Big Sugar pulls the sugar out of Toddler Milk

You won’t often find Big Sugar’s publicity department asleep at the wheel. So when it happens it’s worth wondering why. Over the last few months, some of the makers of toddler formula (the stuff for 1+ year olds) have been quietly tinkering with their high sugar concoctions. A few have always been sugar free, but now most of the rest have removed the sucrose and replaced it with either glucose or lactose.

Sucrose is common or garden variety, sugar. Its half glucose and half fructose. Lactose is the sugar found in milk. It is half galactose (which is metabolised to glucose) and half glucose. When Big Sugar replaces sugar with glucose or lactose they are really just eliminating the fructose.

Fructose is what makes sugar (and the food containing it) taste sweet. Some of these drinks used to contain more fructose than an equivalent serve of soft drink. So getting rid of it will have a material impact on the taste of the product. Fructose is also highly addictive, so deleting it isn’t going to help sales much either.

Call me a cynical old lawyer (gone on, you know you want to), but when Big Sugar starts dressing up as Santa Claus I start looking for gotcha’s. Why would an industry built on getting kids hooked on sweet drinks from the age of 12 months (it’s illegal to include sugar in formulations for babies) suddenly voluntarily decide to remove the substance that makes them both sweet and addictive?

Even more interestingly why wouldn’t they tell us they were doing us such an enormous favour? They’re not normally ones to hide their lights under bushels. And I can’t imagine that this could be viewed as anything other than a positive move by everyone (except perhaps the kids who have to drink the stuff). Whenever a company does something for the common good at the expense of its own bottom line, it’s normally (literally) on the six o’clock news. But not this time.

Maybe Big Sugar has been reading the recent studies that unequivocally link fructose consumption to obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease? And out of sheer concern for their customers they’ve decided to pull it out. Yeah, right. Those studies have been there for a while and Big Sugar haven’t shown any signs of altering any of their other products. In fact Nestle is doing exactly the opposite with its high fructose Fruit Fix concoction. So that can’t be it.

A more likely source for this wave of brotherly love may be Big Pharma. The baby formula and toddler milk market is pretty much the only place you’ll find Big Sugar and Big Pharma competing for shelf space in the local supermarket.

Drug companies actually commissioned some of the research which proves the damage being done by fructose. They were looking for treatments for diabetes and obesity, but in order to treat it they had to understand it thoroughly. Hence they paid for studies around human hormone interaction which lay the blame squarely at the door of fructose (and therefore sugar). Legal deniability is a bit tricky when you were actually signing the cheques and (presumably) reading the outcomes.

The other legal difficulty which might face a manufacturer is that these products are often definitely a child’s first exposure to fructose. If you (I’m assuming you aren’t a toddler) or I front up with a lawsuit claiming fructose made us fat and sick, we’ll have problems proving that any particular tentacle of Big Sugar sold us the sugar which did the damage. We will have been eating sugar from all manner of vendors for years. This is nowhere near as difficult where the individual is in nappies and has only ever consumed fructose in one or two products.

So the combination of actual knowledge of the research and a high probability of causation may have pushed some companies to quietly alter the formula before anyone wises up. And they probably don’t want to jump up and down about that just in case it gives any smart alec lawyers any ideas.

If they can do this for baby formula how about cutting the rest of us a break as well? How about ‘reformulating’ softdrinks by replacing sucrose with glucose? How about having a go at chocolate bars as well? Or breakfast cereals while they’re at it?

I don’t want to look a gift conglomerate in the mouth. They should be applauded for taking the sugar out of toddler formula. But it’s depressing to think the rest of us are expendable just because we’d have a harder time getting a case to stick. It’s time the rest of us demanded parity with toddlers and got a sugar free food supply as well.

Also published in Crikey.

Ad self-regulator says 72% sugar is a simple serve of fruit

The Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) has ruled on my complaint about Nestle’s Fruit Fix advertising. Apparently Nestle has done absolutely nothing wrong. It’s perfectly ok to advertise a product which is 72% sugar as being equivalent to one serve of fruit.

It’s also wrong to suggest that the product was targeting children under 14 years of age. No you see, it was their parents being targeted, so there was no need to consider the special provisions relating to advertising to children.

Even though the ASB acknowledged that children would be viewing the programs in which it appeared, they decided that the ‘advertisement is not directed to children’. And I suppose that’s right, looking at the ad again it probably is trying to target parents feeling guilty about their children’s nutrition rather than the children themselves. Though I’m sure the kids don’t mind the lolly in their lunch box.

The ASB spends much time in its decision (enter 284/09 in the case search box) pointing out that it is not applying a legal test in its determinations. They don’t want you to go mistaking them for an impartial regulator or court. Rather they are an industry funded self-regulator who sees their role as providing ‘guidance to advertisers’ on what the community considers acceptable.

