The Secrets of Sugar - the fifth estate

it's sweet it's seductive it's deadly tonight the dangerous thing about

sugar

I think

sugar

is an important contributing factor new serious warnings from serious people the more I learn about this the more I'm also scared tonight what the sugar industry has tried to hide strategies that I thought the tobacco companies invented in the '50s, actually some of the ones people had made even before that, when the Breeden family goes shopping, like most Canadians, they try to buy healthy things, come on, but like Most Canadians don't always make it. We're busy, meals have to be quick and then there's keeping the kids happy, the other lucky terms or Mini Wheats chocolate, no, I'm one of the lucky ones, okay, lucky terms, okay, you want, you want one that looks like a half moon or you.

They want a lot of what they eat to be processed, they assume it's nutritious but they've never paid much attention to what's in the foods they buy, they have no idea how much sugar is hidden in them, okay guys so I want you to start for telling me a little bit about some of the foods you bought today and registered dietitian Jacqulyn Pritchard is about to help you figure it out. Have you ever taken a look at any of the nutrition labels or actually paid for the label on this NES? Quick cereal says there is 10g of sugar in 3/4 cup, but whoever eats only 3/4 cup, check the ingredients now, how many of those would go in your bowl to make your bowl of cereal for me?

I'd say probably eight eleven, that's a lot of cereal, and as Jonathan Breeden is about to find out there's a huge amount of added sugar, in his cereal serving of about eight of these servings, you're looking at about 20 tablespoons of added sugar. . of non-nutritional value, that's a lot, yes, so let's start at the beginning, what do we mean when we say sugar? Whether it's the white stuff you bake with or the brown stuff you sprinkle on your oats, whether it's molasses syrup and honey, maybe. the high fructose corn syrup you've heard about there's a lot of that in things like soft drinks chemically it's all pretty much the same and we consume a lot of it on average in this country 26 teaspoons of sugar per person per day i.e. 40 kilos a day. year the equivalent of 20 bags is what sweetens the products and increases the profits of some of the most powerful and well-known companies in the world the food industry is one of the largest manufacturers in North America almost a trillion dollars in sales each year and Couldn't make it sugar-free Sugar is one of the essential base ingredients used in and 99% of the processed foods out there.

Former industry executive Bruce Bradley has worked for some of the largest food companies in North America, it's something that can drive a lot of flavor in the world. products and great appeal to consumers, so it is one of the basic components and make no mistake, the amount of sugar in our foods is no coincidence, the food industry does everything it can to find out what makes us want a product, the exact combination. of ingredients is called the Bliss Point, you know, everyone asks what the Bliss Point is. Dr. Howard Moscovitz, he's a long-time food industry consultant known as Dr.

Bliss, the best way I can do this is to give you a Example: Do you drink coffee with sugar or with milk with milk so if you add more and more milk you like it more and more until a certain point where you like it more and then you add a little more milk and you say oh, it's too milky and Oh my God, and you add a lot more milk and it's horrible so it's Goldilocks it's the medium it's the best it's the level at which you like that product the most a Harvard-trained mathematician Moscow uses models to test people's reactions to different versions of a product once you have found the point Bliss of the product hits the shelves from soft drinks to spaghetti sauce its magic makes money everyone wants to sell a little more how do you get that immediate increase in acceptance? those in the know realize that you can add a little bit of sugar, the first thing you need to know is that 4g of sugar is a teaspoon, so with that in mind let's look at some products, it's no surprise that Coca-Cola have a lot of sugar. 40 G A can is 10 teaspoons, but much of the sugar we eat is hidden in foods that we don't necessarily think this oatmeal is sweet 3 and 3/4 cups of sugar an oil this vanilla-flavored yogurt almost 5 teaspoons in just half cup you can add fine sugar to the bread soup all kinds of condiments hot dogs this chicken dinner labeled as Healthy Choice has 5 and 1/2 teaspoons of sugar in each serving, this is the result, there is no doubt, since our consumption of sugars has increased, as have our bodies.

