The Secrets of Sugar - the fifth estate

[Music] it's sweet it's seductive is it deadly tonight the danger of sugar I think that sugar is a main contributing factor serious new warnings from serious people the more I learn about it the more it scares me also tonight what the sugar industry has tried to hide strategies that I thought the tobacco companies made up back in the ' 50s actually some of those the people had done even before [Music] that when the Breeden family goes shopping like most Canadians they try to buy healthy let's go but like most Canadians they don't always succeed they're

busy meals have to be quick and then there's keeping the kids Happy lucky CHS or the Mini weats Chocolate no I'm one of the lucky ones okay lucky terms okay you want you want one that looks like half a moon or you want a lot of what they eat is processed they assume it's nutritious but they' never paid much attention to what's in the food they buy have no idea how much sugar is hidden in all right guys so I I want you to just kind of start by telling me a little bit about some

of the groceries that you got today and um registered dietician Jaclyn Pritchard is about to help them figure it out have you guys ever taken a look at any of the nutrition labels or or really paid the label on this NES quick cereal says there are 10 g of sugar in 3/4 of a cup but whoever eats just 3/4 of a cup just check the ingredients now how many of those would go into your bowl to make up your bowl of cereal for me um I'd say probably like eight 11 that's a lot of cereal

and as Jonathan Breeden is about to find out an awful lot of added sugar so in your serving of cereal of about eight of these servings you're looking at about 20 tpoon of sugar added of of non-nutritional value that's a lot yeah so let's start at the beginning what do we mean when we say sugar well whether it's the white stuff that you bake with or the brown stuff that you sprinkle on your oatmeal whether it's honey molasses syrup maybe the high fructose corn syrup you've heard of there's a lot of that in things like

pop chemically it's all pretty much the same thing and we do consume a lot on average in this country 26 teaspoons of sugar per person per day that's 40 kilos a year the equivalent of 20 [Music] bags it's it's what sweetens the products and spikes the profits of some of the most powerful and familiar companies in the world the food industry is one of the biggest manufacturers in North America nearly a trillion dollars in sales every year and it couldn't do it without sugar sugar is one of the essential basic ingredients used and 99% of

the processed foods out there former industry executive Bruce Bradley has worked for some of North America's biggest food companies it's something that can drive a lot of taste in the products and a lot of appeal for consumers so it's it's one of the basic building blocks and make no mistake the amount of sugar in our food is no accident the food industry goes to Great Lengths to figure out what makes us crave a product the exact combination of ingredients it calls the Bliss point you know everybody asks what is the Bliss Point Dr Howard moscovitz

he's a longtime food industry consultant known as Dr Bliss the best way I can do it is to give you an example do you drink coffee with sugar or with milk with milk so if you add more and more milk you like it more and more up to a certain point where you like it the most and then add a little bit more milk and you say oh it's too milky and my gosh and add a lot more milk and it's horrid so it's Goldilocks it's the middle it's the best one it's the level where

you like that product the most a Harvard trained mathematician moscovitz uses models to test people's reactions to different versions of a product once he's found the Bliss point the product hits the shelves from soda pop to spaghetti sauce his magic makes money everybody wants to sell just a bit more how do you get that immediate increase in acceptance those in the know realize you can add a little sugar a little the first thing to know is that 4 g of sugar is one teaspoon so with that in mind let's look at some products it's no

surprise Coca-Cola has a lot of sugar 40 G A can that's 10 teaspoons but much of the sugar we eat is hidden in Foods we don't necessarily think of as sweet this oatmeal 3 and 3/4 taspo of sugar a b this vanilla flavored yogurt nearly 5 teaspoons in just half a cup you can find sugar added to Bread soup all kinds of condiments hot dogs this chicken dinner labeled Healthy Choice has 5 and 1/2 teaspoons of sugar in every serving is this the result there's no question as our consumption of sugars has grown so have

our bodies Canada doesn't keep good statistics so we've used American ones and those stats rais the troubling question are we changing our evolutionary shape here's the line showing our sugar consumption for the last 50 years here's the number of people who've become overweight and obese now now look at this line it's for cases of type 2 diabetes and this one diseases of the heart back in the ' 80s and '90s we used to blame a lot of those problems on dietary fat but then we started taking fat out of our Foods did the incidence of

