August 1, 2023 • 49 mins
A healthcare worker discovers the shocking truth about the real PR power of Big Sugar.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
If you were a mystery writer, I doubt you'd set
the opening of your page turning thriller at a dental conference.
I don't recall bad PowerPoint presentations or stained lecture room
chairs popping up on the pages of Agatha Christie or
Dan Brown. But it was at a conference about the
links between gum disease and diabetes where dentist Kristin Kern's
(00:22):
life tilted on its axis.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
So at this conference there were two keynote speakers. The
first was representing the US Centers for Disease Control, and
she handed out a brochure and I opened it up.
It was all about decrease calories, decrease fat, decreased salt,
but it didn't actually say the words decrease sugar, which
(00:49):
I found very unusual.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Christen is puzzled. That seems awfully strange. It's a dental conference,
after all. Then the next keynote speaker steps up, a
representative from the National Diabetes Education Program. This guy also
hands out a brochure, the Stop and Go Fast Food
Nutrition Guide. If you've got to eat fast food, here
are the healthy options.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
And I flipped open to the drinks page, and I
noticed that Lippt and brisk sweet tea got a green light.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
A green light as in, it's a healthy choice.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
And it had something like forty four grams of sugar
in it, and I really just couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Forty four grams of sugar. That's more than the recommended
amount of adult should consume in an entire day. So
this speaker is packing up and preparing to leave when Kristen,
who's sitting way at the back of the ballroom, springs
out of her.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Chair and chased him down and caught him and said,
how can you possibly rank sweet tea as a healthy drink?
And his answer to me was there is no evidence
linking sugar to chronic disease. And I was stunned. I
was absolutely stunned.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Kristin is thinking this is a dental conference. Sugar causes
tooth decay, that is a chronic disease, and it's also
been linked to heart disease and diabetes.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
In my head, I'm thinking this guy's nuts. So I
looked back at him, I think, with a blank stare,
and he just turned around and walked out the door,
and I was just really shocked. It really kind of
shook me. Up and I didn't understand what was going on.
(02:35):
So coming back from this dental conference, I just really
couldn't let this go.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Kristin comes home still astonished that a keynote speaker at
an industry conference would say there is no link between
sugar and chronic disease.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And so when I came home, really the first thing
I did was actually dig out my old textbooks. I
got out my biochemistry textbook and looked at Glycollis's again
and like, did I miss something? But soon realized that
there's probably much more to the story. So I started
getting interested in the sugar industry.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Kristen starts searching around on the internet, looking at the
sugar industries trade groups.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah, so I got pretty obsessed, I would have to
say with this, especially when I started to find real clues.
So I actually cut off my cable TV subscription. No
more TV. I was going to dedicate my free time
outside of work to really look into this.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Why was Kristin doing this Well, at this point, she
was working for a dental healthcare provider, but previously had
been working as a dentist at clinic serving low income populations.
It was a tough gig She'd see patient after patient
with serious cavities or even missing teeth. Maybe this sugar
mystery was part of the bigger issue. In the end,
(03:57):
she made a major decision.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Really wanted to dedicate myself to this, So yes, I
actually quit my job to dig into this more.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
To crack this case, Kristin would go through a metamorphosis.
She'd transform from dentist to detective and dive into the
secretive realm of sugar. Albeit her crime scenes were library
storerooms and her smoking guns were Manila folders, but her discoveries,
well they're incredible. She'd eventually uncover evidence revealing the canny
(04:29):
strategies Big Sugar has used to protect its image and
harness the power of public relations and influence the very
food you eat. This episode, we step away from the
lawsuits because to understand how these cases went, you have
to really understand not only the people, but the industry
the lawyers were taking on. I'm Celeste Heedley and from iHeartMedia,
(04:53):
Imagine Audio and the teams at Weekday Fun and Novel.
This is Big Sugar Episode seven, Bittersweet By two thousand
(05:15):
and nine, Kristin Kerns is a full time, unemployed investigator
on the trail of the sugar industry. She'd been scrutinizing
the world of sugar for two years at this point.
Her search has led her to a library in Colorado
and to stumbling upon old records for this sugar beat company.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
I typed in sugar into the local library catalog and
I noticed references to the Great Western Sugar Company. And
this company had gone out of business in the nineteen seventies,
and they for some reason decided to donate some of
their company records to local libraries.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Kristin heads to the small archive room of the Colorado Library.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
It's a very kind of sterile environment, and you have
to put all your belongings in a locker and only
use a pencil. They're very worried about you damaging the documents.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
The boxes are all laid out.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And I just picked the first one, and the first
folder that I opened had confidential typed in all caps.
And I think I had to just take a moment
and sit down and really take in that moment of
will you know, all this time of thinking there's something
there and then actually finding that there was something there
(06:32):
was a big moment for me. That was the moment
where I sort of couldn't believe that I actually found
this kind of hard evidence of the sugar industries public
relations campaigns that hadn't been brought to light yet.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Okay, whoa hold your horses? This discovery, Well, it's major,
and it dates back some seventy years ago and goes
way beyond dentistry.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
It strikes without mourning of ten men.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
We can expect five to get it, but we can't
say who, or when or why.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
In the nineteen fifties, America was under siege. The nation
wasn't threatened by a foreign adversary, but by an indiscernible,
stealthy enemy. Heart disease. Rates of the condition were rising steeply,
and it burst into the public consciousness when one Saturday
afternoon in nineteen fifty five, at the Cherry Hills Country
Club golf course, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began complaining of
(07:37):
indigestion around the ninth hole, which led to.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
The President was helped into a car in the early
morning hours, rushed along this street to the Fitzsimmons Army Hospital,
and placed in an oxygen tent.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
It turned out not to be from the Hamburger he'd
eaten earlier in the day, but a massive cardiac arrest.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
His illness revealed once again America's unpreparedness to deal adequately
with such an emergency.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Why were so many people suddenly having heart attacks? Even
the president had been struck down? What was really going on?
In the nineteen sixties, evidence started to leak out suggesting
there might be a link between heart disease and sugar consumption.
When I say sugar, I don't mean the sugars we
naturally find in whole foods, but those sugars which come
(08:24):
from beets, cane, corn, and even honey. The thing that
scientists and doctors were focused on were the molecules fructose, sucrose,
and dextrose when they're added to our food in large quantities.
And there was one man in particular sounding the alarm.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
John Yudkin, and Yudkin was of the opinion that sugar
was a cause of coronary heart disease.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
This is BBC television.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
You shouldn't eat sugar full stop. But if you insist
on eating sugar, there are some sorts of brown sugar
that do seem to be a nutrition le Superior.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Doctor John Yudkin was a gifted researcher and hyper focused
on the area of public health. In fact, he ended
up helping build the Department of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth
College in London. In nineteen seventy two, John Yudkin dropped
a bomb on the sugar industry. It was the biggest
weapon in the academic arsenal. A well researched book. It
(09:25):
was called Pure White and Deadly.
Speaker 6 (09:29):
Which was describing the dangers as he saw it, of sugar.
Of course, he didn't mean the odd tea spoon of
sugar that one might have in one's coffee a couple
of times a day. He wasn't thinking of that at all.
He was thinking of large quantities of sugar. This is
Michael Yudkin, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry the University of Oxford.
(09:52):
He's also the son of John Judkin, whom I understand
you're making a program about. Pure White and Deadly is
a book which looked into questions of what happened when
people from populations who had typically eaten relatively little sugar
(10:17):
moved to populations where they were exposed to more sugar.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
For example, John Yadkin looked at studies about people from
Yemen who moved to Israel and started eating loads more sugar.
Decades later, what was going on with their health? More
and more people were getting chronic diseases like heart disease
and diabetes. Then he began doing his own experiments on
animals and humans. He found that sugar consumption led to
(10:45):
raised blood levels of triglycerides that's a technical term for fat,
which is considered a risk factor for heart disease, and
then sugar also raised insulin levels, linking it to type
two diabetes. These were early observation rather than concrete explanations, but.
Speaker 6 (11:02):
It started him off thinking that there's something about sugar
which is not only useless, but actually positively harmful in
some way.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So a bit more about John Yudkin, because he'll come
to be central to the story. John Yudkin grew up
in the East End of London.
Speaker 6 (11:21):
His family were very poor. His father died when he
was six. He was one of five brothers, and he
really had to make his own way.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Through leapfrogging on scholarships. He ended up at the prestigious
Cambridge University.
Speaker 6 (11:36):
It was not by any means common for poor children
to finish up at Cambridge He was very clever, very bright,
and extremely hard working. But also he was a fun person.
He had a great sense of humor.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
He wasn't a disciplinarian.