Canada doesn't keep good statistics, so we've used American ones and those statistics raise the troubling question: are we changing our evolutionary ways here's the line that shows our sugar consumption over the last 50 years here's the number of people who are overweight and obesity now look at this line it is for cases of type 2 diabetes and this heart disease back in the In the 80s and 90s we used to blame many of those problems on dietary fat, but then we started eliminating fat from our foods, The incidence of diseases decreased, no, so many doctors and nutritionists wondered why the answer according to an increasingly vocal group is sugar, which was a thousand times worse than sugar or fat than sugar.

Robert lustic Doctor Author, professor of medicine and one of the leaders of the anti-sugar campaign. The fact is that our food supply has been altered and adulterated under our very eyes and in plain sight for the last 30 years, in addition to treating obstetrics, these lustig children are a YouTube sensation. His lecture on sugar has been seen by almost 4 million people around the world and he doesn't mince words, fat is going down. sugar is rising and we are all getting sick you use words you use poison you use toxic MH I certainly use those words and I mean them.

This is not hyperactive, this is the real deal. Everyone thinks that the bad effects of sugar are because sugar has empty calories, what I'm saying is that no, there are actually many things that have empty calories that are not necessarily poisonous, poisonous, he says, because of what it does. excess sugar in our body, so let's take a look at that. Sugar is made up of two molecules, one called glucose here in blue, the other fructose in red, when they are separated in our intestine, glucose circulates throughout our body, feeding our muscles and our brain, but fructose goes directly to our liver and is in the liver. where All kinds of problems start when you metabolize too much fructose.

Your liver has no choice but to convert that energy into liver fat and that liver fat causes all subsequent metabolic diseases. We'll tell you more about those diseases in a moment, but first. let's talk about your brain too much fructose is lustig turns off the part of your brain that tells you when you are full, the brain doesn't register it when you are eating, so if you take a child and prepare him with a soda and then let him loose at the restaurant fast food if you eat less or eat more it turns out you eat more I think there is a long way to go before the literature is so organized Phyllis Tanaka speaks for the largest food companies in Canada, she does not believe in Dr.

Lustig's theories and he believes consumers shouldn't either. I think it's more important that we take a step back and look at how we look for ways to educate and help consumers fit sugar into a healthy dietary pattern. but the industry sure doesn't make it easy look at this breakfast bar, there's sugar near the top of the ingredients list but there are four more sweeteners, would you know they're all chemically the same? Then there's this tomato soup, who knew I would have made it? added sugars too, how is a consumer supposed to know that good old tomato soup has 3 and 1/2 teaspoons of sugar in a cup?

How did you find out based on the nutrition facts table? I discovered this because I have spent a lot. I recently learned what a gram of sugar is and how to read these labels. Do you think most people know how to do it? In recent years we have been involved with Health Canada in a campaign called the Nutrition Facts Education Campaign, largely as a commitment to help Canadians understand how to go to the supermarket and make informed decisions, but surely there is a way to warn people who might be interested in this that a cup of this soup provides 3 and 1/2 teaspoons of sugar for what purpose, well, if you have decided that as part of your healthy diet you want to eat less sugar, let me see, then you would use this same lab label, um uh, the only information on the label is 14 g of sugar in half a cup, do you know what that means?

You shouldn't have to be a dietician to know how much added sugar you're eating, but it helps. Jacn Pritchard has added up all the sugar Jonathan eats in a week. It's quite scary. so this is equivalent to 245 um teaspoons of sugar, that's a lot of sugar when we come back wet, all that excess sugar could lead to us getting 2g of sugar after we've figured out how much sugar that is. in their food, the Breeden family is on a purge, okay, artisanal Dusty Italian has a gram of sugar, in this one they are still shocked by the type of products that contain sugar, but they are also determined to eliminate it all.

Of course, they still have to eat, so to help them learn about life beyond processed foods, we've made them a deal for 3 weeks. We will provide all of your meals professionally made with no added sugar. They will follow the diet and submit. to medical tests lucky terms they are no longer so lucky they are only in their twenties but according to medical standards both Jonathan and Anna are technically obese 5 year old Ruby is borderline we begin our experiment by having her blood tested and analyzed by obesity specialist Dr. Dan Flanders, the family, he says, is headed for trouble by looking at these results.

