Tag: The Case Against Sugar

Gary Taubes ‘The Case Against Sugar’ Part 5

Transcription of Gary Taubes’ YouTube video, The Case Against Sugar, by Elizabeth Reedy

Key takeaways from Part 4

• Sugar is like a drug that shows no immediate side effects.
• Taubes made several references to the connection between consuming sugar and pleasure with this telling statement: . . . once the drug became identified with pleasure, how long before it would be used to celebrate birthdays, a soccer game, good grades in school?
• As sugar became more available in Europe, it was added to all sorts of concoctions. Later in the U.S., sugar was added to the original Coca-Cola formula to mask the bitterness of cocaine and caffeine.

Begin at 49:31

The removal of cocaine in the first years of the 20^th century seemed to have little influence on Coca-Cola’s ability to become, as one journalist described it later, “The sublimated essence of all that America stands for, the single most widely distributed product on the planet and the second most recognizable word on the earth, with okay being the first.”

It’s not a coincidence that John Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola, had a morphine addiction that he’d acquired after being wounded in the Civil War. Coca-Cola is one of several patented medicines he invented to help wean him off of the harder drug. [Quoting Pemberton] “Like Coca, Kola enables its partakers to undergo long fast and fatigue,” read one article in 1884. “Two drugs, so closely related in their psychological properties cannot fail to command early universal attention.”

As for tobacco, sugar was and still is a critical ingredient in the American blended-tobacco cigarette, the first of which was Camel, introduced by R. J. Reynolds in 1913. It’s this “marriage of tobacco and sugar,” as a sugar-industry report described it in 1950, that makes for the “mild” experience of smoking cigarettes as compared with cigars and, perhaps more important, makes it possible for most of us to inhale cigarette smoke and draw it deep into our lungs.

It’s the “inhalibility” of American blended cigarettes that made them so powerfully addictive—as well as so potently carcinogenic—and that drove the explosion in cigarette smoking in the U.S.  and Europe in the first half of the 20^th century, and the rest of the world shortly thereafter, and, of course, the lung-cancer epidemics that have accompanied it.

Here’s an interesting story. About fifteen years ago I read a book called Sugar Blues. Do any of you remember that? William Dufty, Gloria Swanson’s husband, wrote this book. In this book he talks about sugar and tobacco, and about how the sugar in the tobacco leaves is critical to the success of the American cigarette.

For years after that, I tried to confirm that story and I just couldn’t find any evidence to do it. Two things happened. The internet grew and grew, and more and more sources of evidence got scanned into the computer, and you could search through them.

I had gotten a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to write this book on sugar, and part of the grant was to uncover what was the sugar industry’s influence on science in the 70s. I could feel it in the research that in the same way they discover planets by seeing the influence of another planet.

Also, back in 2011 I was lecturing at a bookstore in Denver. I had done nothing on the book, I had completely stalled. I had started my not-for-profit instead. After the lecture, this woman, Kristen Kerns, comes up to me and she says she’s a dentist there in Denver. She works in a lower-class clinic, and she deals with diabetics with terrible teeth all day long.

She read my book Good Calories, Bad Calories, and she became obsessed with it. Then she went to a lecture on dentistry and chronic disease, and she heard a speaker from the American Diabetes Association say that they didn’t know why diabetics had such poor teeth. Kristen was horrified, and she started investigating the sugar industry.

She used Google and she found a cache of sugar industry documents which were from a defunct sugar industry company that had gone out of business and donated its archives to Colorado State University. Then she drove up to Fort Collins, and she started looking through the boxes. She pulled out the first one and it was labeled “Confidential. Sugar industry documents.”

She tells me this story after my talk, and my eyes light up like the big bad wolf. It scared the hell out of me. I was like, “I want everything you’ve got, put it in my book and take credit for it.” I learned that Kristen’s sense of humor was different than mine. Anyway, we ended up working together. We did a cover story for Mother Jones, which helped Kristen get a job at UCSF as a researcher.

If you read the New York Times, you’ll see she has a couple of front-page stories based on her research. I also talk about her research in the book, and I’m proud to have played a role in her life, though I still regret having scared her so much that first day.

One of the documents that Kristen found is this document written by a sugar industry executive in 1954 called “The Marriage of Sugar and Tobacco.” So, after World War II, the sugar industry and all of America starts going on a diet, in part because artificial sweeteners become readily available and allowed people to cut calories. People were arguing that sugar is fattening.