Speaker 6 (11:56):
I would go to a birthday party and he would
say something like, of course there'll be lots of cakes
and biscuits at the birth day party, but I'd rather
if he went easy on them.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Michael reminds me of his dad. Firstly, he too offered
cookies when the production team met him. He's not militant
about sugar either. And secondly, he and his father look
quite similar. Black hair, glasses, and there's pretty much always
at least a hint of a smile on his face,
crinkling his eyes into half moons. Similarly his dad.
Speaker 6 (12:29):
He was a cheerful person, which was lucky considering what
happened later, but considering the way he was treated later.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
John Yudkins's book Pure White and Deadly sparked a lot
of interest when it was published, which was bad news
for sugar's reputation. Plus, at nearly the exact same time,
there was a major FDA review looking into whether foods
like sugar could be called general recognized as safe in
their dietary guidelines. The FDA, the Food and Drug Administration,
(13:06):
is in charge of making sure the food's sold to
us here in the US isn't harmful. If they took
sugar off their safe list, it could spell the end
of the industry. Imagine every time you bought something with
sugar in it, it would have a label warning you
about the dangers of eating it. Basically, in the nineteen seventies,
the heat was on sugar and they went into disaster
(13:28):
control and it all started with the Sugar Association.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
The Sugar Association is a trade association that's based in Washington, DC,
and they represent cane and beat sugar growers and producers
on issues related to sugar and health. So any policy,
any potential regulation that has anything to do with sugar
and health, they are monitoring those activities and trying to
(13:56):
influence them so that it doesn't impact sales of sugar.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
The Sugar Association has been funded by various companies over
the years. These days, its biggest members include some names
that might be familiar to you by now, Florida Crystals
and the Sugarcane Growers Cooperative of Florida. The public face
of the Sugar Association is all well and good, but
(14:23):
Kristin Kerns was more interested in what they weren't saying publicly.
She's flipping through that Manila folder in the Colorado Library
Archives and she stumbles on a pile of documents, letters, memos,
reports from around the nineteen seventies, when the industry was
freaking out about the bad press, the FDA review and
books like Yudkins.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
And they began to get concerned.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
The documents spelled out their game plan.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
They were watching John Yudkin in particular. In fact, in
some of the earlier documents, the way they talked about
it was that it was an anti sugar infection. They
had to exterminate that infection. That was their mission. So
it was how they put together their public relations campaigns
(15:10):
and everything that they did to convince the public, convince
policy makers, convince the media that sugar was safe for consumption.
Back in the nineteen seventies, they were thinking, we could
do a public opinion poll. They thought maybe we could
sponsor a symposium to kind of take down John Yudkin,
(15:33):
and they started thinking about funding their own heart disease research.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Between nineteen seventy five and nineteen eighty, the Sugar Association
spent six hundred and fifty five thousand dollars about three
million in today's dollars on seventeen studies designed as the
document's Kristen found, put it to maintain research as a
main prop of the industry's defense. So the association pulled
out the cash bazouka, and who got showered and dough Well,
(16:08):
most of it apparently went to those scientists whose studies
seemed explicitly designed to exonerate sugar. If you take a
look at the internal documents, Kristin found in one example,
a researcher wanted to know if sugar could boost serotonin
and prove of therapeutic value, as in the relief of depression,
Like could scarfing down candy make you feel better when
(16:30):
you're depressed? Look, if you've ever sought comfort from a
pint of ice cream post a breakup, you can probably
answer that one for yourself. These first documents were just
the tip of the iceberg. Kristin kept digging and digging,
traveling around the country, going through more archives and more documents.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Really, my whole focus became trying to uncover what these
documents were about. And this was not something that I
really had training in. So I just started reading through
these documents. I paid for photocopies of them, I took
them home. I had them in piles all over my
(17:10):
dining room table, trying to read through them and piece
the story together of what was going on.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Kristen has a kind of composed tenacity. When I asked
a question, she often laughs, gives a brief response, and
then pauses before delivering a considered, more articulate answer. So
during this time, was she getting a bit obsessive obsessive?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yes, Once I had the clues that there was really
some manipulation going on behind the scenes, that just made
me even more motivated to continue on. And it seemed
like there really wasn't anybody else talking about this kind
(17:56):
of material, And the more documents that I found, and
the more evidence there was to tell these various stories,
and so it just kept, you know, pushing me on.
It is something that I just really wanted to get
out into the world more.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
After the break, Kristin Current had stumbled on something major.
Big Sugar's pr playbook. Step one, fund new research that
might make sugar look better. Check Step two. Poo poo
your opponents.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
There was a quite clear campaign on the part of
the sugar manufacturers to denigrate my father's work and poopoo
it and say there's nothing in it here. You can
just as be in his bonnet about it, and nobody
really believes it, accept him and a couple of other
(18:52):
deluded individuals whom he has seduced into this way of thinking.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Being bad mouth might not say that extreme, but in
the scientific world these were serious accusations. After Pure White
and Deadly was published, the British Sugar Bureau, the UK
version of the Sugar Association, sent a statement to newspapers,
magazines and radio saying the book is considered to not
only be unscientific in its approach, but to contain very
(19:20):
little more than a number of emotional assertions based on
doctor Yudkins's own theory that sugar is the main cause
of many diseases and should be banned. Another group, the
World Sugar Research Organization, described it as science fiction. Ouch.
We actually asked the World Sugar Research Organization about this,
and a spokesperson gave us this statement. Professor Yudkin's views
(19:44):
towards sugar were widely known and differed from the views
of wsro's director general at the time, nearly forty five
years ago. The commentary by the director General at the time,
who was now deceased, was considered by Professor Yudkin as
an attack on his reputation, was retracted and WSRO settled
with Professor Yudkin within the laws of libel in the UK,
(20:05):
with a payment offered towards Professor Yudkin's legal costs. But
it wasn't just trade groups saying this kind of stuff.
Here's Michael Yudkin again.
Speaker 6 (20:14):
There are examples of remarks that are made, particularly by
an adversary of my found's.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Someone whose voice the sugar industry found very useful.
Speaker 6 (20:27):
The adversary of my father, who was particularly virulent in
this respect, was called Ansel keys Hi.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Doctor ansel keyes Am a physiologist. My specialty is diet
and health. I have written several books on the subject,
including the current bestseller Eat Well and Stay Well.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Back when the US was first in the grip of
a heart disease epidemic, there were two takes on the cause.
In the red corner, John Yudkins said sugar. In the
blue corner, ansel keys said fat.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
I am presently engaged in a major experiment involving the
health and eating habits of some ten thousand individuals scattered
throughout the world. We are collecting data on all types,
from African tribesmen to American businessmen. I have already had
considerable effect on the diet of millions of Americans.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Doctor Ansel Keys was a pioneer in the field of nutrition.
He'd helped create the K rations, those meals that were
carried into combat during World War Two. In fact, the
K in k ration is for Keys.
Speaker 7 (21:26):
Now famous K Rations, the completely streamlined meals. Originally designed
for paratroops, K proved ideal for tankbusters, commandos, and all
isolated units.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
In the mid twentieth century, Ansel Keys oversaw a landmark
study that looked at populations around the world to get
to the bottom of why Americans were dying of heart disease.
He announced what he thought was the culprit for the
scourge of heart disease, saturated fat.
Speaker 8 (21:55):
Well, it wasn't very long before its appears that there
was some connection between corner heart disease and cholesterol and
the blood. There was an important connection between the fats
in the die, particularly the kinds of fats in the
dye and cholesterol in the blood.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
That's Ansel Keys speaking when he was super old. He
lived to one hundred. In the end, Ansel Keys became
probably the first nutritionist celebrity. Imagine the stern face of
a physiologist on the cover of Time magazine. His promotion
of the Mediterranean diet is still a worldwide phenomenon. And
(22:33):
you know when you walk down the aisles of your
supermarket and see low fat this and low fat that, well,
in part you probably have doctor Keys to thank for that.
You can watch videos of doctor Keys on YouTube, and
while we all know comment sections don't always bring out
the best in humanity, you might be surprised to scroll
down and read what people have said about him. Plenty
(22:56):
law doctor Key's work, but others say Keys a disgrace,
or this guy should get a Nobel Prize for ruining
the lives of billions, and even he should be charged
posthumously with mass murder. Why well, you'll come to find out.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
So well, aril, doctor Ansel Keys, please stand up.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Back in the seventies, when he's feud with John Yudkin
was at its peak, Doctor Ansel Keys made.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
Remarks that are really beyond the bounds in my opinion
of what is proper to say in terms of scientists
that you disagree with. Like Judkin's work has no basis
in fact, and although I have tried to counter it
as best I can, the propaganda keeps on reverberating. Attacks
(23:54):
of that sort were largely successful in rendering my father
something of a figure of fun, in rendering him somebody
who could be regarded as eccentric and whose views could
be written off.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Keys was chiming in alongside the sugar pr and trade
associations to belittle John Yudkin's work. And this wasn't just
a personal blow for John Yudkin. It impacted him professionally too.
