Authors: Joanna Blythman
Try as hard as they might, lobbyists can only suppress bad news for so long. In the words of one
British Medical Journal
editorial, ‘the pendulum is now definitely swinging away from fat as the root of all evil’. As the nutritional case against saturated fat has begun melting away, sugar has replaced it as public health enemy number one. The global sugar lobby really began to feel the heat in 2012 with the publication of Dr Robert Lustig’s book,
Fat Chance
, which powerfully argued that sugar, not fat, is the real villain in the global obesity epidemic. Publication in the science journal
Nature
of an article written by Dr Lustig and two colleagues, entitled ‘The Toxic Truth About Sugar’, upped the temperature further. It argued persuasively that an excess of sugar contributes to 35 million deaths a year worldwide, by making us fat, disrupting our metabolism, raising blood pressure, throwing hormones off balance and damaging the liver.
By 2014, the case against sugar was bubbling up uncontrollably all over the place, like an untended saucepan of rapidly darkening, blisteringly hot caramel. And when the World Health Organization announced draft guidance recommending that people should halve their maximum daily intake of free sugars – that’s added sugars, including those from honey, syrups and fruit juice – from 10 per cent of total calories to 5 per cent, citing growing concern about sugar’s contribution to obesity and dental diseases, sugar was obviously on the back foot.
True to type, companies up to their necks in sugar continued to mount the same old defence. Major refiner, AB Sugar, complained loudly that sugar was being singled out unfairly as the leading culprit in the obesity epidemic. Buying time, CAOBISCO, the Association of Chocolate, Biscuits and Confectionery Industries of Europe, tried to muddy the waters by insisting that the scientific case against sugar required ‘further scientific substantiation’. The British Nutrition Foundation, which, despite its neutral, professorial name, is a partisan defender of industrial food production, hailed the ‘sugar is the new tobacco’ attack as ‘misleading’, clinging to its dog-eared script that sugar is only harmful in excess, and nutritionally necessary otherwise. ‘Sugar’, it says, ‘is a type of carbohydrate that provides energy for the body in the form of glucose. In particular the brain needs glucose to function, as do muscles during exercise’. Far from sugar being bad for us, we are asked to believe that sugar is actually necessary for our bodies to function properly. Using this logic, candy floss can be a desirable part of a ‘balanced’ diet.
Disturbingly, the founder of one baby food company wrote passionately that ‘outrageous headlines’ were ‘simplifying this serious national issue to a single, too simple, witch-hunt of one foodstuff’. What infant needs sugar added to its food? And when I wrote a column for the
Grocer
magazine saying that we had to face facts and cut our consumption of sugar, Terry Jones, the director of the Food and Drink Federation – a body that acts as a mouthpiece for the processed food and drink industry – responded with yet another letter to the editor:
Although the balance of scientific evidence shows that sugars, like any other nutrient, can be enjoyed as part of a varied and balanced diet, a vocal minority persist in demonising this ingredient. The simple balanced diet and physical activity message has lost out to alarming narratives.
That exasperated final line expressed a dawning realisation in the food industry that sugar has been outed as public health enemy Number One, and there is no going back. The defence of sugar is doomed. However much the sugar lobby blusters, it has lost its war, leaving manufacturers vulnerable to criticism for using it in such great quantity, and under immense pressure to reduce added sugar content in food and beverages. These days, mention of sugar on a product is not quite as bad as having a skull and crossbones on the label, but it is heading that way.
From a public relations and sales point of view, that troublesome, toxic word ‘sugar’ has to be shooed off labels as fast as possible, and supermarkets have to be seen to be responding. Waitrose, for example, announced in 2014 that it was adjusting and reformulating its chilled juice and smoothie range, removing 7.1 tonnes of sugar a year, a gesture of commitment towards the new reduced sugar era. This meant delisting several lines in PepsiCo’s Copella and Tropicana range. Product delistings such as these send shock waves through the processed food industry. Ouch, that hurts! What’s next for the chop?