disease go down no so that got a lot of doctors and nutritionists asking why the answer according to an increasingly vocal group is sugar which was worse the sugar or the fat the sugar a thousand times over Robert lustic Doctor Author medical professor and one of the leaders of the anti-sugar campaign the fact is our food supply has been altered and adulterated under our very noses and in plain sight over the past 30 years in addition to treating obese kids lustig is a YouTube sensation his lecture on sugar has been seen by nearly 4 million

people around the world and he doesn't pull his punches the Fat's going down the sugar is going up and we're all getting sick you use words you use poison you use toxic MH certainly I use those words and I mean them I'm this is not hyperboy this is the real deal everyone thinks that the bad effects of sugar are because sugar has empty calories what I'm saying is no actually there are lots of things that do have empty calories that are not necessarily poisonous poisonous he says because of what too much sugar does in our

body so let's take a look at that sugar is made up of two molecules one called glucose here in blue the other fructose in red when they separate in our gut the glucose circulates throughout our body feeding our muscle mus in our brain but the fructose goes right to our liver and it's in the liver where all kinds of problems begin when you metabolize fructose in excess your liver has no choice but to turn that energy into liver fat and that liver fat then causes all of the downstream metabolic diseases we'll tell you more about

those diseases in a moment but first let's talk about your brain too much fructose is lustig shuts down the part of your brain that tells you when you're full it doesn't get registered by the brain as you're having eaten so if you take a kid and prep them with a soft drink and then let him loose at the fast food restaurant does he eat less or does he eat more turns out he eats more I think there's a long way to go before um the literature is sort of out Phyllis Tanaka speaks for the biggest

food companies in Canada she doesn't buy Dr lustig's theories and doesn't think consumers should either I think it's more important that we step back and look at how do we uh look for ways to educate and help consumers fit sugar into a healthy dietary pattern but the industry sure doesn't make it easy look at this breakfast bar there's sugar near the top of the ingredient list but there's four more sweeteners would you know that chemically they're all the same then there's this tomato soup who knew it would have added sugars [Music] too how is a

consumer supposed to know that healthy old tomato soup has 3 and 1/2 teaspoons of sugar in a cup well how did you figure it out by the nutrition PX table I figured that out because I've spent a lot of time recently learning about what a gram of sugar is and how to read these labels do you think most people know how to do that in the last couple of years we engaged with health Canada on a a campaign called the nutrition facts education campaign in large part as a commitment to help Canadians understand how to

go into the grocery store and make informed choices but surely there is a way to to warn people who might be interested in this that a cup of this of this soup brings you 3 and 1 12 teaspoons of sugar to what end though well if if they have decided that as part of their healthy diet they want to eat less sugar well let me see then they would use this same um uh label the only information on the label is 14 g of sugar in half a cup do you know what that [Music] means

you shouldn't have to be a dietitian to figure out how much added sugar you're eating but it helps Jaclyn Pritchard has added up all the sugar Jonathan eats in a week it's pretty scary this is your week's worth of sugar intake then so this is equal to 245 um teaspoons of sugar that's a lot of sugar when we come back wet all that excess sugar might be leading [Music] [Music] to got 2 g of sugar for that having discovered just how much sugar is in their food the Breeden family is on on a purge okay

the craft Dusty Italian has the 1 g of sugar in this one they're still surprised at the kinds of products that contain sugar but they're also determined all of it out it goes of course they still have to eat so to help them learn about life beyond processed foods we've made them a deal for 3 weeks we'll provide all of their meals professionally made without any added sugar they'll stick to the diet and submit to medical tests lucky CHMS ain't so lucky anymore they're only in their mid-20s but according to Medical standards both Jonathan and

