Heart Association: Cut Back On Sugar—Way Back

Break out the marching bands. Yesterday the Heart Association recommended that adult men should eat no more than 9 teaspoons of sugar a day (6 teaspoons for women). If that still sounds like a lot to you, you’re not up with the times. The Food Investigators (SBS) recommend 32 teaspoons and even Food Standards Australia says it’s ok for a man to gulp down just over 21 teaspoons every day.

Unfortunately, it’s the American Heart Association that has issued the new guideline. Here in the land of Oz, nothing’s changed. The AHA says that it made the change because:

“High intake of added sugars is implicated in numerous poor health conditions, including obesity, high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease and stroke.”

The AHA has clearly sniffed the wind and decided that a (policy) stitch in time saves nine (lawsuits). There are just too many lawyers in the US who would be more than happy to have a crack at helping a court understand disparities between public health advice and research evidence.

One current example is a class action commenced in January this year against Coke in the US. The claim alleges fraudulent statements in the marketing of Coke’s new range of Glaceau Vitamin Waters. Coke’s advertising suggests that its drinks variously reduce the risk of chronic disease, reduce the risk of eye disease, promote healthy joints, and support optimal immune function. Whereas science suggests that the 8 teaspoons of sugar in each bottle do exactly the opposite.

Meanwhile back in the dark ages, we here in Australia base all our public health advice on something called the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults published in 2003 by the National Health and Medical Research Council. Both Nestle and the Australian Heart Foundation referred me to those guidelines when I questioned the endorsement of Fruit Fix as a healthy snack. And Diabetes Australia-NSW pointed me that way when I queried their involvement in the The Food Investigators show which told us we should eat those 32 teaspoons of sugar a day.

The Dietary Guidelines recommend that we get 15% to 20% of our calories from sugar. They base that recommendation on a 1994 meta-study which concluded that the only ill effects of sugar consumption were likely to be dental cavities. That study based its conclusions primarily on four studies done from 1972 to 1992. Oh and by the way, it was paid for by the American Beverage Association, an outfit not exactly known for its tolerance of anti-sugar messages.

Let me say that again, but slower. Australian recommendations on sugar consumption are based on a 15 year old report paid for by Big Sugar. And that report is in turn based on research which is thinking about applying for its old age pension. None of that would matter if just about every nutritionist in the nation didn’t base their advice on those antiquated guidelines. Or if Big Sugar didn’t use them as a perfect defense to their behaviour. Or if our own Heart Foundation and Diabetes organisations didn’t blindly accept them at face value.

The American Diabetes Association moved in 2006 and now the American Heart Association has gone the same way. Both now say sugar is bad news for their respective constituents. You clearly don’t have to hit the AHA or the ADA over the head with a lawyer. They understand that it’s better to make sure your policy guidance matches what the research says now (rather than what it said in 1972). But the equivalent organisations in Australia are quite happy to keep trotting out Big Sugar’s company line.

It’s time for those responsible for the health of Australians to wake up and smell the (independent) research. In Australia, actions for chronic disease are (so far) limited to tobacco and asbestos poisoning. But it won’t be long before sugar is added to the list. The people we trust for health advice need to move before any more of us are suckered into a life of debilitating disease based on advice which is over three decades old (and paid for by the sugar industry).

Note: Yesterday, I contacted the Australian Heart Foundation and asked if they had any comment on the American Heart Association announcement. They responded with the sound of silence.

Also published in Crikey

Fat chance of diet regulation, but we'll weight and see

There are many good reasons not to be a lawyer. The conversation stopping, effect at parties. The requirement to undergo body cavity searches are every airport where you fill in a customs declaration. And the most pressing of all, the constant need to be up to date.

If you give advice which is based on out-dated information, there is no shortage of your colleagues happy to assist your former client in lodging his claim for damages. They will happily point out that of course you should have been aware of the High Court’s ruling in Muffy v The Crown handed down last Tuesday. And Courts will have little difficulty agreeing that you have been sadly remiss in your continuing education requirement, and strike you from the rolls.

We expect lawyers to be up to the minute because if they stuff things up, the consequences can be very dramatic indeed. Ok, bad advice won’t kill you but it might as well after they’ve carted off you last possession in the back of the repo truck. We have similar expectations of doctors, nurses and even paramedics for very similar reasons (except, when they stuff up it very well may kill you).

But for some reason when it comes to dietary advice all the standards of professional conduct appear to go out the window. Until now, that is. The word on the street today is that one of Kevin’s multitude of taskforce commission thingys wants to regulate the weightloss industry.

According to the Telegraph, the Preventative Health Taskforce wants a ‘wide-ranging review of diet products and a common code of practice drawn up covering the cost, the training of counsellors and the promotion of the diets’. The idea being that if they can’t prove the diet works (after say, two years), then it will not be approved for sale or the promoter’s license will be withdrawn or something like that (the details are a bit vague).

If this were to actually happen then it would be a giant step forward, but I’m not holding my breath. The little evidence there is on the effectiveness of diets (which hasn’t been paid for by the promoters) is damning.

One recent example is a study out of the University of Missouri. The researchers looked at two popular weightloss options and directly compared them over a 12 week period. What makes the study unique is that they didn't just focus on the amount of weight lost. They dug a little deeper to determine exactly what kind of weight was lost. Was it muscle mass or fat? The news was not good for either option.

Fifty Eight overweight, sedentary (less than 60 minutes exercise per week) women were randomly assigned to either a group completing a Weight Watchers program (the largest and oldest diet program in the world) or enrolled in Golds Gym's weightloss program.

