Biochemistry of Obesity - Politics of Sugar

The Politics of Sugar

Ancel Keyes…. In the right place at the right time with really bad data,

“One small Screw-up for Ancel. One big time foul up for Mankind.”

There is a lot to be said about the politics of why we are where we are today, Before I examine the established risks of things like “artifical sweetners”, I think it is important to kind of connect the dots back to the very honest, sincere, and well intentioned medical recommendations that were “standard practice” for most of my adult life.

Sugar’s rise to power was really an accidental by-product of three political winds, beginning with the Nixon administration:

• In 1972, Richard Nixon wanted to reduce food costs as part of his “war on poverty.” He partnered with the USDA to do whatever means necessary to bring food costs down.
• In 1975, HFCS was introduced, replacing sugar because it was cheap and readily available.
• In the mid 1970s, dietary fats were blamed for heart disease (more about this later), giving rise to the “low-fat craze.” Market response was an explosion of processed convenience foods, all nonfat and low fat, most of which tasted like sawdust unless sugar was added. Fructose was used to make fat-free products more palatable.

In 1982, the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Medical Association (AMA), and the United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA) reduced fats from 40 percent of your diet to 30 percent. You’ll eagerly complied, believing you were lowering your risks for both obesity and cardiovascular disease.

Yet, as the low-fat craze spread, so did rates of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity -- the very illnesses you thought you were preventing. Clearly, the plan wasn’t working.

Justification for Low-Fat Diet

But how did the war on fat start, in the first place?

It began with a study called the Seven Countries study by Ancel Keys, a Minnesota epidemiologist who used multivariate regression analysis to examine diet and disease. He compared the diets of seven countries, and his main conclusion was that saturated fats were responsible for cardiovascular disease. After much heated public debate, this notion that saturated fats caused heart disease was widely adopted, especially once Ancel made the cover of Time Magazine in 1980. ( Of course that was pre-internet and pre microsoft with all the cheap computing power that revolution brought us)

Keys’ study laid the foundation for nutrition science, education, and public policy for the next three decades.

There was only one problem. His conclusions were dead wrong.

Keys’ neglected to perform the converse analysis demonstrating that the effect of saturated fat on cardiovascular disease was independent of sucrose. In other words, sucrose and saturated fat were co-mingled into his data. In retrospect, it is impossible to tease out the relative contributions of sucrose versus saturated fat on cardiovascular disease in this study because the original data is long gone and Keys has passed on.

Additionally he never separated out the issue of how the fat was consumed. There is a major difference in raw and cooked animal fat, especially fat cooked at high temperatures, which clearly produces known carcinogens.

Nevertheless, lowering fat (without regard to sugar) became the nutritional model that persists to this day, despite copious evidence that it doesn’t work.

As your fats went from 40 percent to 30 percent, your carbohydrates went from 40 percent to 55 percent. And this carbohydrate increase was of the worst possible kind: SUGAR.

High Fructose Corn Syrup .. The Second Pearl Harbour!

HFCS was invented in 1966 in Japan and introduced to the American market in 1975. Food and beverage manufacturers began switching their sweeteners from sucrose (table sugar) to corn syrup when they discovered that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was far cheaper to make -- sucrose costs about three times as much as HFCS.

HFCS is about 20% sweeter than table sugar. HFCS is either 42% or 55% fructose, and sucrose is 50% fructose, so it's a wash in terms of sweetness.

Still, the switch from sugar to fructose drastically altered the average American diet. The statistics are beyond alarming:

· Corn syrup is now found in every type of processed, pre-packaged food you can think of. In fact, the use of HFCS in the U.S. diet increased by a whopping 10,673 percent between 1970 and 2005, according to a report by the USDA.

· The current annual consumption of sugar is 141 pounds per person, and 63 pounds of that is HFCS.

· Adolescents are taking in 73 grams per day of fructose, mostly from soft drinks and juice drinks -- and 12 percent of their total caloric intake is from fructose alone.

· In the past century, fructose consumption has increased 5-fold.

· Processed foods account for more than 90 percent of the money Americans spend on meals.

You’ve probably heard the statistic that one soda a day is worth 15 pounds of fat per year. However, one soda today does not equal one soda of yesteryear. The original coke bottle was 6.5 ounces. Now, you have 20-ounce bottles and a 44-ounce Big Gulp.

Tragically, many infant formulas are more than 50 percent sugar -- 43 percent being corn syrup solids. You might as well be giving your baby a bottle of Coke or Pepsi. Do you really want to blame “chubby baby syndrome” for the problem or do you want to read the ingredients in “enfamil”?

No wonder there is an obesity epidemic !

Hugh Cole

The Pretty Goodest Hypnotist on the Planet