Speaker 6 (24:25):
I think it certainly affected his career a lot. He
would be invited to conferences and then at the last
moment disinvited. One time he attended a conference and all
the papers from that conference, including his, were to be
published in a book, And then it suddenly discovered that
(24:46):
his contribution to the conference was to be excluded from
the book at the demand of the sugar people. His
funding was put in jeopardy and finally cut. There were
lots and lots of ways in which he was made
to suffer from here for his views. My father was
(25:16):
a man who was not easily depressed. I must say
that if I had been subjected to that kind of language,
I don't think I would have been as cheerful as
my father was about it.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
He focused on his family, often taking his grandchildren out
the things like the circus or the theater. John Yudkin
died in nineteen ninety five. According to Michael, his greatest
fear wasn't that his work had been erased, but what
that could mean for people's health.
Speaker 6 (25:48):
That was very, very hard for him. When he saw
this sort of disappearing before his eyes. That was extremely difficult.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Alongside attacking people like Yudkin, the sugar industry also went
a step further. In nineteen seventy five, an expert committee
led by those supposedly at the cutting edge of public
health research, published a literature review called Sugar in the
Diet of Man. It critiqued evidence that linked sugar to
chronic disease, and it was sent all over the country
(26:18):
twenty five thousand copies to influential people, including reporters and policymakers.
Along with the press release headlined scientists dispel sugar fears.
The documents Kristen found revealed this series was funded by
the sugar industry, but the report at the time didn't
say that.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And so when this Sugar in the Diet of Man
series came out, it became this scientific evidence that the
sugar industry could point to that was disconnected from their funding,
disconnected from any of their fingerprints, and say, look at
all of these prominent scientists who are claiming that there
(26:58):
is no link between sugar and chronic disease.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
All this fed into that FDA report questioning the safety
of sugar.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
And so when you read the report itself, you can
see that there is evidence linking sugar to diabetes, for example.
But then the report goes on to say, here are
some other studies that showed that there is no link
between sugar and diabetes, and those studies happened to be
several that had been sponsored by the sugar industry.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
In the end, the FDA concluded.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
It basically said that there was no link between sugar
and heart disease and diabetes and obesity. It did acknowledge
a link between sugar and two decay, So they actually
succeeded in influencing the food and Drug Administration.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Let me spell it out here. According to the documents,
Kristen found, the sugar industry paid scientists to conduct studies
that made sugar look good, attacked people who said sugar
could be unhealthy, then produced a massive report basically saying,
look at all this evidence sugar isn't linked to these
chronic diseases. Then the government relied on that report when
(28:12):
making their recommendations about the very things you should eat.
No one is saying that you shouldn't eat sugar at all,
but there was no limit, no cap, no suggestion of
how much you could healthily consume or the potential consequences
of eating too much.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I think the president of the Sugar Association at the
time called it their scientific bible. They could use that
FDA report to counter any other government effort to try
to limit sugar consumption in various ways.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Like here's a clip from a nineteen eighties documentary made
by the Florida Sugarcane League, the trade association of Floridas
sugar growers and processors.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Currently, there are many voices reaching the public ear who
make accusations against sugar as a food, such as that
sugar is an important cause of coronary heart disease. Because
of public concern, the Food and Drug Administration in recent
years had a group of independent scientists review the world's
literature dealing with sugar. The conclusion was reached that, other
(29:23):
than one of the contributing factors tatoost decay, there is
no evidence indicating that the average amount of sugar consumed
by the American public in any way constitutes a health hazard.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
That's not a spokesman for the sugar industry speaking. That's
the founder of the nutrition department at Harvard University School
of Public Health. Kristen found that the International Sugar Research
Foundation funded thirty studies in Stair's department between nineteen fifty
two and nineteen fifty six. He also led the report
(29:58):
Sugar in the Diet of Mane. Let me just reiterate
this is a Harvard professor working in public health, also
being paid by the sugar industry, saying sugar is not harmful.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
In conclusion, sugar is an important part of the diet,
is the source of energy, It's a safe food, it
tastes good and makes other foods taste good. And remember
that eating is one of the pleasures of life.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Off the back of all this, the Sugar Association made
ads for newspapers and magazines exclaiming sugar is safe. The
ad said, quote, there is no substantiated scientific evidence indicating
that sugar causes diabetes, heart disease, or any other malady
end quote. So sit back, take a bite of your Oreo,
(30:51):
sip on your Coca Cola, and enjoy the blissful pleasures
of corporate influence in America. The research, the literature reviews,
the attacks on the opponents, the media campaigns, the success
with the FDA report. All of this led to a
(31:12):
big moment for the Sugar Association.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
The Silver Anvil Award was really a big win for
the Sugar Association. It's given out by the Public Relations
Society of America, and it's like winning an oscar if
you're in the public relations world.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Christian uncovered an image of them accepting the award in
the CPUs stained photo, three men smile clutching the trophy.
They had faced a barrage of criticism and who won.
They did more After the break. With the image of
sugar as being safer than fat firmly embedded in the
(31:48):
public imagination, the sugar companies were free to continue pushing
the sweet stuff, and inevitably people ate more and more
of it. Two hundred years ago, we ate an average
of thirteen pounds of sugar a year. These days in
the US that figure is more like one hundred and
fifty pounds. That means in a month's time we get
(32:10):
through what we used to eat in a whole year. Now.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the
United States. Every thirty six seconds someone dies from a
cardiovascular condition, and about one in ten of us live
with diabetes. A decisive link between sugar and these diseases
is still debated, but what can be definitively said is
(32:33):
that eating a lot of sugar increases the possibility of
being overweight, which is a risk factor for type two diabetes,
some cancers, and heart disease. Saturated fat certainly plays its
role as well. This all might seem kind of distant
literature reviews, FDA reports, nutrition studies, but it affects you
(32:53):
and one of the most personal things in your life
what you eat.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Products that were high in sugar could be marketed as healthy.
It was all about low fat.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
I have very little news this new best foods low
fat mannaise dressing has.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Very little fat, so if a product was low in
fat but high in sugar, according to the US government,
it could be marketed as a healthy product because there
was no limit set on how much sugar was too much.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
The low fat market hit the accelerator.
Speaker 7 (33:33):
Nobody does fat free indulgence like SnackWells New SnackWells chocolate
Truffle cookies, so good can we ever make enough?
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Even sugar itself could be marketed as a way to
reduce your weight while you're.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
Holding down your weight only eighteen calories peteaspoon and domino
and prcane sugar.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
There's a simple parallel to be drawn here to another
industry that spent years trying to influence science and get
the public hooked on its product.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
The sugar industry has some interesting connections to the tobacco industry,
So first, they actually have some of the same players.
One really interesting thing I found was that the first
scientific director for the Sugar Research Foundation.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
That was the original name of the Sugar Association.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Went on to work for the tobacco industry. He sent
the tobacco companies a letter telling them about all the
great work he had done for the sugar industry and
exonerating sugar from being linked to obese heart disease, B
vitamin problems to decay, and said that the problems of
(34:44):
the cigarette companies were so similar to what the sugar
industry had gone through that he thought he could be
of great service to the tobacco companies, and indeed they
hired him and he became the assistant scientific director of
the Tobacco Industry Research Committee for at least a decade.
The sugar industry might have been up to no good
(35:08):
even before the tobacco industry, So in this case, it
looks like the tobacco industry actually might have learned from
what the sugar industry was doing.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
We asked the Sugar Association about these allegations that they
funded research explicitly designed to exonerate sugar as a cause
of chronic disease, that their funding of such research was concealed,
and that the attacked opponents of sugar. They send us
a statement which you can read in full in the
episode notes, but in part they told us the Sugar
(35:38):
Association's past and ongoing support of nutrition research was and
is undertaken in good faith in pursuit of science based
nutrition knowledge and sound public policy decisions that result in
better public health outcomes. While standards for peer reviewed published
research and nutrition research of all kinds have changed over
(35:58):
the decades, the sugar industry's financial support of past academic
nutrition research discussed in your podcast should have been disclosed.
They also added, it is important to recognize that despite
decades of inquiry on the topic of sugar and health
and tens of thousands of studies, scientific consensus still suggests
(36:19):
that added sugars are not the cause of obesity or
heart disease, best summed up by the FDA in twenty
sixteen when it wrote, US consensus reports do not support
a cause and effect relationship between added sugar's consumption and
the risk of obesity and heart disease. Listen, it's a
long statement with a lot of words in it. It's
(36:41):
clear the Sugar Association acknowledges that they weren't as transparent
as they should have been, and that's an important point.
I will only note that rising to the standard of
cause and effect in any kind of public health issue
is a very high bar. Indeed, Kristin has faced criticism
for her work too. Some have even gone as far
(37:02):
as calling her a conspiracy theorist. Kristen, an assistant professor
at the University of California.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
It's interesting when people might think about me as a
conspiracy theorist. Maybe it actually was a conspiracy, you know,
behind the scenes. It's something that we didn't know about before.