Yet even under heavy pressure from supermarkets, there’s only so much sugar manufacturers can shed because they rely so heavily on a sweet taste to construct their products. A 100 gram, one-person can of cola contains up to nine teaspoons of sugar and, if you think about it, many highly profitable soft drinks are essentially water with sugars or sweeteners, colours and flavourings added – and this includes many products sold as juices, not just soft drinks.
Sugar is not only a cornerstone of manufactured drinks, confectionery, bakery, breakfast cereals and desserts, but also a surprisingly important ingredient in many savoury products: mayonnaise, ketchup, soups and pasta sauces, ready meals, gravy and bread. When
Which?
investigated ready meals, it found that Sainsbury’s sweet and sour chicken with rice, and Tesco’s Everyday Value sweet and sour chicken with rice, contained around ten teaspoons of sugar in a meal for one. Sweetness is a hallmark of the lion’s share of processed foods.
Sugar also has lots of other important technological properties for food manufacturers. It makes drinks more viscous and acts as a preservative in foods with long best before dates. Its water-binding property helps moisture retention, so you feel like you’re getting more for your money. Knowing we eat with our eyes, manufacturers use it to create enticing golden crusts and the appearance of patiently roasted meat. Added sugar makes dough more voluminous. In the words of one industry report, ‘sugar provides bulk, textural elements, browning, caramelisation and other necessary functional elements [in food manufacture] beyond its sweet taste’. In fact, telling food manufacturers to go easy on the sugar is like asking a builder to construct a house without joists.
Sugar is such a lynchpin of food and drink manufacture, reformulating products so that they contain less, or none, is far from straightforward: it cannot usually be replaced by a single ingredient. Removing or replacing sugar will change taste, texture and appearance. To compensate, the whole recipe needs to be reformulated. So the hunt is on to find an alternative sweet substance with all the functional attributes needed in large-scale food and drink processing, one that can plausibly be presented to the public as more benign than sugar.
Now, the food industry has been quietly working on losing mentions of the toxic word ‘sugar’ on its products for quite some time, using a series of ploys. Foremost here was the grooming of fructose, the type of sugar found naturally in fruit, for its role as a healthier type of sugar. This worked for a while. As every junk food marketer knows, the mere mention of fruit is a shortcut to creating a healthy image for a product. Fruit sugar sounds so much more health-enhancing than plain old sugar, doesn’t it? However, while the fructose in whole fruit comes hand-in-hand with fibre, which slows and reduces the body’s absorption of sugar, this is not the case when fructose is added in a highly refined, 100 per cent purified form, as it is in processed foods. When Mother Nature designed fruit, she thought it through properly. The potential poison in it (fructose) comes in the same wrapper as the antidote (fibre), which seems to prevent the former having any negative effects on our metabolism. But when pure fructose is used in food manufacture, it is every bit as disastrous for health as sucrose, the more familiar white table sugar; some scientists argue that its effect is even worse. Indeed, fructose now looks like the once promising new pupil in the class who turned out to be a nightmare.
Of intense concern has been the highly refined form of fructose, extracted from corn using enzyme technology, called high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). In the UK, it more commonly appears on labels as glucose/fructose syrup, or vice versa. It is widely used in food manufacturing because it is cheaper than sugar and being liquid, it is easier to handle in industrial-scale production. Consumption of this sweetener has been linked to gout, hypertension, fatty liver disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity. North American corn refiners continue to argue that HFCS is ‘safe, natural and nutritionally the same as sugar’, but it has become so hot to handle that consumers on both sides of the Atlantic are voting with their feet and avoiding it. David Rosenthal, Senior Vice-President of the US Corn Refiners Association, voiced the industry’s image problem:
This [bad] publicity has led to a subsequent set of misperceptions among some food and beverage marketers and manufacturers that a large number of consumers are actively avoiding brands with HFCS – and that switching to sugar in their formulations (and touting ‘HFCS-free’ on their labels) can improve their sales.
Stuck with a product that had garnered such an unenviable reputation, corn refiners came up with the idea of reinventing HFCS. Why not rename it as ‘corn sugar’? Even the tainted word sugar didn’t have such negative connotations as HFCS. Nice try, but this initiative was a sign of desperation, and even with the lobbying power of corn refiners, doomed to failure: the US Food and Drug Administration rejected the name change, so HFCS is still saddled with its image problem.