Anna are technically obese 5-year-old Ruby is hovering on the edge we started our experiment by having their blood tested and analyzed by obesity specialist Dr Dan Flanders the family he says is heading for trouble looking at these results I would say that I'm very concerned quite frankly if they don't make meaningful change to their lifestyle relatively soon um there's a higher chance that they're heading for a life of lousy quality of life and early death like most of us getting fatter and sicker the breedens might be forgiven their nutritional ignorance but the food industry has

known and discussed links between processed food and disease for [Music] decades it was miniapolis 1999 obesity was only an emerging problem back then when the heads of America's biggest food companies arrived for a rare meeting among them the heads of craft Nabisco Nestle Coca-Cola and General [Music] Mills these are Executives who normally are biting each other for space on the grocery store they don't get together very often but in 99 they got together to talk about obesity reporter and author Michael Moss he described the Minneapolis meeting in his best-selling book and they had been pulled

together by a cabal of insiders within the industry who had increasingly become concerned about um both the industry's responsibility for and and culpability for being blamed for obesity they gathered at the Pillsbury company headquarters 31st floor the message they got was uncompromising and it was delivered by two of their own Michael mud a top executive at craft and Jim Hill a leading nutrition researcher in a slide presentation obtained by The Fifth Estate the two men gave it to the bosses straight a national epidemic there were too many warnings mud told them before drawing a parallel

designed to make them uncomfortable tobacco companies had recently settled a massive lawsuit in face of evidence their product cause disease did the food industry he asked want to be next if anyone in the food industry ever doubted there was a slippery slope out there I imagine they're beginning to experience a distinct sliding sensation right about now Graphics drove home the point maps showing obesity rates rising and spreading across the country like a rash what are the health implications of all this studies show that obese individuals are at a higher risk of developing chronic diseases such

as diabetes heart disease hypertension and cancer topping the list of contributing factors the ubiquity of inexpensive good tasting supersized energy-dense Foods in other words the very Foods the CEOs were in charge of selling the two men were hoping for money to study the link between food and obesity instead they got a tongue lashing starting with Steven Sanger the head of General Mills he was rather furious at Mud for bringing this to them and blaming them for this and his defense was look we already offer consumers a choice if they want lowfat this or low sugar

that we have those products on in the grocery store we feel we're already being responsible both to Consumers from a health perspective um but also to Wall Street in other words they didn't want to know now it's one thing to silence Troublesome voices in their own companies Michael mud eventually left the food industry out of frustration but the people who profit from sugar have proven themselves very Adept at crushing dissenting voices everywhere including in the halls of Science in front of us day by day our in uh increasingly more and more very tempting Foods his

name was John yudkin a British nutritionist who in 1972 wrote a book The Sugar industry did not like pure white and deadly was a culmination of Decades of research according to his son Michael that led yudkin to what were then controversial conclusions he started to wonder uh late in the 1950s whether sugar might be a culprit in the increase in heart disease more significant than fat which was the prevailing opin significant than fat certainly more significant than fat but that sugar was also involved in a number of other undesirable conditions particularly diabetes and obesity that

thesis soon put yudkin in direct conflict with big Sugar's biggest apologist this man American nutritionist anel keys keys would later be exposed as having been funded by the industry but not before he helped destroy John yudin's reputation and as early as the 1950s he had started producing Publications suggesting that dietary fat was a problem award-winning science writer and author Gary TOS Keys successfully managed to entain yudkin with this smell of quackery and from then on in anyone else for the next 20 30 years who did research on sugar was accused of being just like yudkin

there was a systematic campaign to discredit or ignore his work because of the actions of the sugar industry in the 70s virtually no research was funded you this idea that if you study sugar you're just like yudkin and he was a quack but that's remarkable I mean what you're saying scientific investigation into the link between sugar and and disease ground to a halt it ground to a Hal when we return the science is back what happens when you take healthy students and feed them too much [Music] [Music] sugar it's week one of The Fifth Estate

sugar challenge just looking at recipes that actually help reduce the sugar in your diet and the breedens are getting a cooking lesson Chef James Smith is teaching that real food all the fruits and vegetables and Grains of a healthy diet can also be fast and delicious without any added sugar at all they use specific ingredients uh that will change up and lower the sugar and lower the process foods in your in your diet and that may prove a good thing because after Decades of Silence there's new scientific research linking sugar to all kinds of chronic