The sugar industry sees the writing on the wall even then, and they realize they have to start diversifying their products. They have to find other products that they could be using, and they are proud of the fact that, in 1954, sugar has played such a major role in the tobacco industry. They’re bragging about it in this document, and they had no reason to think that it wasn’t a great thing. It was more American capitalism at work.

And so, it’s all laid out in this document, including the references to FDA reports and the names of tobacco company executives who could confirm it. This didn’t really fit into my book because my book is about heart disease and diabetes, not the role of sugar and tobacco. But how could I leave it out?

At one point I had a chapter called The Marriage of Sugar and Tobacco, and I’d given it the number two and a half. Have any of you seen the movie Being John Malkovich? There was a… Well, this chapter ended up being Chapter 3. My editor doesn’t have the same sense of humor I do, either.

The other interesting thing is that this had actually been covered by a brilliant historian of science at Stanford, Robert Proctor, who had written a 700-page exposé of the sugar industry called Golden Holocaust that is relentlessly reported.

He wrote it based on the tobacco industry documents, and he came upon this article in the tobacco industry documents. So it doesn’t really fit into his book, but he wrote about it anyway, probably because it’s such an amazing story about the role of sugar and tobacco.

I was still able to get the scoop in this book, first of all because Robert Proctor’s book is 700 pages long, and it’s hard to get through. I find myself talking about other people’s books, other people’s set of good calories and bad calories. It’s good but it’s long. Anyway, a little more reading and then we’ll go to Q & A’s.

Unlike alcohol, which was the only commonly available psychoactive substance in the Old World until sugar, nicotine and caffeine arrived on the scene. The latter three had at least some stimulating properties and so offered a very different experience, one that was more conductive to the labor of everyday life.

These were the “eighteenth-century equivalent of uppers,” writes the Scottish historian Niall Ferguson. “Taken together, the new drugs gave English society an almighty hit. The Empire, it might be said, was built on a huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush—a rush nearly everyone could experience.”

Sugar, more than anything, seems to have made life worth living (as it still does) for so many, particularly those whose lives were absent from the kind of pleasures that relative wealth and daily hours of leisure might otherwise provide.

As early as the twelfth century, one contemporary chronicler of the Crusades, Albert of Aachen, was describing merely the opportunity to sample the sugar from the cane that the Crusaders found growing in the fields of what are now Israel and Lebanon as in and of itself “some compensation for the sufferings they had endured.” “The pilgrims,” he wrote, “could not get enough of its sweetness.”

As sugar, tea, and coffee instigated the transformation of daily life in Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they became the indulgence that the laboring classes could afford; by the 1870s, they had come to be considered necessities of life.

During periods of economic hardship, as the British physician and researcher Edward Smith observed at the time, the British poor would sacrifice the nutritious items of their diet before they’d cut back on the sugar they consumed.

“In nutritional terms,” suggested three British researchers in 1970 in an analysis of the results of Smith’s survey, “it would have been better if some of the money spent on sugar had been diverted to buy bread and potatoes, since this would have given them very many more calories for the same money, as well as providing some protein, vitamins and minerals, which sugar lacks entirely.”

“In fact, however, we find that a taste for the sweetness of sugar tends to become fixed. The choice to eat almost as much sugar as they used to do, while substantially reducing the amount of meat, reinforces our belief that people develop a liking for sugar that becomes difficult to resist or overcome.”

Sugar was “an ideal substance,” says Mintz. “It served to make a busy life seem less so; in the pause it refreshes, it eased the changes back and forth from work to rest; it provided swifter sensations of fullness or satisfaction than complex carbohydrates did; it combined easily with many other foods, in some of which it was also used (tea and biscuit, coffee and bun, chocolate and jam-smeared bread)…. No wonder the rich and powerful liked it so much, and no wonder the poor learned to love it.”

What Oscar Wilde wrote about cigarettes in 1891, when that indulgence was about to explode in popularity and availability, might also be said about sugar: It is “the perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

Thank you. I think I’ll leave it at that. Thank you.

Q&A: One man from the audience asks if we would be healthier or less healthy by using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar. Taubes’ response is that the science is inconclusive. He cited studies where the researchers use lean college students as guinea pigs to see how artificial sweeteners affects them. He says that those results may have different outcomes for middle-aged people, and especially those with medical issues.

My Comments: I was intrigued by Taubes’ comments about the use of sugar along with nicotine and caffeine as the “uppers” of the 17^th-18^th centuries in Europe and America. They helped to give people a lift from the drudgeries of a hard life. I wonder if things aren’t all that much different in the 21^st century.