I would say that, frankly, I'm very worried if they don't make significant changes to their lifestyle relatively soon. There is a chance that they are headed for a life of poor quality of life and premature death, like most of us, by getting fat and sick. Breeders could be forgiven for their nutritional ignorance, but the food industry has known and discussed the links between processed foods and disease for decades. It was Minneapolis in 1999. Obesity was just an emerging problem then, when the heads of America's largest food companies arrived for a rare meeting among them craft chiefs Nabisco Nestlé Coca-Cola and General Mills.

These are executives who normally bite each other to gain space in the grocery store. They don't meet very often, but in 1999 they met to talk about obesity. The Minneapolis meeting was described by journalist and author Michael Moss in his best-selling book and had been brought together by a cabal of experts within the industry who had become increasingly concerned about the industry's responsibility and culpability for being blamed for obesity. . They met on the 31st floor of the Pillsbury company headquarters. The message they received was uncompromising and was delivered by two of their own Michael Mud, a senior Craft executive. and Jim Hill, a prominent nutrition researcher, in a slide presentation obtained by The Fifth Estate, the two men told the bosses directly: A national epidemic, there were too many warnings, Mud told them before laying out a parallel design for make them feel uncomfortable, the tobacco companies had recently settled in. a massive lawsuit in the face of evidence that his product caused diseases, did the food industry he asked want to be next?

If anyone in the food industry ever doubted there was a slippery slope out there. I imagine you are beginning to experience a distinct sensation of slipping. Now the charts brought home the dot maps showing obesity rates rising and spreading across the country like a rash. What are the health implications of all this? Studies show that obese people have a higher risk of developing chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and cancer. The list of contributing factors was the ubiquity of inexpensive, good-tasting, large, energy-dense foods—in other words, the same foods that CEOs were in charge of selling.

The two men expected money to study the link between food and obesity, instead they received a reprimand. Starting with Steven Sanger, the CEO of General Mills, he was pretty furious with Mud for bringing this to them and blaming them for this and his defense was: Look, we already give consumers a choice if they want this.low fat or low sugar, we have those products. At the supermarket we feel that we are already responsible to consumers from a health perspective, but also to Wall Street, in other words, they didn't want to know, now it's one thing to silence problematic voices in your own companies, Michael Mud. eventually left the food industry out of frustration, but the people who profit from sugar have proven very adept at crushing dissenting voices everywhere, even in the halls of science, in front of us, day to day, in uh, every There are more and more very tempting foods, their name.

It was John Yudkin, a British nutritionist who wrote a book in 1972. The sugar industry didn't like pure, deadly white. It was the culmination of decades of research, according to his son Michael, that led Yudkin to what were then controversial conclusions that he began to wonder, uh, later. in the 1950s whether sugar could be the culprit for the increase in heart disease more significantly than fat, which was the prevailing opinion, significantly that fat certainly more significantly than fat, but that sugar was also implicated in a series of other undesirable conditions, particularly diabetes and obesity, that thesis soon put Yudkin in direct conflict with Big Sugar's biggest apologist.

This man, the American nutritionist Anel Keys, would later be exposed as having been financed by the industry, but not before he helped destroy the reputation of John Yudin and as early as the 1950s had begun producing publications suggesting that dietary fat It was a problem. Award-winning science writer and author Gary TOS Keys managed to stop Yudkin with this whiff of quackery and from then on anyone else for the next 20 30 years who did research on sugar was accused of being just like Yudkin there was a campaign systematic to discredit or ignore his work because of the actions of the sugar industry in the 70s virtually no research was funded for you this idea that if you study sugar you are like yudkin and he was a quack, but that is notable.

I mean, what you're saying is that scientific research into the link between sugar and disease has stopped. to Hal when we get back science is back what happens when you take healthy students and give them too much sugar is the first week of The Fifth Estate sugar challenge just looking at recipes that really help reduce sugar in your diet and the breeders are getting a cooking lesson Chef James Smith is teaching that real food, all the fruits, vegetables and grains of a healthy diet, can also be quick and delicious without added sugar, they use specific ingredients that will change and reduce sugar and reduce processing foods in your diet and that can be a good thing because after Decades of Silence there is new scientific research that links sugar to all kinds of chronic diseases.