The average participant was 32 years old, had a BMI of 30 (just on the border of obese) and a body fat percentage of 40% at the start of the 12 week program.

The average gym member lost about one kilogram after 12 weeks and the average weight watcher lost four kilos (about 5% of their body weight). More importantly, neither group reduced their percentage of body fat. Whatever they lost it wasn't fat (which means it was either muscle or water).

Neither group improved their cholesterol or triacylglyceride profile. If they were heart attack or diabetes candidates before they started they still were when they finished. So after 12 weeks of sweating at the gym or attending weight watchers meetings and eating special (and expensive) meals, the end result was exactly ... nothing. Oh, except the weight watchers lost some of their muscle mass.

I can’t see the diet industry just standing there and taking the imposition of a regulator and professional standards without a fight. There is a whole lot of lobbying between a story in the Tele and actual legislation. But it’s a fight we need to have. Sure, bad advice from a doctor might kill you a lot quicker than bad advice from a nutritionist, but that doesn’t make the advice any less dangerous, the profession any less in need of regulation, or the ‘professional’ any less legally (and morally) liable for their actions. Bring it on, and the sooner the better.

Also published in Crikey.

NZ Sugar spins up a story on sugar

Apparently sugar doesn’t make you fat. It doesn’t give you tooth decay. And it also doesn’t make children hyperactive.

Now, stop giggling. There’s really true research to ‘prove’ all of this and you can get your own free copy of it from the Sugar Research Advisory Service (SRAS). I know this because Donnell Alexander was good enough to write in to the Waikato Times last week (Letters, August 5) and spill the beans. And Donnell ought to know. After all, she describes herself as being from the ‘secretariat’ of the SRAS and she’s a ‘NZ Registered Dietician’ to boot.

The SRAS ‘aims to encourage appropriate use and enjoyment of sugar as part of a healthy and balanced diet’. It does this by highlighting research that shows that far from being bad for you, sugar is really quite a good thing to have in the diet. The SRAS is wholly funded by the New Zealand Sugar Company, but I’m sure that doesn’t influence them in any way whatsoever.

Donnell must have only just scored her job with the SRAS because try as I might, I couldn’t find her profile on their website. I did however find quite a fulsome profile of her at Network PR, a public relations firm that helps ‘clients to convey complex information in ways that will help change attitudes and effect behaviour change around serious health problems such as obesity, diabetes and osteoporosis’.

Network PR describes Donnell as a ‘key member’ of the ‘food group’. And it seems Donnell is ‘expert at interpreting complex information for use with different audiences’. They go on to froth, ‘she recently assisted organisations such as New Zealand Sugar and Coca Cola Oceania prepare submissions to the Parliamentary Select Committee into Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes’. There are no prizes for guessing what those submissions said.

Let’s just put aside the possibility (remote, I know) that Donnell was trying to influence attitudes and change behaviour on behalf of an entity that makes a living from selling sugar. I sure she was just trying share genuine ground-breaking research that dispels all those awful myths about sugar.

It seems the core study is a summary of a workshop which took place in 2002. The workshop came up with the astounding recommendation that up to 25% of your diet could be sugar. The only reason they stopped at 25% was that they concluded if you ate any more than that you wouldn’t have room for stuff in your diet that you actually need to stay alive.

The workshop was sponsored by the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), ‘ a nonprofit, worldwide foundation that seeks to improve the well-being of the general public through the advancement of science.’ ISLI gets its money from folks such as The American Beverage Association, Cadbury, Nestle ... well, you get the picture. But once again, I’m sure the financial interests had absolutely nothing to do with the ‘scientific’ outcome.

Strangely though, when you look at research that hasn’t been paid for by Big Sugar, you get entirely different results. I don’t want my research paid for by Big Sugar and then ‘communicated’ by people, expert at ‘changing behaviour and attitudes’. The (independent) science is done, the evidence is in and it’s unequivocal. Sugar consumption is the most significant factor in the accelerating incidence of heart disease, diabetes, obesity and a raft of associated illnesses. In that context it’s outrageous for the New Zealand Sugar Company to be propagating dangerous nonsense about sugar being good for you.

Forget me not

If you've been eating a bit too much sugar lately you might have forgotten to keep up with your reading on the dangers of fructose. So to help you out, here's an interesting tidbit.

Researchers at Georgia State University have shown that a high fructose diet impairs spatial memory. Amy Ross chucked a bunch of rats in a pool that had a tricky exit. To get out the rats had to swim to a submerged platform (like those ones in toddler swimming classes).

The rats were smart enough to learn that's what they had to do to get out. But when Amy chucked them in again two days later only the rats on the control diet remembered that there should be a platform. The rats on the high fructose diet didn't seem to remember the trick.

The researchers think that the reason for the difference is the way that fructose interferes with insulin singalling in the brain. Insulin appears to play a significant role in the brain's ability to learn from new experiences. And because the fructose fills your blood with fat and that fat blunts the effect of insulin, memory is affected.

There's a lot of question marks with this research. The diet was 60% fructose and nobody (with the possible exception of someone on weight-loss shakes) consumes that much fructose. That being said, its only 6 times the amount the Food Investigators recommend you eat.

Rats are usually fed higher doses of the substance being studied so as to replicate the effects of a lifetime of consumption for a human, so 60% is not that bizarre. Its worth noting that in the past researchers have been criticised for feeding rats 600 times the dose of artificial sweeteners and this is not even in the same ballpark as that.

We also don't know what the control diet (for the rats with good memories) was or how many times the tests were conducted. But with all those caveats on board, its an interesting addition to the work on the ill effects of fructose.