Rebecca, for example, looks forward to her morning and afternoon coffee breaks at her office. That’s time to get a cup of sweetened coffee and a Danish or some other pastry that a colleague brought to their office. End

transcribed by Liz Reedy

To view Gary Taubes’ 1 hour and 22-minute YouTube video, please click here.

Part 4 continues beginning at 38:43

What if Roald Dahl and Michael Pollan are right that the taste of sugar on the tongue can be a kind of intoxication? Doesn’t it suggest that the possibility that sugar itself is an intoxicant, a drug? Imagine a drug that can do this to us, that can infuse us with energy and can do so when taken by mouth. It doesn’t have to be injected, smoked or snorted for us to experience its sublime and soothing effects.

Imagine that it mixes well with virtually every food and particularly liquids. Imagine that when given to infants it provokes a feeling of pleasure so profound and intense that its pursuit becomes a driving force throughout their lives.

By the way, when I put together this thought experiment that I’m about to read, I never thought I’d ever be able to use it in a book. I thought that if I put this in my first chapter it gives away my hand so profoundly that no one will ever think I was balanced or unbiased. And then I sent it to a colleague of mine who is one of the best scientists I know. He said, “If you don’t use this then you’re crazy.”

Overconsumption of this drug has long-term side effects but there are none in the short-term. There is no staggering or dizziness, no slurring of speech, no passing out or drifting away, no heart palpitations or respiratory distress.

When it is given to children, its effects may be only more extreme variations of the apparently natural emotional roller coaster of childhood. From the initial intoxication to the tantrums and whining that may or may not be withdrawal a few hours later. More than anything, our imaginary drug makes children happy, at least during the period in which they’re consuming it.

It calms their distress, eases their pain, focuses their attention and then leaves them excited and full of joy until the dose wears off. The only downside is that children will come to expect another dose, and perhaps demand it on a regular basis.

I should have said this book was also informed by the fact that I am a parent of two pre-adolescent boys. Michael Pollan said to me at lunch one day that moderating your children’s sugar intake is one of the primary responsibilities of adulthood. I borrow from Michael there as well, but I don’t quote him.

How long would it be before parents took to using our imaginary drug to calm their children when necessary, to alleviate pain, to prevent outbursts of unhappiness, or to distract their attention? And, once the drug became identified with pleasure, how long before it would be used to celebrate birthdays, a soccer game, good grades in school?

How long before it would become a way to communicate love and celebrate happiness? How long before no gathering of family and friends was complete without it, before major holidays and celebrations were defined in part, by the use of this drug to ensure pleasure? How long would it be before the underprivileged of the world would happily spend what little money they had on this drug rather than on nutritious meals for their families?

How long would it be before this drug, as the anthropologist, Sidney W. Mintz said about sugar, demonstrated, “A near invulnerability to moral attack.” How long before writing a book such as this one was perceived as a nutritional equivalent to stealing Christmas?

I wanted to call this book Stealing Christmas: The Case Against Sugar and just lay it out there. I understand the Grinch-like aspect of what I’m doing; I’m not blind to it. It’s another way of saying that I’m not an idiot. But my editor preferred otherwise. When I would tell people the title of my book, a surprising number of them didn’t get the Grinch reference. Maybe Dr. Seuss hasn’t permeated our lives quite as much as I thought.

What is it about the experience of consuming sugar and sweets, particularly during childhood that invokes so readily the comparison to a drug? I have children, still relatively young, and I believe raising them would be a far easier job if sugar and sweets were not an option, if managing their sugar consumption, as Michael Pollan said (but I’m not quoting here), did not seem to be a constant theme in our parental responsibilities.

Even those who vigorously defend the place of sugar and sweets in modern diets, “An innocent moment of pleasure, a balm on the distress of life,” as the British journalist Tim Richardson has written, acknowledge that this dose does not include allowing children to eat as many sweets as they want at any time and that, “Most parents would want to ration their children’s sweets.”

Well, why is it necessary? Children collect many things: Pokémon cards, Star Wars paraphernalia, Dora the Explorer backpacks, and many foods taste good to them. What is it about sweets that makes them so uniquely in need of rationing? Which is another way of asking whether the comparison to drugs and abuse is a valid one.

This is of more than academic interest because the response of entire populations to sugar has been effectively identical to that of children. Once populations are exposed, they consume as much sugar as they can easily procure, although there may be natural limits in that culture about current attitudes about food.

The primary barrier to more consumption, up to the point where populations become obese, diabetic and perhaps even beyond, has tended to be availability and price. This includes in one study, sugar-intolerant Canadian Inuit who lacked the enzyme necessary to digest the fructose component of sugar, and yet continued to consume sugary beverages and candy despite “the abdominal distress that it brought them.”

