Sugar Satire

Words: 1142
Pages: 5

One of our favourite ingredients might be making us sick. It’s something we’re hard-wired from birth to seek out, and it’s been described as addictive. Yet it seems to be spurring on not only obesity, but—if the emerging science is right—other plagues of modern society like heart disease, diabetes, and perhaps even Alzheimer’s. The culprit, these doctors and scientists say, is sugar. Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, who appears in Fed Up, is the most vocal and visible proponent of this way of thinking: that sugar is, as he puts it, a “toxin.” Even a “poison.” If that’s true, we’re in trouble. We consume it in astounding quantities. According to the latest Statistics Canada figures, Canadiens downed 110 grams of sugar a day in 2004, from all sources.
That’s the equivalent of 26 teaspoons, amounting to over 21 per cent of our daily calorie intake, and it’s surely gone up since then. Canadians eat, on average, 88 lb. of sugar per year; the average nine-year-old boy will consume a whopping 123 lb. of sugar per year, and male teens, 138 lb. A Canadian teen’s primary source of sugar, according to the
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The fiercest critics draw a comparison they surely dread. “The industry is responding to obesity exactly how tobacco responded to concerns about lung cancer,” says New York University dietician Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. “Attack the science, undermine the critics, [pay for] industry-funded studies.” In a study published in PLOS Medicine in December, researchers looked at 17 papers on sugar-sweetened drinks and their relationship to weight gain and obesity. They concluded that those papers in which authors had a “financial conflict of interest with [the] food industry” were five times more likely to find no association between sugary drinks and