The Weaponizing of Salt, Sugar and Fat: The Secrets of How Big Food Got Us Hooked on Junk

Food  

Democracy Now! / By Amy Goodman

The Weaponizing of Salt, Sugar and Fat: The Secrets of How Big Food Got Us Hooked on Junk

Michael Moss talks about his new book, "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us."

 

Photo Credit: Adisa/ Shutterstock.com

March 1, 2013  |  

 

 

AMY GOODMAN: We spend the rest of the hour going deep inside the "processed-food-industrial complex," beginning with the "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." That was the cover story in the recent New York Times Magazine that examined how food companies have known for decades that salt, sugar and fat are not good for us in the quantities American’s consume them, and yet every year they convince most of us to ingest about twice the recommended amount of salt, 70 pounds of sugar—22 teaspoons a day. Then, there’s the fat. Well, New York Times reporter Michael Moss explains how one of the most prevalent fat delivery methods is cheese.

MICHAEL MOSS: Every year, the average American eats as much as 33 pounds of cheese. That’s up to 60,000 calories and 3,100 grams of saturated fat. So why do we eat so much cheese? Mainly it’s because the government is in cahoots with the processed food industry. And instead of responding in earnest to the health crisis, they’ve spent the past 30 years getting people to eat more. This is the story of how we ended up doing just that.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss. His new book is called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. He goes deep inside the laboratories where food scientists calculate the "bliss point" of sugary drinks or the "mouth feel" of fat, and use advanced technology to make it irresistible and addictive. As a result of this $1 trillion-a-year industry, one-in-three adults, and one-in-five kids, is now clinically obese.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Michael. You open your book with a remarkable summit. Talk about who was there.

MICHAEL MOSS: This is a meeting in 1999 that engaged the CEOs of some of the largest food companies in the country, and they were presented with a vivid picture of the emerging obesity crisis. And what really amazed me about this meeting, when I found out about it and found the records to it and talked to some of the people who were present, is that it was none other than one of their own, a senior executive at Kraft, who basically laid the emerging obesity crisis at the feet of the processed food industry and pleaded with them to do something collectively to turn the corner.

AMY GOODMAN: What happened?

MICHAEL MOSS: And coming from him, it was just so powerful. They reacted, as you can imagine, rather defensively. They said, "Look, we’re already providing people with choices in the grocery store. We are committed to nutrition, as we are to convenience and low prices." Frankly, they were worried about the lost millions in sales if healthier products they created weren’t as attractive as the ones they do make.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the CEO who basically ended the meeting.

MICHAEL MOSS: The head of General Mills made all of these points and was especially, I think, aghast at being blamed for the obesity crisis, because, again, he felt that in the cereal aisle, for example, General Mills was providing Cheerios with low amounts of sugar, and he didn’t see a need to down-formulate, if you will, all of the products in the grocery store in order to deal with this obesity crisis, which, you have to remember, back in ’99, was not as grave as it is today.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the obesity crisis, I mean, in their terms, is about lawsuits, class action lawsuits. What does obesity mean? Why is this such a critical issue?

MICHAEL MOSS: Well, yes and no. The Kraft official who raised this back in 1999 was actually very deeply and sincerely concerned about the health effects on people and not so worried about litigation.

What this did, though, mean to the companies, though, was—was what I write about in the book, which, I have to tell you, Amy, was a bit of a detective story. I managed to come across a trove of internal documents that enabled me to get insiders to talk. And when they did, what it showed was that salt, sugar, fat are the three pillars, the Holy Grail, if you will, on which the food industry survives. And through their research, they know that when they hit the perfect amounts of each of those ingredients, they’ll send us over the moon, products will fly off the shelves, we’ll eat more, we’ll buy more—and being companies, of course, that they will make more money.

AMY GOODMAN: Name names, and talk about examples of the weaponizing of salt, sugar and fat.

MICHAEL MOSS: One of the legendary senior scientists for the food industry, Howard Moskowitz, walked me through his creation recently of a new soda for Dr. Pepper, a new flavor line. And it was amazing how much effort went into that—you know, a regression analysis, high mathematics. He would take dozens and dozens of formulas, just slightly altered, to find what he calls the "bliss point" for sweetness in the sugar. And you can do this own experiment at home. Take a cup of coffee, keep adding sugar until you reach the point that you like it the most, and then when you add more sugar, you actually like it less. Well, the food industry knows that, and they spend huge amounts of effort finding the perfect spot, not just for sugar, but for fat and salt, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Frito-Lay had scientist Robert I-San [Lin].