disease Jonathan's blood work suggests he may be on the verge of getting one Dr Dan Flanders his results suggests that he's pre-diabetic that his levels have been high and that if we don't make some changes to his lifestyle soon uh diabetes is coming today in North America it's estimated more than a 100 million people are diabetic or pre-diabetic Dr Robert lustig is quite sure he knows why so I can actually categorically say to you that sugar is the proximate cause of diabetes worldwide and we have hard and fast data to show that his data come

from his own study done over a decade comparing diabetes rates in 175 countries with people's diets and we ask the question when you adjust for all of the factors that we know are relevant what about the food supply predicts diabetes rates worldwide answer sugar and only sugar these studies are generally considered a very weak level of evidence a lot of other things have happened at the same time Toronto researcher Dr John cepen Piper he argues lustig's methodology is seriously flawed methodologists would tell you uh there's a lot of potential bias and I could give you

one example over the same time as sugar has gone up so has bottled water but there's no real biological plausibility in the link between bottled water and overweight and obesity so it's not a I don't think a sound uh finding but we have to be careful in putting too much of the biological plausibility and wanting to believe patterns that we see his point is it's hard to know what causes disease and ethically you can't induce it to find out but you can test for markers warning signs that disease may be coming and that's what they're

doing here at the University of California at [Music] Davis in this lab students are the guinea pigs the scientists are feeding them sugar to figure out if it raises the markers for heart heart disease that drink contained 25% of her daily calories as high fructose corn syrup look at this every time they've run the test says Dr Kimber stanh hope the results have been the same we saw increases in visceral adiposity that means that's the fat within the abdominal region this is is the fat surrounding the liver and the intestines and the kidney this is

the fat that is associated with increase risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease the breedens know that fat Anna and Jonathan have already been diagnosed as having fatty livers which puts them at risk for raised insulin and triglyceride levels that's the fat in our blood when Dr stanh hope tested the blood of her College guinea pigs healthy kids with healthy livers she was shocked by how quickly they saw problems we definitely in 2 weeks see increases in the risk factors for cardiovascular disease in the blood just in two weeks in two weeks but those kinds of

studies don't impress everyone after surveying a number of studies including Dr Stan hopes that look at sugar and heart disease John Cen Piper sees no reason for alarm and what we find when we we look at those trials very carefully is that as long as you match for calories fructose does not behave differently than does any other form of carbohydrate namely starches refined starches and glucose now that's not to say that they're benign because I don't think we should be having a lot of refined starch or glucose but it's not behaving any differently sides Stan

hope can't speak to the other studies but she says she tested for all kinds of things and it was only the fructose that caused the the problems if I had results as strong with regard to a food additive a brand new food additive and then I started producing these results they would that additive would get pulled pretty quickly That's How Strong these results are I think they are in the world of cancer research leis kley is a rock star 5 years ago the Cornell University Professor was chosen to head a scientific Dream Team a group

of America's top Cancer Specialists brought together to supercharge the search for a cure his findings may not be embraced by everyone but in the cancer world when cly talks people listen let me ask then do you believe that Sugar consumption causes cancer I think yes I think that uh eating too much sugar can definitely increase the probability of cancer and also make the outcome of people who already have cancer uh out worse so how well let's review what sugar's made of one molecule glucose and one fructose we know that when there's too much fructose in

the liver it sets off a chain reaction the pancreas produces more insulin what klyy now believes is that excess insulin changes cancer tumors telling them to gobble up the glucose what we're now learning is that some of the cancers particularly those cancers that correlate with obesity and diabetes often have insulin receptor on the cancer cell the tumor by expressing the insulin receptor tricks the glucose into going into the tumor rather than the muscle and fat and as a consequence the tumor can use that glucose as a fuel to grow so if sugar can fuel existing

tumors and make them grow can it also cause tumors to form in the first place the science on that isn't as clear yet but kle is taking no chances it scares me yes I think if definitely for ex I don't you know I'll eat fruit fruit has sugar in it obviously uh but if I can avoid any sugar at all in any drinks that I drink or Foods I try to avoid processed foods because it's hard to find one that doesn't have sugar in it um I certainly avoid sugar when I [Music] can one of