Jonathan's blood tests suggest that he may be about to contract one. Dr. Dan Flanders, suggest his results. that you are prediabetic that your levels have been high and that if we don't make some changes soon in your lifestyle, diabetes is coming to North America today, it is estimated that more than 100 million people are diabetic or prediabetic. Dr. Robert Lustig is I'm pretty sure you know why, so I can categorically tell you that sugar is the immediate cause of diabetes worldwide and we have hard, fast data to prove that his data comes from his own study done for a decade comparing diabetes rates in 175 countries to people's diets and asking the question when adjusting for all the factors we know are relevant.

What about the food supply? Predicts diabetes rates around the world. We answer sugar and only sugar. The studies are generally considered a very weak level of evidence. Many other things. have happened at the same time Toronto researchers Dr. John Cen Piper argues that Lustig's methodology is seriously flawed. Methodologists would tell you that there are many potential biases and could give you an example during the same time that sugar has increased and so has bottled water. but there is no real biological plausibility to the link between bottled water and overweight and obesity, so it's not a finding, I don't think it's strong, but we have to be careful about putting too much biological plausibility and wanting to believe in patterns What this means is that it is difficult to know what causes the disease and, ethically, you cannot be induced to find out, but tests can be performed to detect markers that warn of signs that the disease may be about to come and that is what What they're doing here at the University of California at Davis in this lab, the students are the guinea pigs, the scientists are feeding them sugar to determine if it increases markers of heart disease.

That drink contained 25% of your daily calories as high-fructose corn syrup. Oh, look at this every time they run. the test says Dr. Kimber Stan I hope the results were the same we saw increases in visceral adiposity, which means it is the fat within the abdominal region, this is the fat that surrounds the liver, intestines and kidneys , this is the fat that is associated with an increased risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The breeders know that Anna and Jonathan have been diagnosed with fatty liver, which puts them at risk of having elevated levels of insulin and triglycerides, that is the fat. in our blood when Dr.

Stanh Hope tested the blood of his college guinea. pigs healthy children with healthy livers she was surprised by how quickly they saw the problems definitely in two weeks we see increases in cardiovascular disease risk factors in the blood only in two weeks in two weeks but those types of studies do not impress everyone later Looking at a number of studies, including Dr. Stan's, looking at sugar and heart disease, John Cen Piper sees no cause for alarm, and what we found when we looked at those trials very carefully is that as long as calories match , fructose doesn't behave any differently than any other form of carbohydrate, i.e. starches, refined starches and glucose, and that doesn't mean they're benign because I don't think we should consume a lot of refined starch or glucose, but it doesn't behave differently on both sides.

Stan Hope can't talk about the other studies, but he says he tested for all kinds of things and it was just fructose that caused the problems, if I got such strong results for a food additive, a new food additive, and then they started producing these results, they would say that that additive would be removed pretty quickly. That's how strong these results are. I think they are in the world of cancer research. Louis Kley is a rock star 5 years ago, the university professor was chosen to lead a scientific Dream Team. A group of the best cancer specialists in the United States came together to boost the search for a cure.

His findings may not be accepted by everyone, but in the cancer world, when Kley speaks, people listen, let me ask, do you believe that consuming sugar causes cancer? I think so, I think. Eating too much sugar can definitely increase the chance of cancer and also worsen the outcome for people who already have cancer. So how well let's check which sugar is made of one molecule of glucose and one fructose? We know that when there is too much fructose. in the liver it sets off a chain reaction the pancreas produces more insulin what kley now believes is that excess insulin changes cancerous tumors by telling them to gobble up glucose what we are now learning is that some of the cancers, particularly those cancers that correlate with obesity and diabetes often have an insulin receptor on the cancer cell, the tumor by expressing the insulin receptor tricks glucose into entering the tumor instead of the muscle and fat and, as a consequence, the tumor can use that glucose as fuel to grow, so if sugar can feed existing tumors and make them grow, can it also cause tumors to form?