MICHAEL MOSS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Talks about people getting addicted to salt.

MICHAEL MOSS: Yes. He was a wonderful, brilliant scientist who worked—went to work for Frito-Lay in the late ’70s, when salt became an issue in Washington, and the FDA started holding hearings looking at whether potentially it should regulate salt and not consider it inherently safe. Dr. Lin began pushing Frito-Lay to cut back on salt in its own products, for economic reasons. He thought it would position the company really well. And he left Frito-Lay. And years later, when I met him and we went through the documents that he saved from his days at Frito-Lay, it was just amazing to sit down with him at his dining room table and listen to his regrets at not having been able to have done more way back in the ’70s and early ’80s.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the tobacco industry’s effect on the food industry, Michael Moss.

MICHAEL MOSS: I love this part of the story, because it’s really surprising. Philip Morris became the largest food manufacturer in the United States starting in the late '80s, when it acquired General Foods and then Kraft. And as you can imagine, for the first decade of that ownership, it pushed the food managers to do everything they could to sell their products. But starting in the late ’90s, when Philip Morris came under increasing pressure for nicotine and tobacco—and it was the first tobacco company to acknowledge or, rather, to accept the idea of government regulation—the Philip Morris officials turned to their food people and said, "You guys" — and this is private, of course — "You guys are going to face the same issue we're facing over nicotine with salt, sugar, fat and obesity." And they began nudging their food managers to start thinking about ways to ease back on their dependence on those three ingredients.

AMY GOODMAN: The problem with obesity, what it means for, for example, children?

MICHAEL MOSS: You know, in my own household, I have two boys, eight and 13. And you can just see the sugar craving that kids have, inevitably, for sugar. You know, we’ve tried to work with our grocery shopping to get control and to—and I think that’s one of the key things—

AMY GOODMAN: How do you do it with your kids?

MICHAEL MOSS: Well, so, with the kids, my wife Eve kind of arbitrarily said, "Hey, guys, let’s try to limit your cereal, when we eat cereal in the morning, to five grams or less of sugar." And we found that when you engage them in that, shopping becomes an Easter egg hunt, and they’re able to go to the cereal aisle and find those cereals that meet that quota. And they may have to reach low, or I may have to reach high, to find them, because the most sugary ones tend to be at eye level, by calculation. But I think it’s a really important issue, is—you just can’t throw fresh carrots and fresh apples at kids without engaging them. They’ll chuck them out in the lunchroom. But if we could invigorate the home economics program in this country, which fell by the waysides, I think that would be a huge—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, home economics?

MICHAEL MOSS: Well, home economics—kids in school used to be taught how to shop, how to cook from scratch, how to be in control of their diets. Doesn’t happen anymore. And I write about this in the book. What did happen is we got Betty Crocker, a figment of the imagination of a marketing official at a food company. She began pushing processed foods, convenience foods, as an alternative to scratch cooking.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain more.

MICHAEL MOSS: This was back in the '50s and ’60s. Betty Crocker, as you all know—I mean, I used to think she was a real person. She wasn't. She started out just as a marketing tool for the companies. But she was—became emblematic of the food industry’s usurpation, if you will, of the home economist. And their notion was, "Hey, look, who’s got time for scratch meals anymore? Let’s encourage consumers to buy our convenience foods to make things easier for them."

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Lunchables, how they were invented, what they mean.

MICHAEL MOSS: I got to interview and see documents that were kept by Bob Drane, who worked for Oscar Meyer back in the ’80s when the company faced a problem with its meat. People were cutting back on consumption of red meat because it has saturated fat and salt. And Mr. Drane and his team set about looking for a way to repackage those products. He was most interested in saving jobs, and he cared very much about the company. And they came up with the Lunchables, which, as you know, is basically a TV—a cold TV dinner aimed at kids for school lunches.

But it has two remarkable things beyond kind of the ingredients that they used—meat, cheese, crackers, typically. First they went after working moms, who work outside of the home, and designed it and marketed it as a way for moms to get through the crush of the—the 7 a.m. crush in the household where everybody’s scrambling to get out of the house and off to school and work. But then they went after the kids with an amazing marketing campaign, because they realized that the Lunchables wasn’t about food. It was about empowerment for kids. And they came up with this slogan: "All day, you gotta do what they say. But lunchtime is all yours." And kids went nuts for it. Pizza Lunchables, think about it. It’s a piece of cold dough, cheese, tomato sauce, that the kids assemble themselves. But that meant everything to kids, and sales skyrocketed.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they added dessert.

