You know Doublemint gum? Here’s my “double disclaimer”: I’m biased, both against the prevalence of sugar in the American food landscape and towards Dr. Cristin Kearns, a researcher in the Canadian film “Sugar Coated”. She is one of my friends. The idea to write this is all mine. I’m neither a journalist nor a film critic but, as a blogger who “brings awareness to the menu of life”, I often write about what is not prominently featured on mainstream bills of fare. Even though it’s the 2016 winner of the Donald Britain award for best social/political documentary, and sugar recently made the front page again, “Sugar Coated” has not received much coverage in the United States. Feel free to chew on the following words with a grain of salt.
I met Cristin when we both lived in Denver, CO. As viewers of the film learn, she trained and practiced as a dentist and worked in an under served community. Her patients’ severe problems included rampant tooth decay and bone loss. Later, while working as a dental health administrator, she attended a conference on gum disease and diabetes, where one of the keynote speakers handed out a pamphlet called the The Stop & Go Fast Food Nutrition Guide. After noticing that he’d given the green light to sweetened tea, she called him on it. He said there was no evidence linking sugar to chronic disease. Suspecting the dietary advice had been politically influenced, she later began to investigate on her own time and on her own dime. She found documents from the Great Western Sugar Company and the Sugar Association, among other sources. These papers revealed that executives tried to minimize the dangers of sugar consumption. Not only that, they’d won the Silver Anvil award (the Oscar for the public relations community) for convincing the public about sugar’s safety. Perhaps these self-congratulatory sugar barons figured history would judge them favorably and didn’t think to shred the evidence.
When Cristin shared her discoveries with me, I became outraged. How was it possible that, just as cigarette companies had manipulated the truth about nicotine’s dangers, the sugar industry had persuaded American regulators to swallow the myth that sugar was not only harmless but part of a balanced diet? To director Michèle Hozer’s credit, passion is present but outrage is absent from this film. Her balanced approach, interspersing interviews with experts speaking in measured tones, scenes of a Japanese health worker measuring waistlines to enforce that country’s “Metabo Law”, and mouthwatering vintage advertisements for cakes, gooey chocolates and other confections, allows one to digest the information without their blood boiling to sugar’s melting point. Even composer Russell Walker’s funky Nutcracker-esque soundtrack soothes rather than excites. As Mary Poppins said, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
I watched “Sugar Coated” mainly to see my friend on screen and “meet” her mentor Professor Stanton Glantz, a leading tobacco control activist, and one of her collaborators, author Gary Taubes. Despite my familiarity with the subject, my disgust at the sugar industry’s deceitful business practices had not dissipated much since I’d first learned about them. As someone with a sugar addiction, I occasionally resent that my attempts to remain divorced from sweets without periodic flings is complicated by sugar’s prevalence on the menu of modern life. That its ubiquity is buttressed by government subsidies, toxic and deceitful business practices and relentless marketing makes me want to toss my (sugar free) cookies.
To those who say, “Just don’t eat sugar”, that can be easier said than done, especially if a person has been conditioned by the culture to associate sweets with fun, connection and belonging. Unlike other addictive substances such as alcohol and cigarettes, sweets appear prominently in supermarkets, convenience stores and other retailers and are strategically placed near checkout lines, accessible to children and adults alike. They occupy extra square footage before holidays when they’re piled near store entrances and endcaps. With marketing cycles so extended, there’s barely a gap between the end of one season (or reason) to buy sweets and the beginning of another. It’s easy to avoid sugar when eating alone or in specialized, non-mainstream settings, such as retreat centers. But sharing a meal or celebration with family and friends who serve or order conventional foods is not always a piece of cake; it’s harder to abstain when nearby sweets stimulate the olfactory and salivary glands.
Possibly just as dangerous as dessert is sugar that appears in foods you wouldn’t expect and probably doesn’t need to be. It’s added to yogurt and energy bars. It’s included in ketchup, other condiments and, as I ruefully discovered, in some brands of beef jerky. Even naturally occurring sugar is not always healthy. In the documentary, Yoni Freedhoff, MD, a Canadian obesity expert, shows how one package of “no sugar added” Del Monte fruit stripes contains more sugar than Twizzlers, the candy it’s meant to substitute. Consuming one glass of pure grape juice is, sugarly speaking, the same as drinking a quarter glass of maple syrup. If it didn’t make my skull buzz like a bee hive, I’d go for the syrup.
Dr. Freedhoff shares a disturbing scenario, that the treatment of chronic diseases, many of which are diet related, will likely cripple our health care systems. Everyone, even those with clean diets, will bear the cost. That thought depressed me so much I reached for a piece of extra dark, 85% cacao chocolate (just 3g sugar, not enough to trigger a craving). To those who’d say, “Exercise and take responsibility,” the film introduces us to Sami Inkinen, an endurance athlete. Mr. Inkinen became pre-diabetic after following the recommended, high carbohydrate American diet for 15 or so years, despite rigorous training 10 hours a week. As his partner points out, exercise alone can’t “move the needle” on blood glucose levels if the diet isn’t right. He’s lucky to have discovered his condition while he could still reverse it. Millions of people are not so fortunate or don’t have access to affordable, nutritious food.
As discussed by many experts in the movie, the battle against Big Sugar is not new. For decades, researchers such as Sheldon Reiser, PhD of the US Department of Agriculture and Judith Hallfrisch, PhD, of the National Institutes of Health, studied sugar’s effects on health, including links to heart disease and obesity; in the early 1970s, health and consumer groups demanded that the amount of sugar in breakfast cereals be limited or carry warning labels. But industry operatives spent a fortune convincing regulators that the evidence was “inconclusive”, allowing sugar laden products to thrive within this adroitly created gray area. According to Professor Glantz, “Where we are in the sugar debate is about where the tobacco debate was in the 1960s.”
Even if the state of discourse is somewhat retrograde, the availability of the film on Netflix is timely. As mainstream media seems to be relinquishing its role as disciplined investigator of events we can all, regardless of dietary differences, take a page from Dr. Kearns’ personal playbook. Pay attention, trust your experience, ask questions, get answers and speak truth to power. Whether you do so sweetly or not is up to you.