can lead to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and liver cancer. Scientists need more research to know if MSG affects humans the same way.
Comfrey
Comfrey is a shrub found in Europe and Asia. Its leaves have a chemical that reduces swelling and keeps skin healthy, so you can find it in some pain-relieving creams. But comfrey also has substances that harm the liver. Don’t use a product that has it for more than 10 days at a time or for more than 6 weeks total in a year. Apply only very small amounts, and never put it on broken skin.
Herbal Supplements
Just because the label says “natural” doesn’t mean it’s safe. One serious danger is kava kava, an herb that can relieve menopause symptoms and help you relax. Studies show it can keep the liver from working, causing hepatitis and liver failure. Some countries have banned or restricted the herb, but it’s still available in the U.S. You should always talk to your doctor before you take any herbs to make sure they’re safe.
Obesity
If you’re carrying around extra weight, fat can also build up in your liver cells, which can lead to NAFLD. It can make the liver swell. Over time, hardened scar tissue can replace healthy tissue (a condition doctors call cirrhosis). People who are overweight or obese, middle-aged, or have diabetes are at highest risk of NAFLD. There’s no cure, but eating well and exercise can sometimes reverse the disease.
Too Much Vitamin A
You can find vitamin A in eggs and milk as well as fresh fruits and vegetables, especially those that are red, orange, and yellow. Many supplements also include it since it helps improve vision, strengthen bones, and give a boost to your immune system. But in very high doses, vitamin A is toxic to the liver. To stay safe, never take more than 10,000 IU a day.
Unsterile Tattoos
When you get a tattoo or body piercing in a licensed, clean shop that sterilizes its equipment after each customer, the chances you’ll get a serious infection like hepatitis C are low. But if tools aren’t properly cleaned, your risk of hep C shoots up. The virus spreads through contact with the blood of an infected person and causes serious, sometimes lifelong liver illness. Check out the shop and its safety record before you get inked.
Soft Drinks
Scientists studied the diets of a group of people with NAFLD, taking into account their weight, the amount of fat in their blood, and if they had diabetes. One thing stood out: 80% of them drank 2 or more soft drinks a day. It didn’t matter if it was calorie-free or regular soda, which means an ingredient besides sugar could play a role in the condition. There’s no hard evidence, but some researchers think artificial sweeteners might be to blame.
Antidepressants
It’s rare, but some antidepressants can harm your liver, even if you take them for only a few days. In some cases, the damage can be deadly. Older people or anyone taking a lot of other meds are at higher risk because their liver may be damaged already. If you’re taking antidepressants, talk with your doctor to make sure you’re on the smallest dose you need. Make sure you know the symptoms of liver illness to watch for.
Trans Fats
Trans fats are a man-made fat common in packaged foods and baked goods. (You’ll see them listed in the ingredients as “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” or “vegetable shortening.”) A diet high in trans fats not only boosts your chances of gaining weight, it makes severe liver disease with scar tissue more likely. In one study, mice that ate a fast-food diet high in trans fats had liver damage after only 4 months.
Source: http://www.webmd.com/hepatitis/ss/slideshow-surprising-liver-damage?ecd=wnl_men_042715&ctr=wnl-men-042715_nsl-ld-stry&mb=%2fYEUKcm5jBiihqPGg%2fPGD2dEpmNqbUHLAOXXq3hWp98%3d
Monday, April 27, 2015
Children Encouraged to Smoke Cigarettes, Indonesia
In this photograph taken on May 16, 2010 two-year-old Indonesian boy Ardi Rizal puffs on a cigarette while playing on a plastic toy jeep in the yard of his family home in a village on Sumatra island. A new video of a smoking Indonesian toddler has emerged to shock health experts and provide further graphic illustration of the Southeast Asian country's growing addiction to tobacco. His father reportedly gave him his first cigarette when he was 18 months old and now he smokes 40 a day. Child Protection Ministry official Heru Kasidi said the family would be investigated for what would be considered a clear case of child abuse in many countries.
Indonesia's smoking epidemic – an old problem getting younger
Many male smokers now start their habit at age seven, with activists blaming weak regulations and the tobacco industry
He is a thoroughly modern icon: the cherubic toddler now known around the world as the "smoking baby." More than 13 million people have watched a YouTube clip of the two-year-old puffing hungrily on cigarette after cigarette, twirling them in his hands. But while many viewed this video with amusement and perhaps some shock, it appears this "smoking baby" is just the tip of the iceberg.
Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on earth, appears to be in the throes of an uncontrolled tobacco habit. It is a place where domestic and international tobacco companies are able to operate ways they haven't been able to in the U.S. for 41 years.
This is a country where, as soon as a visitor steps off the plane, he is bombarded with cigarette ads on billboards and logos; and where, as "2020" found out, there is more than one "smoking baby."
In a tiny fishing village in Eastern Java, lives an adorable two-year-old boy named Chairul. Soon after awaking from a nap, he lights up with the help of his own grandfather. The grandfather says he allows Chairul to smoke because it tastes good, "like bread with chocolate."
As Chairul smokes beside him, his grandfather said he doesn't think it is a problem.
"He sometimes smokes two packs a day," he said, though it appears Chairul does not inhale. Yet he puffs away, exposed to the smoke around him.
When warned about the health effects of cigarettes, Chairul's grandfather said: "If the boy doesn't smoke, he doesn't feel good." It's all right, he said, "as long as he drinks enough coffee with his cigarettes."
As strange as that may seem, Chairul is no fluke. In a town a few hours to the south, "20/20" found a seven-year-old boy who also smoked while his family looked on.
His name is Maulana, and his mother said he has been smoking since he is two, but she hopes he quits when he goes to school this year.
As to why she allows her son to smoke, Malauna's mother said: "I can't just stop him abruptly, because he gets weak and cries. It has to be done slowly."
It is estimated that about a million children in Indonesia under the age of 16 smoke, and that one third of Indonesian children try smoking before the age of 10. In Indonesia, it is perfectly legal for a child of any age to buy and smoke cigarettes.
This, despite hundreds of international studies showing tobacco is addictive and harmful. The World Health Organization says tobacco kills more than five million people annually.
In the U.S., tobacco companies haven't been allowed to advertise on TV in 41 years. So, unable to market freely at home, big tobacco has increasingly turned overseas, where they are using the very tactics to reach young people that have long been banned in America
Monday, April 20, 2015
Seroquel XR
Drug Trial's Frayed Promise
By KATIE THOMAS
A study of the drug Seroquel XR for patients with borderline personality disorder exposes the tangled mess of interests for academics and universities involved in clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry.
Source: go to NYTimes.com/Business »
Source: go to NYTimes.com/Business »
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