As the price of a pound of sugar has dropped over the centuries, from the equivalent of 360 eggs in the 13^th century to 2 eggs in the early decades of this one, the amount of sugar consumed has steadily, inexorably climbed.

In 1934, while sales of candy continued to increase during the Great Depression, the New York Times commented, “The depression proved that people wanted candy and that as long as they had any money at all they would buy it.”

During those brief periods of time during which sugar production surpassed our ability to consume it, the sugar industry and the purveyors of sugar-rich products have worked diligently to increase demand and at least until recently have succeeded.

The critical question which scientists debate, is what journalist and historian Charles C. Mann has eloquently put it, is whether sugar is actually an addictive substance or do people just act like it is. The question is not easy to answer. Certainly, people and populations have acted as though sugar is addictive, but science provides no definitive evidence.

Until recently, nutritionists studying sugar did so from the natural perspective as viewing sugar as a nutrient, a carbohydrate and nothing more. They occasionally argued about whether or not it might play a role in diabetes or heart disease, but not about whether it triggered a response in the brain or body that made us want to consume it in excess. That was not their area of interest.

The few neurologists and psychologists interested in probing the sweet tooth phenomenon or why we might need to ration our sugar consumption so as not to eat it to excess, did so typically from the perspective of how these sugars compared to other drugs of abuse, in which the mechanism of addiction is now relatively well understood.

Lately, this comparison has received more attention as the public health community has looked to ration our sugar consumption as a population and has thus considered the possibility that one way to regulate these sugars, as with cigarettes, is to establish that they are indeed addictive. These sugars are very likely unique in that they are both a nutrient and a psychoactive substance with some addictive characteristics.

Historians have often considered that the sugar-as-a-drug metaphor to be an apt one. “That sugars, particularly highly refined sucrose, produce peculiar physiological effects is well known,” wrote the late Sidney Mintz, whose 1985 book, Sweetness and Power, is one of two seminal English-language histories of sugar, on which other and more recent writers on this subject, myself included, heavily rely.

But these effects are neither as visible nor as long-lasting as those of alcohol or caffeinated beverages, “The first use of which can trigger rapid changes of respiration, heartbeat, skin color, and so on.” Mintz has argued that a primary reason that through the centuries sugar has escaped religious-based criticism for the kind pronounced on tea, coffee, rum, and even chocolate is that whatever conspicuous behavioral changes may occur when infants consume sugar, it did not cause the kind of “flushing, staggering, dizziness, euphoria, changes in the pitch of the voice, slurring of speech, visibly intensified physical activity or any of the other cues associated with the ingestion” of these other drugs.

As this book will argue, sugar appears to be a substance that causes pleasure with a price that is difficult to discern immediately and paid in full in the years or decades later. With no visible, directly noticeable consequence as Mintz says, questions of “long term nutritive or medical consequences went unasked and unanswered.” Most of us today will never know if we suffer even subtle withdrawal symptoms from sugar because we never go long enough without sugar to find out.

Mintz and other sugar historians consider the drug comparison to be so fitting in part because sugar is one of the handful of “drug foods,” to use Mintz’s term, that came out of the tropics, and on which European empires were built from the 16^th century onward, the others being tea, coffee, chocolate, rum and tobacco.

Its history is intimately linked to that of these other drugs. Rum is, of course, distilled from sugar cane, whereas tea, coffee and chocolate were not consumed with sweeteners in their regions of origin.

Actually, when the conquistadors discovered the Aztecs eating chocolate in Mexico, in their march and fully confident of their devastation of the people, the Aztecs were mixing it with chili peppers. The conquistadors tried it and said it “tasted awful and they wouldn’t feed it to their pigs.” So, they shipped it back to Europe anyway, and they started mixing it with sugar. Within about 50 years, hot chocolate had become the morning and afternoon drink for the Spanish aristocrats.

In the 17^th century, once sugar was added as a sweetener, and prices allowed it, the consumption of these substances in Europe exploded. Sugar was used to sweeten liquors and wine in Europe as early as the 14^th century. Even cannabis preparations in India and opium-based wines and syrups included sugar as a major ingredient.

Kola nuts, containing both caffeine and traces of a milder stimulant called theobromine, became a produce of universal consumption in the late 19^th century, first as a cocoa-infused wine in France, and then as the original mixture of cocaine and caffeine of Coca-Cola, with sugar added to mask the bitterness of the other two substances. [For more information about kola nuts, please click here and here.]

Stop 49:31 and to be continued