As the material is uncovered, you can see exactly what
the sugar industry has been up to. Sugar and tobacco
(37:29):
are quite different. You don't ever want to smoke, but
with sugar, you know there is some room for some
sugar in your diet. But the question is how much
is too much? And that's the question that the sugar
industry hasn't wanted us to answer.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
But wait, there's more. The industry hasn't let up, even
in recent years on its efforts to keep us eating
loads of sugar. Peka Pushka is known as the man
who made Finland.
Speaker 9 (37:59):
Help. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Okay good.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
He's a medical doctor and he too saw the rise
of heart disease in the twentieth century and knew something
had to be done about it.
Speaker 9 (38:14):
In the early seventies, Finland had the highest mortality of
heart disease in the world, and that led me to
this field because it was quite a national emergency. We
have to do something.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Peca is a fan of international collaboration, a big fan.
Some people wear shirts that are emblazoned with their favorite
band or someplace they've been as a tourist. Peca he
wears the official UN gift shop button down.
Speaker 9 (38:43):
I bought this ship some years ago at the US
headquarters in New York.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
I like he literally wears his love for global cooperation
on his sleeve. So Paca went on to have some
major roles in international public health, including at the WHO,
the World Health organization. He was the Director for non
Communicable Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Basically, he was tasked
with looking into health issues like heart disease for the
(39:09):
Global Health Group. Back in the early two thousands, he
was getting ready to publish a report for the WHO.
Speaker 9 (39:16):
We wanted to have a very solid scientific report, so
we appointed an expert group of something like thirty people
expert from different countries.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
The scientists made a strong unanimous conclusion in the draft.
Speaker 9 (39:30):
Report because for health reasons, sugar intakes should not be
more than ten percent of energy.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
This was not something the industry wanted to hear. In
other words, they recommended that no more than ten percent
of our calories should come from sugar.
Speaker 9 (39:45):
Then suddenly, quite suddenly, actually the sugar industry really started
this very heavy attack and saying that it is not scientific,
it should not be published.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Pecka says that sugar lobbyists started content acting him.
Speaker 9 (40:01):
It was very strong pressure against publishing this report.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
And there's one memory that sticks out.
Speaker 9 (40:09):
One particular occasion that is still very strongly in my mind,
when a very powerful, very important Coca Colar lobbyist came
to my office and said, Becker, about this work, Are
you sure you know what you are doing? Because you
are now dealing with big boys par maturitical industry, small boys.
(40:33):
Now you are messing up with the big boys. Are
you sure you know what you are doing? He also
said that if you act properly, we have millions the
work with your people, meaning.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
They have a lot of money to spend to give
to the WHO for joint projects. We asked Coca Cola
to respond to the claim that they lobbied the WHO
after this ten percent recommendation, but we got no reply back.
When this was all happening, Peca refused to back down.
He said there was solid evidence for the recommendation and
(41:07):
the report would be published regardless of the pressure.
Speaker 9 (41:11):
We have to be patient and just push, push and push.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
His colleagues jokes that he puts the push in Peka, Pushka.
Speaker 9 (41:18):
Somebody said, okay, now we know why your name is Pushka.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
But the Big Sugar boys went a step further.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
The sugar industry launched a massive campaign to threaten the WHO,
coming from the US saying that we would pull our
funding from the WHO if they continued on with that recommendation,
and the sugar industry was able to recruit to US
senators as well as our Secretary of Health and Human
Services at the time to write it was like a
(41:47):
twenty six page letter claiming that the evidence the WHO
had used did not meet the standards of the US government.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
The letter from the Sugar Association threatened the WA, saying
they're demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO
scrapped the guidelines.
Speaker 9 (42:07):
You know we did with the letter. We licked it
to the Guardian.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
The Guardian published parts of the leaked letter, and the
Big Sugar tactic backfired. Pekka thinks all the resistance from
the lobbyists and politicians actually drew attention to the report
and the ten percent recommendation.
Speaker 9 (42:30):
After all this well, being there was huge international interests
in this report, the Senator should have realized how stupid
it was. Of the absolutely stupid.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
So the sugar industry has a lot of support to
try to influence even international organizations to try to soften
the message about sugar and chronic disease. That's pretty astounding
their power.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Oh and by the way, a last note on the
John Yudkin Ansel Keys feud. Keys certainly came out on
top in the seventies, but perhaps not now, helped in
part by something else Kristen found.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
I discovered a brochure on the Sugar Research Foundation just
in this random publication online, and it was listing the
first research projects that SRF funded in the early nineteen forties,
and Ansel Keys happened to be the very first researcher
that they gave money to. They gave him at the
(43:34):
time about twelve thousand dollars per year for a three
year project, which would be the equivalent of about one
hundred thousand dollars per year today. So that's pretty significant.
Speaker 6 (43:44):
Probably not on the explicit condition that he undermined John Jordkinsburg,
but with a wink probably said well, you know, we're
very interested in your work, and we noticed that your
work has the effect of undermining John Yudkin, and we're
happy to fund you.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Hence the accusation that by helping attack Yudkin and not
warning people about the potential impacts of sugar ansel keys
has cost lives. That's what those YouTube comments were suggesting. Anyway,
many would say that cozy relationships with industry are the
norm and have no impact on a scientist's impartiality. These
funds were granted back the nineteen forties, well before the
(44:27):
feud was really underway. Yudkin also took funding from industry
giants such as Hines, Nestley and the National Dairy Council,
but his results, as he writes in the acknowledgments to
Pure White and Deadly, were often not at all in
their interests. Fortunately for Judkin, discoveries like Christen's, coupled with
(44:47):
new research, began to turn the tide of opinion around
his work, and actually, thanks to a viral video, the
book Pure White and Deadly has gone gangbusters it's become
a hit and been republished and translated into a bunch
of languages forty years after its original publication, so.
Speaker 6 (45:06):
It's undergone something of a rebirth of that book.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Michael is enjoying seeing how his dad's work has gone
through a sort of renaissance.
Speaker 6 (45:15):
Of course, it's always nice to see one's own father
welcomed again. So it was fun for me, and it
is extraordinary. I don't know a case like it actually.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
And by the way, the World Health Organization did end
up making that ten percent recommendation and now labels on
food list a line for added sugar, while sugar consumption
in the US has gone down since the nineteen nineties.
With this turn of events these days, Michael imagines his
dad's response.
Speaker 6 (45:46):
He was not the kind of man to say, I
told you so. He was a man to say, oh, well,
something good has happened. Let's rejoice.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Kristen now feels like the case is closed on that question.
She asked all those years ago at the conference, why
is lipten brisk tea considered healthy? And this whole investigation
has shifted the way she looks at the world.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
I'm very cynical. How to say that it's not just
one or two industries. There are many out there who
make products that are harmful, and they all engage in
some form of public relations to try to cover up
(46:36):
the connections, to try to delay regulation, to try and
convince us that there's no problem.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
And from all this research and experience, she has advice
for anyone taking on big sugar.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
People definitely don't realize how sophisticated the sugar industry is
and the resources that they have at their disposal, and
the lengths that they would go to to protect their industry.
The sugar industry is always on guard looking for threats.
They're always scanning for threats. They never stop.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
And that's what you'll hear next week, just how far
the sugar industry will go.
Speaker 9 (47:23):
There's all kinds of corruption. There's a kind you can prosecute,
and there's the kind that there are no penalties for.
Speaker 5 (47:29):
If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, and
vote against them, you shouldn't.
Speaker 9 (47:33):
Be in this business.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
And how much power they have that they have a
line directly to the Oval Office.
Speaker 5 (47:39):
If you can get the President of the United States
on the phone while he is breaking up with his girlfriend,
You've got a lot of clout.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
That's next time on Big Sugar. Big Sugar is produced
by Imagine Audio, Weekday Fund Productions and Novel for iHeartMedia.
The series is hosted by me Celeste Hedley. Big Sugar
(48:09):
is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions. It's
executive produced by Karl Welker, Nathan Kloke, and Marie Brenner.
Story editor and executive producer is Joe Wheeler. The researcher
is Nadia Metti. Production management from Scherie Houston, Frankie Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolfe. Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. Field
(48:32):
reporting by Amber Amortigi. Sound design and mixing by Eli Block,
Naomi Clark and Daniel Kempsen. Original music composed by Troy
McCubbin at Alloy Tracks. Additional music by Nicholas Alexander. Special
thanks to Alec Wilkinson, author of the book Big Sugar,
and Stephanie Black, director of the documentary H two Worker.
(48:55):
Big Sugar is based on the Vanity Fair article in
the Kingdom of Big Sugar by Marie A.
Speaker 8 (49:00):
Brainner.
If you were a mystery writer, I doubt you'd set
the opening of your page turning thriller at a dental conference.