the criticisms of the anti-sugar scientists is that too much of their evidence comes from animals not humans that said here at Brown University in Rhode Island they're doing studies they think should make a lot of humans nervous this rat is perfectly healthy put him in a vat of water and he finds his way to saf safety every time 5.2 now look at this guy what he's been eating is the equivalent of a North American diet complete with all the fats and sugars we regularly consume he doesn't know where to go his brain has been damaged

these rats were totally normal and then they turned into demented animals they don't remember their learning after even a day and um as the challenge gets harder and harder they fail more and more just like a human with Alzheimer's disease 36.2 in this lab the belief now is that Alzheimer's is really diabetes of the brain linked to insulin levels which can be affected by too much sugar Professor Suzanne deamonte insulin resistance we now know can occur in any organ can occur in the muscles that's what diabetes is it can occur in the liver that causes

fatty liver disease it can occur in the ovaries that's polycystic ovar disease and it can occur in the brain and we think that's Alzheimer's now it's important to remember that none of this research represents the scientific mainstream the case against sugar has not been proven associations on both sides of the border for Al alimer cancer diabetes including Health Canada and the FDA they all know about this research and yet none of them is warning about links between sugar and disease but there is one important group that is raising the alarm the American Heart Association now

recommends that people cut back on added sugar dramatically women should have no more than six teaspoons A Day Men nine don't forget the total sugar intake in this country per person is 26 teaspoons a day and yet the Canadian food industry remains unimpressed that's all we've talked to people who are quite convinced that there is a relationship a correlation between sugar and diabetes and heart disease cancer uh dementia what happens if those people are right uh at this point in time I'm comfortable saying that the science just isn't there to support a role in chronic

disease compc when we come back government goes on the attack if your kids drink one bottle of soda a day they're eating the equivalent of 50 lbs of sugar a year the equivalent of 50 lbs of sugar from just one soda a day and big sugar Strikes [Music] Back everywhere you turn somebody is telling us what we can't [Music] worldwide there are few Industries more powerful than the processed food industry or the sugar industry that feeds it and yet for all their power we know remarkably little about how they work Kristen cousins is determined to

change that as a community Care dentist in Colorado she'd always been interested in sugar but it wasn't until she Unearthed a stash of documents from a sugar company that had gone out of business that she got a peak into a very secretive world the first folder that I pulled out opened up to a memo the blue letterhead of the sugar Association and it had the word confidential underneath the letterhead and I just looked at that and I oh my God you know what have I found what she'd found was a directive from the' 7s a

memo to Industry Executives about a newly published scientific white paper a paper that concluded sugar was not only safe but important it was clear after reading further that the sugar Association had funded this white paper called sugar in the diet of man and they were trying to make it appear that it was an independent study among the more than 1500 pages she uncovered there were some Canadian ones too an account of a sugar industry meeting in the 70s in Montreal that included Frank talk about heart disease and the greatest threat to Sugar consumption is in

the field of nutrition it says more particularly in view of comments that have been recently made on the influence of sugar in AOS sclerosis so they were worried they were worried as far back as 1971 what does that say to you they've known for a long time so I took this paper and crossed out where it said tobacco and put in sugar and looked to see if I could find similar tactics that the sugar industry was using today cousins is pursuing her research at the University of California in San Francisco and she's doing it under

the toage of someone to whom it all sounds familiar the amazing thing I learned from her was that strategies that I thought the tobacco companies made up back in the 50s actually some of those the sugar people had done even before that well you know now we have 83 million pages of industry documents that's on the internet we don't bother stand glance is famous in litigation circles as a man who first publicized secret tobacco industry documents that prove cigarette companies knew their product was dangerous in the new sugar documents he sees lots of parallels to

make it more organ well one parallel is just trying to undermine science another one is working to try to attack and intimidate scientists and others who are coming up with results that the that these big corporate interests don't like another one is trying to subvert sensible regulation the sugar industry has Decades of practice in that in 2003 the World Health Organization in Geneva was looking at a resolution recommending people reduce their sugar intake to just 10% of what they eat it had broad appeal among Health experts but then the industry weighed in the sugar industry