First of all, the science on this is still not so clear, but Kle doesn't take any chances, it scares me, yeah, I think I definitely, for example, don't do it. you know, I will eat fruit, fruit has sugar, obviously, uh, but if I can avoid sugar in any drinks that I have or foods, I try to avoid processed foods because it's hard to find one that doesn't have sugar. Um, I certainly avoid sugar when I can. One of the criticisms of anti-sugar scientists is that much of their evidence comes from animals, not humans, who said here at Brown University in Rhode Island they are doing studies that they think should make a lot of humans get nervous, this rat is perfectly healthy, they put it in a tub of water and every time it finds its way to safety 5.2 now look at this guy, what he's been eating is the equivalent of a full North American diet with all the fats and sugars. we consume regularly he doesn't know where to go his brain has been damaged these rats were totally normal and then they became EOS and animals that don't remember their learning after even a day and um as the challenge becomes more and more difficult, they fail more and more as a human being with Alzheimer's disease 36.2 in this laboratory the belief now is that Alzheimer's disease is actually a diabetes of the brain related to insulin levels that can be affected by excess sugar Professor Suzanne deamonte insulin resistance which we now know can occur in any organ can occur in the muscles, that's diabetes, can occur in the liver, which causes fatty liver disease, can occur in the ovaries, polycystic ovary disease, and it can occur in the brain, and we think that's Alzheimer's, now it's important to remember that.

None of this research represents mainstream science. The case against sugar has not been proven. Associations on both sides of the border with Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes, including Health Canada and the FDA, all know about this research, and yet none of them warn about the links between sugar. and disease, but there's one important group sounding the alarm: The American Heart Association now recommends that people sharply reduce their consumption of added sugar. Women should consume no more than six teaspoons a day. Nine men, don't forget the total sugar intake in this country. per person is 26 teaspoons per day and yet the Canadian food industry is not impressed, that's all we've talked to people who are pretty convinced that there is a relationship between sugar and diabetes and heart disease, the cancer, dementia, what happens if those people Well, right now I'm comfortable saying the science just isn't there to support a role in chronic diseases when we get back, the government attacks if your kids drink a bottle of soda per day they eat. the equivalent of 50 pounds of sugar a year the equivalent of 50 pounds of sugar from just one soda a day and big sugar is fighting back everywhere you look someone is telling us what we can eat around the world there are few industries more powerful than the sugar industry processed foods or the sugar industry that feeds it, and yet, for all their power, we know very little about how they work.

Cousins ​​Kristen are determined to change that. As a Community Care dentist in Colorado, she had always been interested in sugar, but it wasn't until she unearthed a bunch of documents from a sugar company that she had gone bankrupt that gave her access to a very secret world. The first folder I pulled out opened to a memo on the blue letterhead of the Sugar Association and had the word confidential. under the letterhead and I just looked at it and oh my gosh, do you know what I found? What she found was a directive from the 1970s, a memo to industry executives about a recently published scientific technical report, a document that concluded that sugar was not only safe but important, it became clear after reading more than the The Sugar Association had funded this white paper called Sugar in Man's Diet and they were trying to make it look like it was an independent and dependent study among the 1500+ pages they discovered there.

There was also some Canadians an account of a sugar industry meeting in the 70s in Montreal at which Frank spoke about heart disease and the biggest threat to sugar consumption is in the field of nutrition, he says more particularly in view of the comments that have been made recently about the influence of sugar on atherosclerosis, so they were worried, they were worried since 1971, what does that tell you? They've known this for a long time, so I took this piece of paper and crossed out where it said tobacco and put sugar and saw if I could find tactics similar tothe ones the sugar industry was using today.

My cousin is conducting her research at the University of California, San Francisco, and she is doing so under the tutelage of someone to whom it all sounds familiar. The surprising thing I learned from her was the strategies that I thought the tobacco companies invented in the '50s, actually some that the sugar people had done even before, well, you know, now we have 83 million pages of documents from the industry that are on the Internet, we don't bother to look. Famous in litigation circles as the man who was the first to advertise secret tobacco and his documents proving that tobacco companies knew his product was dangerous.