I don't recall bad PowerPoint presentations or stained lecture room
chairs popping up on the pages of Agatha Christie or
Dan Brown. But it was at a conference about the
links between gum disease and diabetes where dentist Kristin Kern's
(00:22):
life tilted on its axis.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
So at this conference there were two keynote speakers. The
first was representing the US Centers for Disease Control, and
she handed out a brochure and I opened it up.
It was all about decrease calories, decrease fat, decreased salt,
but it didn't actually say the words decrease sugar, which
(00:49):
I found very unusual.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Christen is puzzled. That seems awfully strange. It's a dental conference,
after all. Then the next keynote speaker steps up, a
representative from the National Diabetes Education Program. This guy also
hands out a brochure, the Stop and Go Fast Food
Nutrition Guide. If you've got to eat fast food, here
are the healthy options.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
And I flipped open to the drinks page, and I
noticed that Lippt and brisk sweet tea got a green light.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
A green light as in, it's a healthy choice.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
And it had something like forty four grams of sugar
in it, and I really just couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Forty four grams of sugar. That's more than the recommended
amount of adult should consume in an entire day. So
this speaker is packing up and preparing to leave when Kristen,
who's sitting way at the back of the ballroom, springs
out of her.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Chair and chased him down and caught him and said,
how can you possibly rank sweet tea as a healthy drink?
And his answer to me was there is no evidence
linking sugar to chronic disease. And I was stunned. I
was absolutely stunned.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Kristin is thinking this is a dental conference. Sugar causes
tooth decay, that is a chronic disease, and it's also
been linked to heart disease and diabetes.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
In my head, I'm thinking this guy's nuts. So I
looked back at him, I think, with a blank stare,
and he just turned around and walked out the door,
and I was just really shocked. It really kind of
shook me. Up and I didn't understand what was going on.
(02:35):
So coming back from this dental conference, I just really
couldn't let this go.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Kristin comes home still astonished that a keynote speaker at
an industry conference would say there is no link between
sugar and chronic disease.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
And so when I came home, really the first thing
I did was actually dig out my old textbooks. I
got out my biochemistry textbook and looked at Glycollis's again
and like, did I miss something? But soon realized that
there's probably much more to the story. So I started
getting interested in the sugar industry.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
Kristen starts searching around on the internet, looking at the
sugar industries trade groups.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah, so I got pretty obsessed, I would have to
say with this, especially when I started to find real clues.
So I actually cut off my cable TV subscription. No
more TV. I was going to dedicate my free time
outside of work to really look into this.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Why was Kristin doing this Well, at this point, she
was working for a dental healthcare provider, but previously had
been working as a dentist at clinic serving low income populations.
It was a tough gig She'd see patient after patient
with serious cavities or even missing teeth. Maybe this sugar
mystery was part of the bigger issue. In the end,
(03:57):
she made a major decision.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Really wanted to dedicate myself to this, So yes, I
actually quit my job to dig into this more.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
To crack this case, Kristin would go through a metamorphosis.
She'd transform from dentist to detective and dive into the
secretive realm of sugar. Albeit her crime scenes were library
storerooms and her smoking guns were Manila folders, but her discoveries,
well they're incredible. She'd eventually uncover evidence revealing the canny
(04:29):
strategies Big Sugar has used to protect its image and
harness the power of public relations and influence the very
food you eat. This episode, we step away from the
lawsuits because to understand how these cases went, you have
to really understand not only the people, but the industry
the lawyers were taking on. I'm Celeste Heedley and from iHeartMedia,
(04:53):
Imagine Audio and the teams at Weekday Fun and Novel.
This is Big Sugar Episode seven, Bittersweet By two thousand
(05:15):
and nine, Kristin Kerns is a full time, unemployed investigator
on the trail of the sugar industry. She'd been scrutinizing
the world of sugar for two years at this point.
Her search has led her to a library in Colorado
and to stumbling upon old records for this sugar beat company.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
I typed in sugar into the local library catalog and
I noticed references to the Great Western Sugar Company. And
this company had gone out of business in the nineteen seventies,
and they for some reason decided to donate some of
their company records to local libraries.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Kristin heads to the small archive room of the Colorado Library.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
It's a very kind of sterile environment, and you have
to put all your belongings in a locker and only
use a pencil. They're very worried about you damaging the documents.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
The boxes are all laid out.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And I just picked the first one, and the first
folder that I opened had confidential typed in all caps.
And I think I had to just take a moment
and sit down and really take in that moment of
will you know, all this time of thinking there's something
there and then actually finding that there was something there
(06:32):
was a big moment for me. That was the moment
where I sort of couldn't believe that I actually found
this kind of hard evidence of the sugar industries public
relations campaigns that hadn't been brought to light yet.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Okay, whoa hold your horses? This discovery, Well, it's major,
and it dates back some seventy years ago and goes
way beyond dentistry.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
It strikes without mourning of ten men.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
We can expect five to get it, but we can't
say who, or when or why.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
In the nineteen fifties, America was under siege. The nation
wasn't threatened by a foreign adversary, but by an indiscernible,
stealthy enemy. Heart disease. Rates of the condition were rising steeply,
and it burst into the public consciousness when one Saturday
afternoon in nineteen fifty five, at the Cherry Hills Country
Club golf course, President Dwight D. Eisenhower began complaining of
(07:37):
indigestion around the ninth hole, which led to.
Speaker 5 (07:40):
The President was helped into a car in the early
morning hours, rushed along this street to the Fitzsimmons Army Hospital,
and placed in an oxygen tent.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
It turned out not to be from the Hamburger he'd
eaten earlier in the day, but a massive cardiac arrest.
Speaker 5 (07:55):
His illness revealed once again America's unpreparedness to deal adequately
with such an emergency.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Why were so many people suddenly having heart attacks? Even
the president had been struck down? What was really going on?
In the nineteen sixties, evidence started to leak out suggesting
there might be a link between heart disease and sugar consumption.
When I say sugar, I don't mean the sugars we
naturally find in whole foods, but those sugars which come
(08:24):
from beets, cane, corn, and even honey. The thing that
scientists and doctors were focused on were the molecules fructose, sucrose,
and dextrose when they're added to our food in large quantities.
And there was one man in particular sounding the alarm.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
John Yudkin, and Yudkin was of the opinion that sugar
was a cause of coronary heart disease.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
This is BBC television.
Speaker 6 (08:53):
You shouldn't eat sugar full stop. But if you insist
on eating sugar, there are some sorts of brown sugar
that do seem to be a nutrition le Superior.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Doctor John Yudkin was a gifted researcher and hyper focused
on the area of public health. In fact, he ended
up helping build the Department of Nutrition at Queen Elizabeth
College in London. In nineteen seventy two, John Yudkin dropped
a bomb on the sugar industry. It was the biggest
weapon in the academic arsenal. A well researched book. It
(09:25):
was called Pure White and Deadly.
Speaker 6 (09:29):
Which was describing the dangers as he saw it, of sugar.
Of course, he didn't mean the odd tea spoon of
sugar that one might have in one's coffee a couple
of times a day. He wasn't thinking of that at all.
He was thinking of large quantities of sugar. This is
Michael Yudkin, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry the University of Oxford.
(09:52):
He's also the son of John Judkin, whom I understand
you're making a program about. Pure White and Deadly is
a book which looked into questions of what happened when
people from populations who had typically eaten relatively little sugar
(10:17):
moved to populations where they were exposed to more sugar.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
For example, John Yadkin looked at studies about people from
Yemen who moved to Israel and started eating loads more sugar.
Decades later, what was going on with their health? More
and more people were getting chronic diseases like heart disease
and diabetes. Then he began doing his own experiments on
animals and humans. He found that sugar consumption led to
(10:45):
raised blood levels of triglycerides that's a technical term for fat,
which is considered a risk factor for heart disease, and
then sugar also raised insulin levels, linking it to type
two diabetes. These were early observation rather than concrete explanations, but.
Speaker 6 (11:02):
It started him off thinking that there's something about sugar
which is not only useless, but actually positively harmful in
some way.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
So a bit more about John Yudkin, because he'll come
to be central to the story. John Yudkin grew up
in the East End of London.
Speaker 6 (11:21):
His family were very poor. His father died when he
was six. He was one of five brothers, and he
really had to make his own way.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Through leapfrogging on scholarships. He ended up at the prestigious
Cambridge University.
Speaker 6 (11:36):
It was not by any means common for poor children
to finish up at Cambridge He was very clever, very bright,
and extremely hard working. But also he was a fun person.
He had a great sense of humor.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
He wasn't a disciplinarian.
Speaker 6 (11:56):
I would go to a birthday party and he would
say something like, of course there'll be lots of cakes
and biscuits at the birth day party, but I'd rather
if he went easy on them.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Michael reminds me of his dad. Firstly, he too offered
cookies when the production team met him. He's not militant
about sugar either. And secondly, he and his father look
quite similar. Black hair, glasses, and there's pretty much always
at least a hint of a smile on his face,
crinkling his eyes into half moons. Similarly his dad.
