Big Sugar Episode 7: Bittersweet

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 life tilted on its axis.

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 I found very unusual.

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.

And I flipped open to the drinks page, and I noticed that Lippt and brisk sweet tea got a green light.

A green light as in, it's a healthy choice.

And it had something like forty four grams of sugar in it, and I really just couldn't believe it.

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.

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.

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.

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. So coming back from this dental conference, I just really couldn't let this go.

Kristin comes home still astonished that a keynote speaker at an industry conference would say there is no link between sugar and chronic disease.

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.

Kristen starts searching around on the internet, looking at the sugar industries trade groups.

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.

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, she made a major decision.

Really wanted to dedicate myself to this, So yes, I actually quit my job to dig into this more.

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 strategies Big Sugar has used to protect its image and harness the power of public relations and influence the very

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.

Kristin heads to the small archive room of the Colorado Library.

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.

The boxes are all laid out.

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 like 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

Okay, whoa hold your horses? This discovery, Well, it's major, and it dates back some seventy years ago and goes way beyond dentistry.

It strikes without mourning of ten men.

We can expect five to get it, but we can't say who, or when or why.

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 indigestion around the ninth hole, which led to 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 tech.

It turned out not to be from the Hamburger he'd eaten earlier in the day, but a massive cardiac arrest.

His illness revealed once again America's unpreparedness to deal adequately with such an emergency.

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

John Yudkin, and Yudkin was of the opinion that sugar was a cause of coronary heart disease.

This is BBC television.

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.

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 was called Pure White and Deadly.

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. He's also the son of John Judkin, whom I understand

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

But it started him off thinking that there's something about sugar which is not only useless, but actually positively harmful in some way.

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.

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.

Through leapfrogging on scholarships. He ended up at the prestigious Cambridge University.

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.

He wasn't a disciplinarian.

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.

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.

He was a cheerful person, which was lucky considering what happened later, but considering the way he was treated later.

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, 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

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 influence them so that it doesn't impact sales of sugar.

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 Kristin Kerns was more interested in what they weren't saying publicly.

And they began to get concerned.

The documents spelled out their game plan.

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 and everything that they did to convince the public, convince policymakers, convince the media that sugar was safe for consumption. Back in the nineteen seventies, they were thinking, we could do

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, most of it apparently went to those scientists whose studies

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 dining room table, trying to read through them and piece the story together of what was going on.

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?

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 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.

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.

There was a quite clear campaign on the part of the sugar manufacturers to denigrate my father's work and poopoo it and say no, 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 deluded individuals whom he has seduced into this way of thinking.

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 little more than a number of emotional assertions based on doctor Yuedkins's own theory that sugar is the main cause

There are examples of remarks that are made, particularly by an adversary of my father's.

Someone whose voice the sugar industry found very useful.

The adversary of my father, who was particularly virulent in this respect, was called Ansel keys Hi.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now famous K Rations, the completely streamlined meal. Originally designed for paratroops, K proved ideal for tankbusters, commandos, and all isolated units.

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.

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 and the die, particularly the kinds of fats in the dye and cholesterol in the blood.

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 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.

So well, arel, doctor Ansel Keys, please hand up.

Back in the seventies, when he's feud with John Yudkin was at its peak, Doctor Ansel Keys made.

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 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.

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.

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 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

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.

That was very, very hard for him. When he saw this sort of disappearing before his eyes. That was extremely difficult.

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 twenty five thousand copies to influential people, including reporters and policymakers.

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 is no link between sugar and chronic disease.

All this fed into that FDA report questioning the safety of sugar.

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.

In the end, the FDA concluded.

It basically said that there was no link between sugar and heart disease and diabetes and obesity did acknowledge a link between sugar and two decay. So they actually succeeded in influencing the food and Drug Administration.

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 making their recommendations about the very things you should eat.

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.

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.

Currently, there are many voices reaching the public gear 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

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

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.

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, 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

The Silver Antel Award was really a big win for the Sugar Association. Is given out by the Public Relations Society of America, and it's like winning an oscar if you're in the public relations world.

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 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

Products that were high in sugar could be marketed as healthy. It was all about low fat.

I have very little news this new best foods low fat mannaise dressing has.

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.

The low fat market hit the accelerator.

Nobody does fat free indulgence like SnackWells New SnackWells chocolate Truffle cookies, so good can we ever make enough?

Even sugar itself could be marketed as a way to reduce your weight while you're.

Holding down your weight only eighteen calories peteaspoon and domino and prcane sugar.

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.

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.

That was the original name of the Sugar Association.

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 obesity, heart disease, B vitamin problems to decay, and said that the problems of 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

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,

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 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

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.

Help.

Can you see me? Can you hear me? Okay good.

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.

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.

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.

I bought this.

Ship some years ago at the US headquarters in New York.

I like this.

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 Global Health Group. Back in the early two thousands, he was getting ready to publish a report for the WHO.

We wanted to have a very solid scientific report, so we appointed an expert group of something like thirty people expert from different countries.

The scientists made a strong unanimous conclusion in the draft report.

Because for health reasons, sugar intakes should not be more than ten percent of energy.

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.

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.

Pecka says that sugar lobbyists started content acting him.

It was very strong pressure against publishing this report.

And there's one memory that sticks.

Out, 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. 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.

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 the report would be published regardless of the pressure.

We have to be patient and just push, push and push.

His colleagues jokes that he puts the push in Peka, Pushka.

Somebody said, okay, now we know why your name is Pushka.

But the Big Sugar boys went a step further.

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 twenty six page letter claiming that the evidence the WHO had used did not meet the standards of the US government.

The letter from the Sugar Association threatened the WA, saying they're demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scrapped the guidelines.

You know we did with the letter.

We licked it to the Guardian.

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.

After all this well, being there was huge international interests in this report, the Senator should have realized how stupid it was of there, absolutely stupid.

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.

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.

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 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.

Probably not on the explicit condition that he undermined John Jorkinsburg, 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 underlining John Yudkin, and we're happy to fund you.

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

It's undergone something of a rebirth of that book.

Michael is enjoying seeing how his dad's work has gone through a sort of renaissance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 the connections, to try to delay regulation, to try and convince us that there's no problem.

And from all this research and experience, she has advice for anyone taking on big sugar.

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.

And that's what you'll hear next week, just how far the sugar industry will go.

There's all kinds of corruption.

There's a kind you can prosecute, and there's the kind that there are no penalties for.

If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, and vote against them, you shouldn't.

Be in this business.

And how much power they have that they have a line directly to the Oval Office.

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.

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 is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions. It's executive produced by Kara 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,

Brainner.