This is the transcript of a science based radio programme called Ockham's Razor, which aired here yesterday.
Robyn Williams: Do you know, I'm old enough to remember that shocking book called Pure, White and Deadly, written by Dr John Yudkin in the 1970s. I had him on The Science Show back in 1977, all about sugar and why it's very bad for you.
Now we have a successor. It's Sweet Poison, written here by David Gillespie, who's not a doctor but a lawyer, and loathes sugar as much as Yudkin did. Here's why.
David Gillespie: In 1865, much of what is today inner suburban Brisbane was home to vast sugar cane farms.
The farms were located there because Britain had a problem. They'd finally worked out how to make commercial quantities of refined sugar and then those pesky Americans had a civil war, stopping cane imports dead. But the demand for the white gold was insatiable and the edict went out to the empire: turn all arable land over to the production of sugar.
In the inner eastern suburbs of Brisbane, cane was planted as far as the eye could see and a floating refinery (somewhat aptly named The Walrus) plied the creeks turning out over 1,000 kilograms of sugar every day. But it was still expensive, and wasn't being eaten every day by anyone but Queen Victoria and her mates.
By 1910, sugar-based foods were starting to sneak into our diets. Cadbury had just started shipping its Dairy Maid Chocolate bar, the first-ever packaged chocolate product. In the US, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were still garage operations run out of sheds behind the pharmacies of their inventors, but were growing fast. But you still wouldn't be able to buy breakfast cereal in Australia for another 14 years. And the only place you'd be tasting fruit juice you hadn't squeezed yourself was in Church on Communion Sunday. In fact it would be 40 years before you could buy canned orange juice at all in Australia.
There weren't many overweight people. In fact four out of every five people you'd meet were downright skinny by today's standards. There was no such thing as heart disease and the medical specialty of cardiology wasn't even going to be necessary for another 25 years.
Obviously no-one was getting rich selling diets or gym-memberships. There wasn't even enough interest in diets to start a woman's magazine. The first copy of Women's Weekly wouldn't be rolling off the presses for another quarter of a century and it would be more than half a century before the first Weight Watchers meeting would happen.
Jump forward 50 years to the 1960s and things had changed a lot. Sugar was everywhere. Coke and Pepsi had grown into goliaths of the food industry. Fruit juice could be bought, refrigerated and drunk at every meal. Chocolate bars had become the lifeblood of the huge Cadbury Empire. Imitators like Nestle and Mars weren't far behind
The range of breakfast cereals had grown from the corn flakes offered in the 1920s, to thousands of high sugar concoctions. Breakfast cereal sales were doubling every nine years. That wasn't the only thing doubling. The number of overweight people in the population had doubled in just 50 years.
Heart disease was endemic, with two out of every three deaths being caused by it. A health disaster was clearly in progress, so cardiologists were trained at a rate never seen before for any profession. Medical schools were endowed with fortunes. Drug companies launched massive research programs with government money helping to grease the wheels.
To help understand why we had all suddenly gotten so fat, a new profession was invented: Human Nutrition. At the urging of the newly minted experts we all went on low-fat diets and took up the brand new sport of jogging. Never before in human history had it been necessary to run for a purpose other than catching food or getting away from danger. Sports clothing and fitness empires were created in the blink of an eye. Having shoes designed for running had never previously been necessary. And going somewhere to 'work-out' had only ever been necessary if you spent your days at Her Majesty's pleasure in a 3x3 cell.
Food manufacturers made low-fat everything. We were doing what the experts said to do, eating low-fat and exercising lots. We ate even more breakfast cereals and drank more juice and Coke because none of these things had the devil, fat, inside.
So how did that work out for us? Emergency over? Well, no, not really.
The doctors did their bit - they used all that extra money to figure out ways of replacing bits of clogged-up artery with bits from your legs. This meant that the death rate from heart disease has halved to only 1 in 3 deaths.
We did what the nutritionists told us. We started having Skinny Lattes. We stopped our children drinking milk at school because it was high in fat. We stopped having bacon and eggs for breakfast; we drank orange juice and we made sure our kids had plenty of juice to drink at school. We worked out at the gym. We got personal trainers and bought sport shoes. We pilloried McDonald's and made them introduce low-fat options and we created a whole new kind of fast food outlet, the low-fat sandwich bar.
Unfortunately, none of that worked. In fact quite the opposite. In the period from the 1960s to now, the percentage of overweight people has doubled again! Now the skinny guy is the odd man out in most rooms.
Type-2 diabetes is taking over as the new killer, and our health systems are collapsing under the weight of treating the complications of weight-related diseases that simply did not exist 40 years ago.
When these stark realities are presented to politicians, there is the usual hand-wringing and waggling of fingers at us, the slothful masses. Clearly we have not been listening to the expert advice. We need to eat less fat, and exercise more.
But the numbers tell a different story. Fat consumption has been steadily declining for 20 years. Health equipment, gym and weight loss have all gone from zero to multi-billion dollar industries in just 30 years. Forget about the internet boom, the boom in the 'health' industry has been sustained like nothing in our economic history. Twice as many people in Australia work as fitness instructors than did just 10 years ago. To mangle Winston Churchill, 'Never before have so many done so much for so little.'
Sugar purveyors like Cadbury, Coke, Pepsi, Mars and Nestle, that barely existed 99 years ago, now sit astride trillions of dollars in annual revenue. Breakfast cereal makers reap billions in profits and fully half of the US corn crop gets turned into sugar to put into soft drinks.