Speaker 6 (12:29):
He was a cheerful person, which was lucky considering what
happened later, but considering the way he was treated later.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
John Yudkins's book Pure White and Deadly sparked a lot
of interest when it was published, which was bad news
for sugar's reputation. Plus, at nearly the exact same time,
there was a major FDA review looking into whether foods
like sugar could be called general recognized as safe in
their dietary guidelines. The FDA, the Food and Drug Administration,
(13:06):
is in charge of making sure the food's sold to
us here in the US isn't harmful. If they took
sugar off their safe list, it could spell the end
of the industry. Imagine every time you bought something with
sugar in it, it would have a label warning you
about the dangers of eating it. Basically, in the nineteen seventies,
the heat was on sugar and they went into disaster
(13:28):
control and it all started with the Sugar Association.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
The Sugar Association is a trade association that's based in Washington, DC,
and they represent cane and beat sugar growers and producers
on issues related to sugar and health. So any policy,
any potential regulation that has anything to do with sugar
and health, they are monitoring those activities and trying to
(13:56):
influence them so that it doesn't impact sales of sugar.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
The Sugar Association has been funded by various companies over
the years. These days, its biggest members include some names
that might be familiar to you by now, Florida Crystals
and the Sugarcane Growers Cooperative of Florida. The public face
of the Sugar Association is all well and good, but
(14:23):
Kristin Kerns was more interested in what they weren't saying publicly.
She's flipping through that Manila folder in the Colorado Library
Archives and she stumbles on a pile of documents, letters, memos,
reports from around the nineteen seventies, when the industry was
freaking out about the bad press, the FDA review and
books like Yudkins.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
And they began to get concerned.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
The documents spelled out their game plan.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
They were watching John Yudkin in particular. In fact, in
some of the earlier documents, the way they talked about
it was that it was an anti sugar infection. They
had to exterminate that infection. That was their mission. So
it was how they put together their public relations campaigns
(15:10):
and everything that they did to convince the public, convince
policy makers, convince the media that sugar was safe for consumption.
Back in the nineteen seventies, they were thinking, we could
do a public opinion poll. They thought maybe we could
sponsor a symposium to kind of take down John Yudkin,
(15:33):
and they started thinking about funding their own heart disease research.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Between nineteen seventy five and nineteen eighty, the Sugar Association
spent six hundred and fifty five thousand dollars about three
million in today's dollars on seventeen studies designed as the
document's Kristen found, put it to maintain research as a
main prop of the industry's defense. So the association pulled
out the cash bazouka, and who got showered and dough Well,
(16:08):
most of it apparently went to those scientists whose studies
seemed explicitly designed to exonerate sugar. If you take a
look at the internal documents, Kristin found in one example,
a researcher wanted to know if sugar could boost serotonin
and prove of therapeutic value, as in the relief of depression,
Like could scarfing down candy make you feel better when
(16:30):
you're depressed? Look, if you've ever sought comfort from a
pint of ice cream post a breakup, you can probably
answer that one for yourself. These first documents were just
the tip of the iceberg. Kristin kept digging and digging,
traveling around the country, going through more archives and more documents.
Speaker 2 (16:49):
Really, my whole focus became trying to uncover what these
documents were about. And this was not something that I
really had training in. So I just started reading through
these documents. I paid for photocopies of them, I took
them home. I had them in piles all over my
(17:10):
dining room table, trying to read through them and piece
the story together of what was going on.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Kristen has a kind of composed tenacity. When I asked
a question, she often laughs, gives a brief response, and
then pauses before delivering a considered, more articulate answer. So
during this time, was she getting a bit obsessive obsessive?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Yes, Once I had the clues that there was really
some manipulation going on behind the scenes, that just made
me even more motivated to continue on. And it seemed
like there really wasn't anybody else talking about this kind
(17:56):
of material, And the more documents that I found, and
the more evidence there was to tell these various stories,
and so it just kept, you know, pushing me on.
It is something that I just really wanted to get
out into the world more.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
After the break, Kristin Current had stumbled on something major.
Big Sugar's pr playbook. Step one, fund new research that
might make sugar look better. Check Step two. Poo poo
your opponents.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
There was a quite clear campaign on the part of
the sugar manufacturers to denigrate my father's work and poopoo
it and say there's nothing in it here. You can
just as be in his bonnet about it, and nobody
really believes it, accept him and a couple of other
(18:52):
deluded individuals whom he has seduced into this way of thinking.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Being bad mouth might not say that extreme, but in
the scientific world these were serious accusations. After Pure White
and Deadly was published, the British Sugar Bureau, the UK
version of the Sugar Association, sent a statement to newspapers,
magazines and radio saying the book is considered to not
only be unscientific in its approach, but to contain very
(19:20):
little more than a number of emotional assertions based on
doctor Yudkins's own theory that sugar is the main cause
of many diseases and should be banned. Another group, the
World Sugar Research Organization, described it as science fiction. Ouch.
We actually asked the World Sugar Research Organization about this,
and a spokesperson gave us this statement. Professor Yudkin's views
(19:44):
towards sugar were widely known and differed from the views
of wsro's director general at the time, nearly forty five
years ago. The commentary by the director General at the time,
who was now deceased, was considered by Professor Yudkin as
an attack on his reputation, was retracted and WSRO settled
with Professor Yudkin within the laws of libel in the UK,
(20:05):
with a payment offered towards Professor Yudkin's legal costs. But
it wasn't just trade groups saying this kind of stuff.
Here's Michael Yudkin again.
Speaker 6 (20:14):
There are examples of remarks that are made, particularly by
an adversary of my found's.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Someone whose voice the sugar industry found very useful.
Speaker 6 (20:27):
The adversary of my father, who was particularly virulent in
this respect, was called Ansel keys Hi.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Doctor ansel keyes Am a physiologist. My specialty is diet
and health. I have written several books on the subject,
including the current bestseller Eat Well and Stay Well.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Back when the US was first in the grip of
a heart disease epidemic, there were two takes on the cause.
In the red corner, John Yudkins said sugar. In the
blue corner, ansel keys said fat.
Speaker 4 (20:57):
I am presently engaged in a major experiment involving the
health and eating habits of some ten thousand individuals scattered
throughout the world. We are collecting data on all types,
from African tribesmen to American businessmen. I have already had
considerable effect on the diet of millions of Americans.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Doctor Ansel Keys was a pioneer in the field of nutrition.
He'd helped create the K rations, those meals that were
carried into combat during World War Two. In fact, the
K in k ration is for Keys.
Speaker 7 (21:26):
Now famous K Rations, the completely streamlined meals. Originally designed
for paratroops, K proved ideal for tankbusters, commandos, and all
isolated units.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
In the mid twentieth century, Ansel Keys oversaw a landmark
study that looked at populations around the world to get
to the bottom of why Americans were dying of heart disease.
He announced what he thought was the culprit for the
scourge of heart disease, saturated fat.
Speaker 8 (21:55):
Well, it wasn't very long before its appears that there
was some connection between corner heart disease and cholesterol and
the blood. There was an important connection between the fats
in the die, particularly the kinds of fats in the
dye and cholesterol in the blood.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
That's Ansel Keys speaking when he was super old. He
lived to one hundred. In the end, Ansel Keys became
probably the first nutritionist celebrity. Imagine the stern face of
a physiologist on the cover of Time magazine. His promotion
of the Mediterranean diet is still a worldwide phenomenon. And
(22:33):
you know when you walk down the aisles of your
supermarket and see low fat this and low fat that, well,
in part you probably have doctor Keys to thank for that.
You can watch videos of doctor Keys on YouTube, and
while we all know comment sections don't always bring out
the best in humanity, you might be surprised to scroll
down and read what people have said about him. Plenty
(22:56):
law doctor Key's work, but others say Keys a disgrace,
or this guy should get a Nobel Prize for ruining
the lives of billions, and even he should be charged
posthumously with mass murder. Why well, you'll come to find out.
Speaker 4 (23:13):
So well, aril, doctor Ansel Keys, please stand up.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Back in the seventies, when he's feud with John Yudkin
was at its peak, Doctor Ansel Keys made.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
Remarks that are really beyond the bounds in my opinion
of what is proper to say in terms of scientists
that you disagree with. Like Judkin's work has no basis
in fact, and although I have tried to counter it
as best I can, the propaganda keeps on reverberating. Attacks
(23:54):
of that sort were largely successful in rendering my father
something of a figure of fun, in rendering him somebody
who could be regarded as eccentric and whose views could
be written off.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Keys was chiming in alongside the sugar pr and trade
associations to belittle John Yudkin's work. And this wasn't just
a personal blow for John Yudkin. It impacted him professionally too.