In the new documents on sugar he sees many parallels to do better. A parallel is just trying to undermine science. Other. is working to try to attack and intimidate scientists and others who are getting results that these big corporate interests don't like. Another is trying to subvert a sensible regulation that the sugar industry has decades of practice in which in 2003 the World Health Commission An organization in Geneva was considering a resolution that recommended people reduce their sugar consumption to just 10% of what they eat. It had great appeal among health experts, but then the industry intervening in the sugar industry went to their friends in the US Congress and got these very influential congressmen to write a letter and say this is simply unacceptable and that in fact the US would, you know, fund the World Health Organization if this report continued 5 months later, the recommendation quietly disappeared after I had seen the movie before Stan.

One look says we can't let this happen again. We wouldn't have a smoking epidemic if there wasn't a tobacco industry. We wouldn't have an obesity epidemic if there wasn't an industry that made a lot of money. sell sugar, fat, salt and things like that, and for me the conclusion is that one of the key registries of non-communicable diseases is the large corporations and I think we are going to have to control these large corporations. It becomes a moral issue when you see how far we've come. Bruce Bradley, who used to help run several of those corporations, agrees that this is not a blip, it's not something minor, you know I just need to course correct. , we are on a completely wrong trajectory with our health, what is the answer?

So I think the honest answer is that we need the government to step in and be an advocate for consumers, but sugary drinks are a big problem. But look what happened when governments tried earlier this year to get New York City to pass a law banning super-sized sugary drinks. If your kids drink a bottle of soda a day, they'll eat the equivalent of 50 pounds of sugar a year, the equivalent of 50 pounds of sugar with just one soda a day: The industry's response to ridiculing Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a babysitter authoritarian the law was later overturned by the courts everywhere you turn someone tells us what we can't eat but advocates keep trying two weeks ago in Washington a congressman asked the government to help consumers by demanding better labels and at the same time at least recommend a daily limit on how much sugar is safe in Canada and the US, those limits exist for other ingredients like fat and sodium.

Manufacturers must say what percentage of the recommended daily limit their product contains, but along with Sugar, their Association that represents the large companies would not do anything. Food manufacturers in this country would accept an upper limit on how much sugar Canadians should consume. That's kind of hypothetical because people are putting it on the table saying this is a way to reduce the amount of sugar that people eat. It's a way to start doing that. I think the industry has really responded to the need for a diverse food supply in the retail market in our portfolio of over 650 beverages we now offer over 180 low calorie and no calorie options and most.

Nowadays, even Coca-Cola, the world's largest consumer of sugar, knows that it can no longer ignore the health debate. We would like people to unite on something that concerns us all: obesity. Coca-Cola and everything but the bottom line hasn't. changed if you're getting sick from what you eat it's your fault people blame the consumer, blame the victim in all of this, just like the tobacco companies blame 12 year olds who go out and get addicted, it's just not fair. because people are not given the information they need if they are trying to make a good decision, since with tobacco at some point it will come down to lives and dollars, the Reckoning warns that Dr.

Lustig is reaching the end, There will be no money left by 2026 for anything else, because diabetes will have consumed all the health care dollars. There will be no healthcare for 13 years here in the US if we do nothing, and I'm sure Canada will be behind for 3 weeks. The breeders have been eating the food we have provided. How much do you want Anna? They are still eating the type of food they like as much as they like it. The only difference is that none are processed and none have added sugar. Well, eat a little. Because it's not too hot, so has it made a difference?

The moment of truth in 3 weeks, Jonathan lost 1 and a half inches around her waist, 8 and a half pounds, right, yes, Anna's weight went down too and her waist was so dangerous. the fat that can be stored has been reduced by 5 in hell and what effect did all that have on her blood work? Dr. Flanders, nice to meet you, abolism, okay, Jonathan, I'm happy to say that there are some real signs that things are improving if we have a look at your cholesterol level, it's actually down 10%, which is fabulous. Your Ides Trigly are down 20%, so Anna, your results are equally good and although our 3we experiment is far from scientific proof of anything, Dr.

Flanders is happy to be able to improve your health, so this is Proof that the changes you've made to your diet are helping your body be happier and healthier. This is fantastic news, it's really great. When we started the project, I thought about change. It would be very little that I wouldn't see anything, but seeing how dramatically it has changed means to me it's really good, it was a big change at the beginning, it was helpful, but good results, I'm happy.