Big Sugar, big people

Big Sugar, big people

by digby

Mother Jones on the amazing PR victory by Big Sugar:
ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. As John "JW" Tatem Jr. and Jack O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they'd just pulled off.

Their winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers had come to see sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might exacerbate, if not cause, heart disease and diabetes. With an initial annual budget of nearly $800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of Dixie Crystals, Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the association recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to allay the public's fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold, and bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a "highly supportive" FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made it "unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in coming years."
And it hasn't been. In fact, it turned the American public into a bunch of sugar addicts with a whole bunch of associated illnesses:
Research on the suspected links between sugar and chronic disease largely ground to a halt by the late 1980s, and scientists came to view such pursuits as a career dead end. The industry's PR campaign corresponded roughly with a significant rise in Americans' consumption of "caloric sweeteners," including table sugar (sucrose) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This increase was accompanied, in turn, by a surge in the chronic diseases increasingly linked to sugar. Since 1970, obesity rates in the United States have more than doubled, while the incidence of diabetes has more than tripled.
Check it out:


I don't really want to enter the food wars, although I have become convinced about the dangers of too much sugar. However, this information about how an industry managed to dry up funding for the scientific community and radically change public opinion is a very useful illustration of what money and this strategy is capable of.

Now, it must be said that it's probably not terribly hard to convince people that what they already desire is perfectly healthy. But still, there was a time when it was a matter of common sense that over-doing sugar wasn't good for you. Today, it's barely on the radar. Indeed, most people don't think of this overconsumption of sugar as being unhealthy at all. It's more than just an amazing example of an industry pushing back on regulation. They went way beyond that and have managed to get it introduced into thousands of foods and in the process changed people's tastes so they crave ever more of it. It's a brilliant victory for the sugar and corn producers.  People, not so much.

*And I'm not advocating banning sugar, Sarah Palin. But science is science and when you look at those charts it's obvious that we need to do some serious research into whether that growth in certain diseases really is caused by this growth in sugar consumption. Maybe it isn't. But we need to know. In the meantime, people should at least be aware that they are basically eating the equivalent of glazed donuts even when they're not eating dessert.

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