Speaker 6 (24:25):
I think it certainly affected his career a lot. He
would be invited to conferences and then at the last
moment disinvited. One time he attended a conference and all
the papers from that conference, including his, were to be
published in a book, And then it suddenly discovered that
(24:46):
his contribution to the conference was to be excluded from
the book at the demand of the sugar people. His
funding was put in jeopardy and finally cut. There were
lots and lots of ways in which he was made
to suffer from here for his views. My father was
(25:16):
a man who was not easily depressed. I must say
that if I had been subjected to that kind of language,
I don't think I would have been as cheerful as
my father was about it.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
He focused on his family, often taking his grandchildren out
the things like the circus or the theater. John Yudkin
died in nineteen ninety five. According to Michael, his greatest
fear wasn't that his work had been erased, but what
that could mean for people's health.
Speaker 6 (25:48):
That was very, very hard for him. When he saw
this sort of disappearing before his eyes. That was extremely difficult.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
Alongside attacking people like Yudkin, the sugar industry also went
a step further. In nineteen seventy five, an expert committee
led by those supposedly at the cutting edge of public
health research, published a literature review called Sugar in the
Diet of Man. It critiqued evidence that linked sugar to
chronic disease, and it was sent all over the country
(26:18):
twenty five thousand copies to influential people, including reporters and policymakers.
Along with the press release headlined scientists dispel sugar fears.
The documents Kristen found revealed this series was funded by
the sugar industry, but the report at the time didn't
say that.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
And so when this Sugar in the Diet of Man
series came out, it became this scientific evidence that the
sugar industry could point to that was disconnected from their funding,
disconnected from any of their fingerprints, and say, look at
all of these prominent scientists who are claiming that there
(26:58):
is no link between sugar and chronic disease.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
All this fed into that FDA report questioning the safety
of sugar.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
And so when you read the report itself, you can
see that there is evidence linking sugar to diabetes, for example.
But then the report goes on to say, here are
some other studies that showed that there is no link
between sugar and diabetes, and those studies happened to be
several that had been sponsored by the sugar industry.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
In the end, the FDA concluded.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
It basically said that there was no link between sugar
and heart disease and diabetes and obesity. It did acknowledge
a link between sugar and two decay, So they actually
succeeded in influencing the food and Drug Administration.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Let me spell it out here. According to the documents,
Kristen found, the sugar industry paid scientists to conduct studies
that made sugar look good, attacked people who said sugar
could be unhealthy, then produced a massive report basically saying,
look at all this evidence sugar isn't linked to these
chronic diseases. Then the government relied on that report when
(28:12):
making their recommendations about the very things you should eat.
No one is saying that you shouldn't eat sugar at all,
but there was no limit, no cap, no suggestion of
how much you could healthily consume or the potential consequences
of eating too much.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
I think the president of the Sugar Association at the
time called it their scientific bible. They could use that
FDA report to counter any other government effort to try
to limit sugar consumption in various ways.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Like here's a clip from a nineteen eighties documentary made
by the Florida Sugarcane League, the trade association of Floridas
sugar growers and processors.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Currently, there are many voices reaching the public ear who
make accusations against sugar as a food, such as that
sugar is an important cause of coronary heart disease. Because
of public concern, the Food and Drug Administration in recent
years had a group of independent scientists review the world's
literature dealing with sugar. The conclusion was reached that, other
(29:23):
than one of the contributing factors tatoost decay, there is
no evidence indicating that the average amount of sugar consumed
by the American public in any way constitutes a health hazard.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
That's not a spokesman for the sugar industry speaking. That's
the founder of the nutrition department at Harvard University School
of Public Health. Kristen found that the International Sugar Research
Foundation funded thirty studies in Stair's department between nineteen fifty
two and nineteen fifty six. He also led the report
(29:58):
Sugar in the Diet of Mane. Let me just reiterate
this is a Harvard professor working in public health, also
being paid by the sugar industry, saying sugar is not harmful.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
In conclusion, sugar is an important part of the diet,
is the source of energy, It's a safe food, it
tastes good and makes other foods taste good. And remember
that eating is one of the pleasures of life.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Off the back of all this, the Sugar Association made
ads for newspapers and magazines exclaiming sugar is safe. The
ad said, quote, there is no substantiated scientific evidence indicating
that sugar causes diabetes, heart disease, or any other malady
end quote. So sit back, take a bite of your Oreo,
(30:51):
sip on your Coca Cola, and enjoy the blissful pleasures
of corporate influence in America. The research, the literature reviews,
the attacks on the opponents, the media campaigns, the success
with the FDA report. All of this led to a
(31:12):
big moment for the Sugar Association.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
The Silver Anvil Award was really a big win for
the Sugar Association. It's given out by the Public Relations
Society of America, and it's like winning an oscar if
you're in the public relations world.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Christian uncovered an image of them accepting the award in
the CPUs stained photo, three men smile clutching the trophy.
They had faced a barrage of criticism and who won.
They did more After the break. With the image of
sugar as being safer than fat firmly embedded in the
(31:48):
public imagination, the sugar companies were free to continue pushing
the sweet stuff, and inevitably people ate more and more
of it. Two hundred years ago, we ate an average
of thirteen pounds of sugar a year. These days in
the US that figure is more like one hundred and
fifty pounds. That means in a month's time we get
(32:10):
through what we used to eat in a whole year. Now.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the
United States. Every thirty six seconds someone dies from a
cardiovascular condition, and about one in ten of us live
with diabetes. A decisive link between sugar and these diseases
is still debated, but what can be definitively said is
(32:33):
that eating a lot of sugar increases the possibility of
being overweight, which is a risk factor for type two diabetes,
some cancers, and heart disease. Saturated fat certainly plays its
role as well. This all might seem kind of distant
literature reviews, FDA reports, nutrition studies, but it affects you
(32:53):
and one of the most personal things in your life
what you eat.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Products that were high in sugar could be marketed as healthy.
It was all about low fat.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
I have very little news this new best foods low
fat mannaise dressing has.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
Very little fat, so if a product was low in
fat but high in sugar, according to the US government,
it could be marketed as a healthy product because there
was no limit set on how much sugar was too much.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
The low fat market hit the accelerator.
Speaker 7 (33:33):
Nobody does fat free indulgence like SnackWells New SnackWells chocolate
Truffle cookies, so good can we ever make enough?
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Even sugar itself could be marketed as a way to
reduce your weight while you're.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
Holding down your weight only eighteen calories peteaspoon and domino
and prcane sugar.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
There's a simple parallel to be drawn here to another
industry that spent years trying to influence science and get
the public hooked on its product.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
The sugar industry has some interesting connections to the tobacco industry,
So first, they actually have some of the same players.
One really interesting thing I found was that the first
scientific director for the Sugar Research Foundation.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
That was the original name of the Sugar Association.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Went on to work for the tobacco industry. He sent
the tobacco companies a letter telling them about all the
great work he had done for the sugar industry and
exonerating sugar from being linked to obese heart disease, B
vitamin problems to decay, and said that the problems of
(34:44):
the cigarette companies were so similar to what the sugar
industry had gone through that he thought he could be
of great service to the tobacco companies, and indeed they
hired him and he became the assistant scientific director of
the Tobacco Industry Research Committee for at least a decade.
The sugar industry might have been up to no good
(35:08):
even before the tobacco industry, So in this case, it
looks like the tobacco industry actually might have learned from
what the sugar industry was doing.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
We asked the Sugar Association about these allegations that they
funded research explicitly designed to exonerate sugar as a cause
of chronic disease, that their funding of such research was concealed,
and that the attacked opponents of sugar. They send us
a statement which you can read in full in the
episode notes, but in part they told us the Sugar
(35:38):
Association's past and ongoing support of nutrition research was and
is undertaken in good faith in pursuit of science based
nutrition knowledge and sound public policy decisions that result in
better public health outcomes. While standards for peer reviewed published
research and nutrition research of all kinds have changed over
(35:58):
the decades, the sugar industry's financial support of past academic
nutrition research discussed in your podcast should have been disclosed.
They also added, it is important to recognize that despite
decades of inquiry on the topic of sugar and health
and tens of thousands of studies, scientific consensus still suggests
(36:19):
that added sugars are not the cause of obesity or
heart disease, best summed up by the FDA in twenty
sixteen when it wrote, US consensus reports do not support
a cause and effect relationship between added sugar's consumption and
the risk of obesity and heart disease. Listen, it's a
long statement with a lot of words in it. It's
(36:41):
clear the Sugar Association acknowledges that they weren't as transparent
as they should have been, and that's an important point.
I will only note that rising to the standard of
cause and effect in any kind of public health issue
is a very high bar. Indeed, Kristin has faced criticism
for her work too. Some have even gone as far
(37:02):
as calling her a conspiracy theorist. Kristen, an assistant professor
at the University of California.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
It's interesting when people might think about me as a
conspiracy theorist. Maybe it actually was a conspiracy, you know,
behind the scenes. It's something that we didn't know about before.