Is there an elephant in the room? Big Sugar (far stronger now than Big Tobacco ever was) assures us there isn't and diverts our attention with talk of everything in moderation. But the elephant is getting hard to hide. For decades there has been grumbling by researchers that couldn't prove that feeding rats fat made them fat, but could prove that feeding them sugar not only made them fat, but gave them heart disease, type-2 diabetes, fattty liver disease and testicular atrophy.
They were easily dismissed or distracted by Big Sugar and the nutritionists. Everyone knows that if you give a rat a big enough dose of anything you can make it sick, or dead. And no-one had been game to try it on humans ever since some researchers had almost killed a few of their trial participants in the early '80s.
But then someone just as powerful as Big Sugar started to look for a different answer. The drug companies that had gotten rich from cholesterol-lowering drugs started looking for a 'cure' to obesity and type-2 diabetes.
When you have to make a drug that works, it's not good enough to guess that fat causes fatness and it's not good enough to guess that exercise has anything to do with changing it. Biochemists started looking at what we actually did with our food rather than making 'educated' guesses as the nutritionists had been doing
As always, money can focus the attention of researchers, and a lot of progress was made during the '90s and noughties. Important new appetite-related hormones were discovered and what emerged from two decades of work was a scientific consensus as to how we digest food and how our appetite control system works.
They found:
We are designed for equilibrium. Like all other animals, we won't get fat unless something is broken about our appetite control system.
When we eat fat and protein a hormone is released by our gut that tells us to stop eating when we've had enough.
When we eat carbohydrates a different hormone is released by our pancreas that does the same thing.
That is true of most carbohydrates, but there is one that doesn't trip either appetite control switch: fructose. Fructose is one half of sugar. Everything that contains sugar, contains fructose.
Now that on its own wouldn't be such a big deal if we didn't eat much fructose. The worst case would be that we'd eat a few more calories than our brains thought we did.
Unfortunately, our livers are blindingly efficient at converting it to fat. Before you even finish the glass of apple juice, the fructose in the first mouthful will be circulating in your bloodstream as fat.
OK, so that's a little worrying, but still not a big deal if we don't eat much fructose.
In 1870 the average Australian's primary source of fructose was from the occasional bit of ripe fruit. And you could only get that fruit when it grew, there was no refrigerated aircraft flying bananas in from Brazil to give them to you in the middle of winter. All of that amounted to at most 1kilogram of fructose per person per year.
By the time two out of every three premature deaths were being caused by heart disease in the '60s, we'd ramped that up to 24kilograms of fructose per person per annum.
By the year 2000, we'd pushed that to 33 kilograms of fructose per person per annum, about a kilo every 10 days!
By then, almost 20% of the average person's daily calorie intake was coming from fructose. But it gets worse.
The researchers found that if you put that much fat in your arteries, you mess up the appetite control system for the foods that do trigger it.
Hormones like insulin, CCK and leptin which tell us when to stop eating, no longer work. If we're not told to stop, we keep eating and overproduction of hormones destroys our pancreas and gives us type-2 diabetes. So not only is fructose undetected and turned to fat, it actually increases the amount of other food we can eat. This is why our average daily calorie intake has increased by 30% in the last three decades.
Clearly we have an insatiable desire for sweetness, born of an evolutionary safety mechanism aimed at keeping us away from poisonous foods which were sour. Even better, if you are a fructose purveyor, it actually makes your customers want more food.
So how has something which now forms almost 20% of the average diet, crept into our food supply without anyone noticing?
The long and the short of it is the nutritionists guessed wrong when they said reduced fat and exercise was the solution. Governments didn't question the guesses and nobody invested serious money into finding out the real answer until there was an obvious buck to be turned.
Flying under the fat radar, fructose crept into every food we buy, often under the banner of making it healthier. We were told to eat more fruit and so we counted dried fruit and fruit juice as good things, and fed them to our kids.
We were told to drink less full fat milk, so we switched to zero fat alternatives, like Coke and apple juice.
We were told to avoid high fat spreads like peanut butter, so we switched to healthy honey and fruit conserves.
We were told to avoid high fat breakfasts like bacon and eggs, so we switched to healthy cereals which were a quarter to half sugar.
The miracle is not that we have all become overweight and sick. The miracle is that we are not all dead in the face of the incessant fructose doping.
So why don't we know this? The drug companies do, but they haven't the cure they were looking for, so there's not much point telling us how to solve the problem ourselves.
There's a saying in the IT industry from which I hail: 'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' - perhaps for the nutritionists and politicians, it's 'Nobody ever got fired for recommending a low fat high exercise diet'.
Every day that fructose remains a part of our diet, is a death sentence for thousands of Australians. So what should be done? What can be done?
The quickest and easiest solution would be to immediately ban added fructose as a food. Fructose is not necessary; it is just addictive and cheaper than the alternatives. For politicians with less intestinal fortitude, the next best option would be a regulation that requires the clear and unambiguous labelling of the fructose content of all foods. Then those of us who want to avoid it can vote with our wallets.
Robyn Williams: And it's interesting that Dr Norman Swan ran a similar fructose warning on The Health Report way back. But do keep exercising. David Gillespie is a lawyer and his book, Sweet Poison is published here by Penguin.
Next week, Professor Ian Webster, on good health care for the poor.
I'm Robyn Williams.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsraz...009/2621415.htm
It might be worth noting that HFCS is not used here (that I've ever seen). All of our soft drinks, for example (including Coca-Cola), are sweetened with cane sugar. Still ½ fructose, but not quite so bad as HFCS.
More about fructose
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