For a non-legal analysis, the ASB have gotten very pernickety about the definition of fruit. I was suffering under the impression that I knew what fruit was. A strawberry was an example that leapt to mind when thinking about strawberry flavoured Fruit Fix’s, but as Nestle pointed out, they contain more grapes and apples than anything else. Even so, each of these whole fruits is at most 15.5% sugar. Process them, squish them and dry them out though, and you can get that up to the 75% range.

Advertisers of all manner of confectionary should be very pleased with the ruling indeed. According to the test which the ASB seems to be applying, a Mars Bar could be advertised as equivalent to three serves of fruit. The Mars Bar is only 56% sugar compared to 72% for the Fruit Fix, so maybe they could top it up a tad and chuck in a little more salt so it didn’t taste too sweet.

And I can’t wait to see a range of new advertisements from Big Sugar telling us that a 250ml bottle of soft drink is equivalent to two serves of fruit. They will of course have to make sure that the sugar molecules involved were once part of a piece of fruit rather than the dreaded sugar cane. Perhaps they could demand ID from the sugar molecules at the factory door. That should sort them out.

Now I’m sure the ASB (and Nestle for that matter) would say that I am unfairly shooting the messenger and they might just be right. They are simply applying the black letter of the wording of the Australian Dietary Guidelines. They clearly state (somewhere in the fine print) that one and a half tablespoons of sultanas are equivalent to a serve of fruit and so is half a cup (125 ml) of fruit juice. So while I can rant and rave about how much sugar is in those things, the people watching over our health have deemed those to be equivalent to fruit.

Pureed, Dried and Juiced (once was) fruit is no more fruit, than a bag of sugar is grass. It’s time the escape clause was removed from the guidelines. It’s time the game of ducks and drakes with sugar molecules was bought to an end. And its time advertisers were made to call a lolly a lolly.

Suggesting to time-poor parents that they were in some way doing their children a favour by giving them a lump of sticky sugar and calling it fruit is just plain appalling. Big Sugar knows it’s not true. Your kids’ dentist knows it’s not true (go on, ask her). And you (and your kids) shouldn’t swallow it, no matter how much the ASB is happy to believe that nothing untoward is going on.

Also published in Crikey

Nagging won't make us thin

Nicola Roxon thinks were too fat, smoke too much and drink too much. And all of this overindulgence is costing the country a motza. But don’t worry she’s got a solution. She’s going to nag us to death instead. This week she announced she’s creating the National Preventative Health Agency (NPHA).

This brand spanking new, taxpayer funded thingo will ''push, cajole and lead'' families, schools, workplaces, industries, clubs and community organisations to encourage healthier living.

You don’t have to exercise too much imagination to understand what that’s going to look like. Get ready to be told you need to exercise more, eat less fat, stop smoking and stop drinking. Nicola’s health taskforce has observed that the stuff we’ve been told to do for 30 years isn’t working, and their solution is, ah, to do more of it?

Its timely then, that just last week, the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne published the results of a study into exactly how effective that kind of nagging is. The research team asked 66 general practitioners to administer advice “targeting change in nutrition, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour.” The advice was in accordance with the national healthy living guidelines, exactly the same guidelines that Nicola plans to ‘cajole’ us with.

In the study, 258 obese Melbourne children were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. The children in the intervention group saw their GP four times over a 12 week period and received all the recommended advice about nutrition and exercise. The kids in the control group lived life as normal without any nagging from their doctor.

Twelve months later, the researchers checked in with the kids to see what difference it made. The result was that the counselling “did not improve BMI, physical activity, or nutrition in overweight or mildly obese 5-10 year olds.” The researchers went on to note that “and it would be very costly if universally implemented.”

Details are a bit light on at the moment, but I don’t think Nicola is planning to have our doctors nag us once a month. Even if she did, this study suggests the outcome would be exactly the same as doing nothing. And doing nothing sounds like it might be quite a bit cheaper.

Our standard health advice might be firing blanks but elsewhere in the world, similar studies with slightly different advice have achieved significantly more impressive outcomes. In the UK, 644 schoolchildren were divided into two groups. One group was told they would be healthier if they stopped drinking sugar (in the form of soft drinks) and the control group was not told that. The message was delivered in four one hour lessons (one per term) during a school year.

The group of kids who weren’t told about sugar got fatter. By the end of the school year, there were 7.5 percent more overweight and obese kids in that group than there were at the start. But in the other group there were slightly less (.2 percent) fat kids. No one was forcing the children to stop drinking sugar and they didn’t entirely stop. They just slightly reduced the amount they drank on average.

The UK study was done in 2001 and adds to the pile of over 80 studies which say that if we drink less sugar we lose weight. This kind of evidence seems to have escaped the mighty deductive powers of our health hierarchy. Because even in the face of unequivocal proof that the advice we give our children doesn’t work, we’re lining up for more of the same.

Nicola, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. It doesn’t matter how often you nag us about exercising more and eating less fat or how many Quango’s you create to do it. The advice is wrong and it won’t get more right by saying it more often. It’s time to start paying attention to what the science really says rather than what Big Sugar would like us to believe it says.

Also published in Crikey

Sugar causes dementia

Next year is a red letter year for our health and social security systems. 2010 is the year that the first of the baby boomers turn 65. Not only do they become eligible for old age pension, but they start down the slippery slope for one of the deadliest incurable diseases known to modern medicine. Dementia is a class of diseases characterised by loss of mental function. The most significant dementia is (by far) Alzheimers disease.

Even though it’s one of the oldest known diseases, we really don’t know much about dementia. We know that that you will likely be dead within 7 years of diagnosis. We know that 93 percent of cases are caused by something other than who we are related to. And we also know that the older we get the greater our chances of having it. According to a report released by Access Economics this week, we have a 1 in 4 chance of having the disease by the time we reach 85.

For a long time, researchers have known there is a strong relationship between diabetes and dementia. Estimates have varied, but you are approximately two to four times as likely to have dementia if you also have diabetes or a history of insulin resistance (the precursor to Type II Diabetes). Now a bunch of Swedish twins are starting to put some real meat on the bones of the diabetes link.

Almost 14,000 twins participated in a recently published study. The twins were part of the Swedish twin registry and were all over the age of 65. Because they had provided health data to the registry throughout their lives, the researchers had excellent information about their health over a very long period.

Twins are great for this kind of work because when one becomes ill but the other doesn’t, large tracts of potentially irrelevant causes are eliminated. Clearly the twins share the same gene pool and (usually) have been raised in an identical environment. When dementia sets in early, as it increasingly is (15,000 Australians under the age of 65 now have dementia according to the Access Economics Report), the number of possible causes is narrowed further.

The study proved beyond any doubt that diabetes is associated with dementia (at least in Swedish twins). Even more interestingly, they concluded that the longer you have had diabetes (or insulin resistance), the more likely you are to develop dementia. In a somewhat depressing footnote, the researchers suggest their estimate (that you are 125% more likely to become demented if you are diabetic) is probably a bit light on because so many diabetics die before they are old enough to notice they are losing their grip.

Research published a month after the twin study took the issue further and established a direct link between consuming sugar and 'impaired cognitive function'. 2,977 people suffering from Type II Diabetes, aged 55 years and older took part in that study. They were subjected to a battery of tests (part of a standardised set used for detecting early signs of dementia) designed to measure things such as how fast they performed calculations, how well they multi-tasked and the accuracy of their memory.

The researchers then compared the results of the tests to measures of each person's average blood glucose reading over time. They found that there was a significant correlation between a person's score on the tests and their blood sugar level. The higher the blood sugar level, the lower their score on all the tests. Just to put icing on the cake, the researchers noted that a one per cent rise in blood sugar takes you two whole years closer to dementia.

High blood sugar (and ultimately diabetes) is definitively caused by overconsumption of sugar. What this latest research tells us is that diabetes is not the end of the story (as if that weren’t enough). Lifelong sugar consumption is driving us mad – literally.

The Access Economics report was commissioned by Alzheimer’s Australia and paid for by Pfizer (a pretty big drug company). While it is a worthy document when it comes to telling us how bad the problem is getting and how very bad it is going to get (dementia will quadruple in the next 4 decades), the best it can come up with in the solution bucket is both predictable and insulting. We should all exercise more and keep taking hypertension drugs (hmm, I wonder who makes those?). You see people with dementia are often overweight and have hypertension, neither of which is particularly surprising once we understand the link to diabetes.

Where is the discussion of the abundant evidence on the relationship between sugar consumption and dementia? Where is the recommendation that perhaps we should throttle back public health statements suggesting it is ok to get 20% of our calories from sugar? Certainly not in the Access Economics report and certainly not in the simultaneously released National Preventive Health Taskforce Report.

In the US, public health signs are going up all over New York showing human fat being poured out of a soft drink bottle and suggesting it’s not such a good idea to drink sugar. And the American Heart Association is recommending people consume less than half the sugar suggested by Australian authorities.

But our best and brightest can only manage limp recommendations to limit alcohol advertising and tax cigarettes – oh, and keep taking our hypertension medication. It’s time we started demanding more from those in charge of our health dollars - while we can still remember who they are.

Also published in Crikey