As the material is uncovered, you can see exactly what
the sugar industry has been up to. Sugar and tobacco
(37:29):
are quite different. You don't ever want to smoke, but
with sugar, you know there is some room for some
sugar in your diet. But the question is how much
is too much? And that's the question that the sugar
industry hasn't wanted us to answer.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
But wait, there's more. The industry hasn't let up, even
in recent years on its efforts to keep us eating
loads of sugar. Peka Pushka is known as the man
who made Finland.
Speaker 9 (37:59):
Help. Can you see me? Can you hear me? Okay good.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
He's a medical doctor and he too saw the rise
of heart disease in the twentieth century and knew something
had to be done about it.
Speaker 9 (38:14):
In the early seventies, Finland had the highest mortality of
heart disease in the world, and that led me to
this field because it was quite a national emergency. We
have to do something.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
Peca is a fan of international collaboration, a big fan.
Some people wear shirts that are emblazoned with their favorite
band or someplace they've been as a tourist. Peca he
wears the official UN gift shop button down.
Speaker 9 (38:43):
I bought this ship some years ago at the US
headquarters in New York.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
I like he literally wears his love for global cooperation
on his sleeve. So Paca went on to have some
major roles in international public health, including at the WHO,
the World Health organization. He was the Director for non
Communicable Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Basically, he was tasked
with looking into health issues like heart disease for the
(39:09):
Global Health Group. Back in the early two thousands, he
was getting ready to publish a report for the WHO.
Speaker 9 (39:16):
We wanted to have a very solid scientific report, so
we appointed an expert group of something like thirty people
expert from different countries.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
The scientists made a strong unanimous conclusion in the draft.
Speaker 9 (39:30):
Report because for health reasons, sugar intakes should not be
more than ten percent of energy.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
This was not something the industry wanted to hear. In
other words, they recommended that no more than ten percent
of our calories should come from sugar.
Speaker 9 (39:45):
Then suddenly, quite suddenly, actually the sugar industry really started
this very heavy attack and saying that it is not scientific,
it should not be published.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
Pecka says that sugar lobbyists started content acting him.
Speaker 9 (40:01):
It was very strong pressure against publishing this report.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
And there's one memory that sticks out.
Speaker 9 (40:09):
One particular occasion that is still very strongly in my mind,
when a very powerful, very important Coca Colar lobbyist came
to my office and said, Becker, about this work, Are
you sure you know what you are doing? Because you
are now dealing with big boys par maturitical industry, small boys.
(40:33):
Now you are messing up with the big boys. Are
you sure you know what you are doing? He also
said that if you act properly, we have millions the
work with your people, meaning.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
They have a lot of money to spend to give
to the WHO for joint projects. We asked Coca Cola
to respond to the claim that they lobbied the WHO
after this ten percent recommendation, but we got no reply back.
When this was all happening, Peca refused to back down.
He said there was solid evidence for the recommendation and
(41:07):
the report would be published regardless of the pressure.
Speaker 9 (41:11):
We have to be patient and just push, push and push.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
His colleagues jokes that he puts the push in Peka, Pushka.
Speaker 9 (41:18):
Somebody said, okay, now we know why your name is Pushka.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
But the Big Sugar boys went a step further.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
The sugar industry launched a massive campaign to threaten the WHO,
coming from the US saying that we would pull our
funding from the WHO if they continued on with that recommendation,
and the sugar industry was able to recruit to US
senators as well as our Secretary of Health and Human
Services at the time to write it was like a
(41:47):
twenty six page letter claiming that the evidence the WHO
had used did not meet the standards of the US government.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
The letter from the Sugar Association threatened the WA, saying
they're demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO
scrapped the guidelines.
Speaker 9 (42:07):
You know we did with the letter. We licked it
to the Guardian.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
The Guardian published parts of the leaked letter, and the
Big Sugar tactic backfired. Pekka thinks all the resistance from
the lobbyists and politicians actually drew attention to the report
and the ten percent recommendation.
Speaker 9 (42:30):
After all this well, being there was huge international interests
in this report, the Senator should have realized how stupid
it was. Of the absolutely stupid.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
So the sugar industry has a lot of support to
try to influence even international organizations to try to soften
the message about sugar and chronic disease. That's pretty astounding
their power.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Oh and by the way, a last note on the
John Yudkin Ansel Keys feud. Keys certainly came out on
top in the seventies, but perhaps not now, helped in
part by something else Kristen found.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
I discovered a brochure on the Sugar Research Foundation just
in this random publication online, and it was listing the
first research projects that SRF funded in the early nineteen forties,
and Ansel Keys happened to be the very first researcher
that they gave money to. They gave him at the
(43:34):
time about twelve thousand dollars per year for a three
year project, which would be the equivalent of about one
hundred thousand dollars per year today. So that's pretty significant.
Speaker 6 (43:44):
Probably not on the explicit condition that he undermined John Jordkinsburg,
but with a wink probably said well, you know, we're
very interested in your work, and we noticed that your
work has the effect of undermining John Yudkin, and we're
happy to fund you.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
Hence the accusation that by helping attack Yudkin and not
warning people about the potential impacts of sugar ansel keys
has cost lives. That's what those YouTube comments were suggesting. Anyway,
many would say that cozy relationships with industry are the
norm and have no impact on a scientist's impartiality. These
funds were granted back the nineteen forties, well before the
(44:27):
feud was really underway. Yudkin also took funding from industry
giants such as Hines, Nestley and the National Dairy Council,
but his results, as he writes in the acknowledgments to
Pure White and Deadly, were often not at all in
their interests. Fortunately for Judkin, discoveries like Christen's, coupled with
(44:47):
new research, began to turn the tide of opinion around
his work, and actually, thanks to a viral video, the
book Pure White and Deadly has gone gangbusters it's become
a hit and been republished and translated into a bunch
of languages forty years after its original publication, so.
Speaker 6 (45:06):
It's undergone something of a rebirth of that book.
Speaker 1 (45:11):
Michael is enjoying seeing how his dad's work has gone
through a sort of renaissance.
Speaker 6 (45:15):
Of course, it's always nice to see one's own father
welcomed again. So it was fun for me, and it
is extraordinary. I don't know a case like it actually.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
And by the way, the World Health Organization did end
up making that ten percent recommendation and now labels on
food list a line for added sugar, while sugar consumption
in the US has gone down since the nineteen nineties.
With this turn of events these days, Michael imagines his
dad's response.
Speaker 6 (45:46):
He was not the kind of man to say, I
told you so. He was a man to say, oh, well,
something good has happened. Let's rejoice.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Kristen now feels like the case is closed on that question.
She asked all those years ago at the conference, why
is lipten brisk tea considered healthy? And this whole investigation
has shifted the way she looks at the world.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
I'm very cynical. How to say that it's not just
one or two industries. There are many out there who
make products that are harmful, and they all engage in
some form of public relations to try to cover up
(46:36):
the connections, to try to delay regulation, to try and
convince us that there's no problem.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
And from all this research and experience, she has advice
for anyone taking on big sugar.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
People definitely don't realize how sophisticated the sugar industry is
and the resources that they have at their disposal, and
the lengths that they would go to to protect their industry.
The sugar industry is always on guard looking for threats.
They're always scanning for threats. They never stop.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
And that's what you'll hear next week, just how far
the sugar industry will go.
Speaker 9 (47:23):
There's all kinds of corruption. There's a kind you can prosecute,
and there's the kind that there are no penalties for.
Speaker 5 (47:29):
If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, and
vote against them, you shouldn't.
Speaker 9 (47:33):
Be in this business.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
And how much power they have that they have a
line directly to the Oval Office.
Speaker 5 (47:39):
If you can get the President of the United States
on the phone while he is breaking up with his girlfriend,
You've got a lot of clout.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
That's next time on Big Sugar. Big Sugar is produced
by Imagine Audio, Weekday Fund Productions and Novel for iHeartMedia.
The series is hosted by me Celeste Hedley. Big Sugar
(48:09):
is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions. It's
executive produced by Karl Welker, Nathan Kloke, and Marie Brenner.
Story editor and executive producer is Joe Wheeler. The researcher
is Nadia Metti. Production management from Scherie Houston, Frankie Taylor,
and Charlotte Wolfe. Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. Field
(48:32):
reporting by Amber Amortigi. Sound design and mixing by Eli Block,
Naomi Clark and Daniel Kempsen. Original music composed by Troy
McCubbin at Alloy Tracks. Additional music by Nicholas Alexander. Special
thanks to Alec Wilkinson, author of the book Big Sugar,
and Stephanie Black, director of the documentary H two Worker.
(48:55):
Big Sugar is based on the Vanity Fair article in
the Kingdom of Big Sugar by Marie A.
Speaker 8 (49:00):
Brainner.
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