The Way We Think About Sugar Is Going To Change

The FDA recently changed their Nutrition Facts label to include added sugars. But why?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff.
This is Christian Seger. So we recently went to the
house Stuff Works kitchen and we looked at the nutrition
facts label on some of the food there. We looked
at cherry coke, for instance, it has forty two grams
of sugar. Then we looked at Mountain dew and it

(00:23):
had forty six grams in a can. Okay, Well, something
that's always bothered me is how there isn't a percent
daily value listed for sugar. For instance, thirty nine grams
of sugar and a can of coke seems like a lot,
but is it? On Mayen, the Food and Drug Administration
introduced an updated Nutrition Facts label, which they said reflected

(00:47):
new scientific information, and among the changes were updated serving sizes,
calories in a way bigger font, and an entirely new
line for added sugars that also includes a percent daily value.
But let's back up, why does it matter how much
sugar a person consumes? Well, Sugar, whether it's natural or added,

(01:11):
is a type of carbohydrate that our bodies used for energy. Fruits, vegetables,
and dairy foods can naturally contain sugar. But the FDA
defines added sugars as those that are either added during
the processing of foods, sugars from syrups and honey, and
sugars from concentrated fruit or vegetable juices that are in

(01:33):
excess of what would be expected from the same volume
of one fruit or vegetable juice of the same type.
That that that last bit was a little bit long anyways.
A food science expert we talked to named Marion Nestley
from New York University explains why added sugars can be
harmful and they dilute the nutritional quality of whatever they're

(01:56):
added to. They give you calories, but they don't give
you any additional nutrients. The f d A recommends limiting
added sugar intake to no more than ten percent of
a person's total daily calories. For adults, this equals about
fifty grams or twelve point five teaspoons of sugar per day,
in other words, a little more than a can of

(02:18):
mountain dew. The World Health Organization recommends even less, just
five percent of a person's daily calories, which equal about
twenty five grams or six teaspoons per day, or one
package of peanut M and M's Now, for reference, the
average American adult consumes seventy five grams of added sugar

(02:39):
per day, or about nineteen teaspoons. So where does all
this added sugar come from? If your first answer is soda,
you might be surprised to know that American soda consumption
has steadily decreased in the past fifteen years or so.
The truth is that sugar can be found in just
about everything we eat and drink, but it's often disguised

(03:01):
under other names like glucose, fructoast, malttoast, dextros basically anything
that ends with oas cane juice, cane syrup, high fructoast,
corn syrup, cane sugar, corn sweetener, molasses, malt syrup, invert sugar,
or fruit juice concentrates. Okay, that was another long one.

(03:22):
Manufacturers list them in this way to break up the
amount and make it appear like there's less overall sugar
in a product, and that's one of the reasons the
f d A is updating the nutrition label so consumers
are aware of how much added sugar is in their food.
If you're going to be eating helpfully, you want to
keep the amount of sugar down, not just for reasons

(03:44):
of nutrients, but also because there's so much evidence that
people who eat a lot of sugar have a higher
risk for obesity, type two diabetes, heart disease, and so forth.
If that's the case, why hasn't the public been better
informed to answer that? We need to go back in time,
and we're going to talk to Christina Kerns, a post

(04:04):
doctoral fellow at the University of California in San Francisco.
The nineteen sixties, a lot of attention in the scientific
community was directed to trying to understand the dietary factors
in the American diet and how they might be linked
to coronary heart disease. American men were dying of coronary
heart disease at higher rates than other countries, and so

(04:25):
we thought our specific American diet might have something to
do with that. Kurns, along with co authors Laura Schmidt
and stand Glance, recently published a paper in jama Internal
Medicine revealing that the sugar industry sponsored research that purposefully
singled out fat as the dietary cause of heart disease,
while downplaying the evidence that sugar consumption was a factor.

(04:49):
As more evidence began to link sucross consumption to coronary
heart disease. The sugar industry got involved with the research
themselves in an attempt to discredit some of the evidence,
and I believe direct attention away from that research onto
the research linking fat to coronary heart disease. Founded in

(05:11):
nineteen forty three by members of the U S sugar industry,
the Sugar Research Foundation was dedicated to communicating and supporting
sugar's dietary role to the public. It later evolved into
what is currently called the Sugar Association. The documents that
we have, the industry is certainly talking about how to
protect market share, so the Sugar Research Foundation was created

(05:34):
to protect sales. Now, industry sponsored research is nothing new,
but the effects of the Sugar Research Foundation's manipulation were
far reaching. When the US government first published their dietary
guidelines for Americans in night, they recommended avoiding too much fat,
saturated fat, and cholesterol, which they linked to a greater

(05:55):
chance of having a heart attack. They did recommend limiting
sugar intake, but only because it could cause tooth decay.
Even today, go walk into any grocery store and look
at the so called healthy products. They usually advertise themselves
as being low fat or low cholesterol, but they say
almost nothing about their sugar content. After the GM article

(06:17):
came out, the Sugar Association released a statement in which
they said, we acknowledge that the Sugar Research Foundation should
have exercised greater transparency in all of its research activities. However,
when the studies in question were published, funding disclosures and
transparency standards were not the norm they are today. I
think it was interesting that they sort of acknowledged that

(06:39):
they should have been more transparent. Actually didn't expect them
to to say that. However, you know that that doesn't
exonerate the industry from from their actions. Despite the manipulation
by the Sugar Research Foundation, whether added sugar contributes to
coronary heart disease is still hotly debated. What you have
is an enormous amount of evidence from correlation and association

(07:04):
that people who eat diets that are high in sugar
tend to have a greater risk for obesity, types of diabetes,
and heart disease. The best thing that you can do
look at the labels, know what's in your food and
how much, And if you're worried about added sugar. A
simple solution is just to avoid prepackaged food by fresh

(07:24):
ingredients and cook them yourself. That way, you know exactly
what's going into the food you eat. So if you're
wondering why you haven't seen the new nutrition Facts label yet,
it's because manufacturers have until July to comply with the changes,
and if a manufacturer makes less than ten million dollars
a year in annual food sales, they'll have another year

(07:47):
to make this change. Check out the brain stuff channel
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