went to their um friends in the US Congress and they got these uh very influential congressmen to write letter and say that this is simp unacceptable and in fact that the US would um you know P its funding for the World Health Organization if this report continued 5 months later the recommendation quietly disappeared having seen the movie before Stan glance says we can't afford to let it happen again we wouldn't have a tobacco epidemic if there wasn't a tobacco industry we wouldn't have an obesity epidemic if there wasn't an industry that was is making a

lot of money selling sugar and fat and salt and things like that and to me the bottom line is that one of the key disease recors for non-communicable diseases as big corporations and I think we're going to have to get these big corporations under control it has become a bit of a moral issue um when you see uh the the the L How Far We've Come Bruce br who used to help run a number of those corporations agrees this isn't a blip this isn't a minor you know we just need a minor course correction we're

on a completely wrong trajectory with our health what's the answer then I think the the honest answer is that we need government to step in and to become an advocate for consumers but sugary drinks are a big reason for but look what's happened when governments have tried earlier this year New York City passed law Banning supersized sugary drinks if your kids drink one bottle of soda a day they're eating the equivalent of 50 lb of sugar a year the equivalent of 50 lbs of sugar from just one soda a day industry's response to ridicule Mayor

Michael Bloomberg as an overbearing Nanny the law was later overturned by the [Music] courts everywhere you turn somebody is telling us what we can eat but Advocates keep on trying two weeks ago in Washington Congressman calling on the government to help consumers by demanding better labels and at the very least recommending a daily limit for how much sugar is safe in Canada and the US those limits exist for other ingredients like fat and sodium manufacturers must say what percentage of the recommended daily limit they're product contains but next to Sugar nothing would your Association representing

the big food manufacturers in in this country would they accept a upper limit of how much sugar Canadians would should be think that that's kind of hypothetical because people are putting on the table saying this is one way to if you want to curb the amount of sugar people are eating this is one way to to start doing that I think the industry has responded to the need for uh a a diverse supply of foods out in the retail Marketplace across our portfolio of more than 650 beverages we now offer over 180 low and no

calorie choices and most of our today even Coca-Cola the world's largest sugar user knows it can't ignore the health debate anymore we'd like people to come together on something that concerns all of us obesity Coca-Cola and everything but the bottom line hasn't changed if you're getting sick from what you eat it's your fault for people to to blame the consumer to blame the victim in all of this just as the tobacco companies blame the the 12 year olds they go out and addict it it it's just not fair because people aren't given the information that

they need if they're trying to make a a a good choice as with tobacco at some point it will all come down to lives and to Dollars the Reckoning warns Dr lustig is coming bottom line there will be no money left by the year 2026 for anything else because diabetes will have chewed through all of the health care dollars there will be no Health Care in 13 years here in America if we do nothing and I'm sure Canada is right behind for 3 weeks the breedens have been eating the food we've supplied how much s

do you want Anna they're still eating the kinds of food they like as much as they like the only difference none of it's processed and none has added sugar need my mind cuz it's not too hot hot so has it made a difference the moment of truth in 3 weeks Jonathan lost 1 and 1/2 in around his waist 8 and 1/2 lb yeah yeah Anna's weight is down to and her waist where all that dangerous fat can accumulate is down by 5 in helloo and what effect did all that have on their blood work Dr

Flanders nice to meet you metabolism okay so Jonathan I'm glad to say that there's some there's some real signs of things improving if we have a look at your cholesterol level it's actually gone down by 10% which is fabulous um your triglycerides have gone down by 20% okay so Anna her results are equally good and while our 3-we experiment is far from scientific proof of anything Dr Flanders is pleased could improve your health in the long so this is some evidence that the changes that you've made to your eating are are helping to make your

body happier healthier um this is fantastic news this is really great well when we first started the project I thought the change would be like really little that I wouldn't see anything but to see how dramatically it's changed means to me that like it's it's really good it was a big change at first it was help but good results I'm happy [Music]