Cane sugar companies, meanwhile, have attempted a similar rebranding exercise with sugar, by trying to rename dried cane syrup, which is essentially an ever so slightly less refined type of sugar comparable to ‘golden’ cane sugar, as ‘evaporated cane juice’. In 2009, the Food and Drug Administration also refused to authorise this term, on the grounds that it ‘falsely suggests the sweeteners are juice’. Juice, courtesy of its association with fruit, shines that ever welcome ‘wellness’ glow on a product. Since 2012, US courts have seen several class action lawsuits against prominent companies on the grounds that evaporated cane juice is nothing more than sugar, cleverly disguised. One such case, against leading yogurt manufacturer Chobani, was dismissed, but others are following in its footsteps. Although the agency has repeatedly told food manufacturers not to use the term because it is false and misleading, it says that it has not reached a final decision, so companies determined to swop the word ‘sugar’ for ‘juice’ are still in with a fighting chance.
Seeing all the shenanigans around sugar and high fructose corn syrup, you might think that manufacturers could fall back on the option of high-intensity artificial sweeteners – after all, there is quite a collection of them. They include Aspartame, Acesulfame K, saccharin and Sucralose, which are respectively 200, 200, 300 and 600 hundred times sweeter than sucrose, the standard white refined sugar, but they are zero calorie. These chemically synthesised sweeteners have been around for decades and are widely used in diet drinks and foods, chewing gum and table-top sweeteners. Or a manufacturer could play around with the toothsome possibilities presented by the more recently developed neotame, which is a dizzying 8,000–13,000 times sweeter than sucrose. If that won’t do the trick, a further high-intensity sweetener to consider is advantame. Made from aspartame and vanillin, it is an unimaginable 37,000 times sweeter than sugar. The European Union’s Panel on Food Additives decided in 2014 that advantame raised ‘no genotoxicity [damage to our DNA] or carcinogenicity concerns’ at the levels permitted in food and drink.
Looking forward to trying advantame? Perhaps not. Although arguably artificial sweeteners have a more favourable reputation than high fructose corn syrup, and come with all manner of official reassurance, they can’t seem to shake off safety concerns. Studies have linked artificial sweetener consumption to a variety of negative health effects: migraine, epilepsy, premature birth and brain cancer. Nevertheless, the European Food Safety Authority has ruled that all the sweeteners it permits for sale in the European Union, although potentially toxic in larger quantities, are ‘safe for human consumption at current levels of exposure’. This may be reassuring to those who trust our regulators to put public health before corporate interests, but lingering health concerns around artificial sweeteners persist; several feature on Whole Foods Market’s ‘black list’ of unacceptable ingredients, alongside HFCS. For manufacturers keen to dump sugar and HFCS for something that plays better with a critical public, embracing sweeteners may look like a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.
From a more practical point of view, plain old sugar, or sucrose, has what’s regarded in the food industry as the ideal bell curve flavour profile, that is, the taste starts off gently, builds to a pleasing peak, then fades away cleanly, whereas artificial sweeteners are often slow to build and have a lingering bitter, slightly metallic, almost liquorice-like aftertaste. That’s not a problem in a product like chewing gum where the pungent mint will hide it, but it can stick out like a sore thumb elsewhere.
Safety and taste apart, a further blot on the horizon for artificial sweeteners is a growing body of evidence indicating that despite their absence of calories, they don’t seem to do what they are meant to do, that is, help control weight. Indeed, several large-scale studies have found a positive correlation between artificial sweetener use and weight gain. One animal study found that rats consuming artificial sweetener gained weight faster than those eating the sugar. Some studies also flag up that artificial sweeteners could be worse for health than sugar. In 2013, a major study of over 66,000 women, tracking their consumption of sugar-sweetened and artificially-sweetened (diet) soft drinks over 14 years, found that those consuming the latter had a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes than those drinking the former. Later that year, a wide-ranging review of studies looking at the impact of artificial sweeteners on weight and other health outcomes reached this overall conclusion: