The human face of sugar addiction

His big toe has been amputated due to gangrene and he has eye and major skin problems.
She is obese and barely mobile, with cataracts in both eyes. She has a stent, skin problems and spends four hours on a dialysis machine three days a week, just to stay alive.
At two years old, this child will scream and cry before having six rotten teeth extracted, showing raw nerves exposed in the jaw. The dental surgeon will learn how her parents had fed her soft drink like it was water.

According to statistics these people are just numbers

But when we look past the numbers we see the very human cost of sugar addiction.

In Nigel Latta’s documentary, ‘Is Sugar the New Fat?’^[1] these are just a tiny sample of the many millions of people that are living with (or in the aftermath of) sugar abuse.

How has it come to this?

In 1972 when British physiologist and nutritionist John Yudkin published his claim in his famous book ‘Pure, White and Deadly’, that sugar is a major cause of obesity and heart disease, he was ignored by the majority of the medical profession and rubbished by the food industry.

Yudkin’s exposé on sugar has been developed recently by American childhood obesity expert and endocrinologist, Dr Robert H. Lustig, who has spent the past sixteen years treating childhood obesity and studying the effects of sugar on the central nervous system and metabolism. Dr Lustig says the sweeter they make the drinks, the more people buy^[2].

Yet even with Yudkin’s and Lustig’s clear and early warnings, in 2014:

One in four adults in the UK was overweight^[3]
There is an epidemic of obese six month old babies and obese newborns around the globe ^[3]
25% of Australian children and 63% of the adult population was overweight ^[3]
Australia's obesity levels are now on par with the United States, but slightly less than New Zealand and have nearly doubled in 30 years^[4]
Obesity rates in Australia are climbing faster than anywhere else in the world, with five million obese people^[4]
Since 1980, worldwide obesity rates have doubled. In 2014, studies estimate there were 2.1 billion overweight and obese people on this earth^[5] – a staggering one third of the world’s population, which is predicted to increase. We are choking on ourselves, literally!
To put this in perspective, there are an estimated 805 million people suffering chronically from hunger. Whereas the first International Conference on Nutrition pledged to ensure freedom from hunger, at the second conference twenty-two years later, the pledge changed to eradicate hunger, reverse the rising trends in overweight and obesity and reduce the burdens of diet-related non-communicable diseases^[5]
Sugar consumption has tripled since World War ll
Eighty percent of the 600,000 manufactured food products in the US have added sugar, and sugar now has 56 names^[6]

What has led to the massive increase in sugar consumption?

In 1971, during President Nixon’s era, American farmers were told to "get big or get out of farming". Scientists had invented a process of making corn syrup, so the American farmers who had surplus land were instructed to grow corn – lots of it! The idea was to get cheap food into supermarkets by substituting sugar with this new sweetener. The farmers became rich from all their corn production and the industrial sweetener was now up and running. It was aptly called "Gold".

This sweetener is now used in processed foods everywhere – pizzas, toppings, bread and soft drinks like Coca-Cola and Pepsi that replaced sugar with the less expensive corn syrup.

Between 1982 and 1984, due to Coca-Cola’s marketing strategies, four billion cases of soft drink were sold.

Statistics in April 2015^[7], show Coca-Cola owns 3,500 different products and is responsible for over 50% of all soft drinks sold globally.

There are 1.8 billion bottles of Coca-Cola sold daily and nearly 10.5 Coca-Cola branded drinks consumed every second

Whilst during the 1970’s obesity was not a problem, this soon began to change, so in 1985 the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the USA began to map obesity rates in the population.

In 1994 studies done by Dr Jean-Marc Schwarz^[8], a biochemist, researcher and professor at Touro University, San Francisco, showed how sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup converts to fat in the body and where it is then stored. Scientists say that fructose suppresses leptin, our internal stop button, so we don’t stop eating when we should.

Does sugar cause obesity?

Scientists claim the problem with fructose is twofold:

First, there is no hormone to remove fructose from our bloodstream (unlike glucose, which stimulates insulin production). It is therefore left to the liver to remove it. When the liver is overwhelmed it converts fructose to liver fat, which increases our chances of developing insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes), hardened arteries and heart disease.

Secondly, fructose suppresses the hormone leptin, which tells you when you’re full. In other words, your brain lets you consume it without limit. A decade long worldwide study covering 175 countries found that for every 150 calories of sugar consumed each day – about the amount in a 355ml (12 ounce) can of soft drink – the proportion of people with diabetes rose by one per cent^[9].

The sugar industry rejects the claims that sugar causes obesity. Studies done in the 1970’s showed sugar was an issue, but careful lobbying by the food and sugar industry buried this scientific evidence. In a pivotal moment in history, the food industry made fat the scapegoat and, as a result, low-fat foods were born. BUT, the problem was flavour, as taking fat out of food made it less tasty. The solution? Add sugar. Any possible benefits of removing fat were now cancelled out by having more sugar in foods.

By 2000, the tide was turning. People were talking and food lobbyists became nervous and began defending sugar. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had released a report in 2003 showing that excess sugar threatens the nutritional quality of diets and it recommended sugar be limited to 10 percent of daily calorie intake.

This raised the ire of The Sugar Association Inc.^[10] which then wrote to the Director General of WHO, suggesting it would persuade the US Congress to deny $406 million in federal funding to WHO if the report on sugar was not pulled^[11].

It also, on behalf of itself and several major American food and business organisations, wrote to the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (a federal government department, whose goals are to protect the health of all Americans and to provide essential human services), asking for intervention in this matter. The threat and lobbying appear to have worked. When WHO issued its global health strategy on diet and health the following year (2004) there was no mention of the sugar study in its report.

This intervention by the sugar industry is having dire effects on us today. In 2009, Dr David Kessler, the US Federal Drug and Administration (FDA) commissioner between 1990-1997, predicted that the obesity crisis fuelled by sugar, will end up as ‘one of the most profound public health epidemics.’^[12]

Professor Nick Finer, from University College London's Institute of Cardiovascular Science, said in December 2015 that obesity was now "the most pressing health issue for the nation. Estimates of the economic costs of obesity suggest they will bankrupt the NHS.” (National Health Service)^[13]