MICHAEL MOSS: And then they added dessert, hamburger Lunchables, hot dog Lunchables, pancake Lunchables—some of them with huge loads of salt, sugar, fat. Kraft, to its credit, is now pulling back on those ingredients, and you can actually find some much lower amounts. But it opened the door to something really important, which is the fast-food industry has moved into the grocery store, so you no longer have to go to a fast-food chain to find problematic foods.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moss, talk about cheese. Talk more about cheese.

MICHAEL MOSS: So, I was amazed to hear that figure, that we are, on average, eating as much as 33 pounds of cheese a year. And I thought, "How could that be?" And that’s triple the amount back in the '70s. And the story goes like this. Starting in the ’60s, people began drinking less whole milk as a way of reducing calories and intake of saturated fat. That left the dairy industry with a glut of whole milk and the milk fat they were extracting from the whole milk to make skim milk. They went to the government and asked for help. And they started making more cheese with that milk. The government, since it subsidizes the dairy industry, bought the cheese. It accumulated. It was storing the cheese in caves in Missouri, when none other than Ronald Reagan came into office and says, "This is crazy. We've got $4 billion worth of cheese that’s going moldy. Stop it." But they still wanted to support the industry, so they came up with a marketing scheme that allowed the dairy industry to collect tens of millions of dollars every year to encourage consumers—for advertising and marketing, to encourage consumers to eat more cheese, not just as a delicacy that you eat as an hors d’oeuvre before dinner, but as an ingredient in processed food. And so, suddenly, cheese began showing up as slices on sandwiches, as ingredients in packaged foods in the store. And our consumption of saturated fat, while we thought we were taking it out of our diets, snuck back in, because cheese is largely invisible as a fat in that form.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moss, Jeffrey Dunn, whistleblower, or at least quit Coke. He was in charge of, what, $44 billion of sale of Coke.

MICHAEL MOSS: Wasn’t quite that much. He was in charge of North America and Latin America. But I’m glad you raise that, because—

AMY GOODMAN: Rather, $20 billion.

MICHAEL MOSS: Jeffrey Dunn was the top warrior at Coke, and he was the heir apparent, or one of the heir apparents, of the entire company in 2000, when he began having a change of heart. And, by the way, he walked me through all the incredible marketing strategy that Coke has, including targeting the most vulnerable consumers, which the company calls "heavy users."

AMY GOODMAN: Don’t call them "consumers" anymore; they’re "heavy users."

MICHAEL MOSS: "Heavy users." Twenty percent of their customers drink 80 percent of the Coke, and those are the people that it’s gone after. But starting in 2000, Jeffrey Dunn had a change of heart. It started with reading a book about sugar and the health effects. It went to his fiancée, who started like nudging him: "Hey, Jeffrey, do you really want to be doing this with your life?" And then he went to Brazil, where Coke was starting to market soda to the emerging middle class there. And out of the blue, Jeffrey says it was almost a voice he heard, said to him, "Jeffrey, you know, you should—these kids need a lot of things, but one thing they don’t need is another Coke." He went back to the company, pushed them to work more on selling healthier drinks, including soda, and cut back on marketing to schools. He ultimately left the company.

And today, he is selling fresh carrots from a farm in California, but with this—and this is really important, because this may be one way out of the situation that we’re in: He is marketing carrots as junk food, meaning he’s stolen a page of the playbook from the junk food industry to make carrots attractive to kids. And I think that is so brilliant.

AMY GOODMAN: We should probably clarify that he was pushing, when we say "Coke," though it sounds like when you’re talking about "heavy users" coke, cocaine, we’re talking Coca-Cola.

MICHAEL MOSS: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: And the problem with Coca-Cola and what it means and why, for example, when they pushed it to Mexico at the time of a terrible recession, they upped their advertising, because they thought, "Well, if anyone’s got any money, they could put it into Coke."

MICHAEL MOSS: And Coke will say, "Look, we’re only part of the" — in fact, recently they had an ad campaign saying, "Hey, we’re only part of the obesity crisis. You can’t blame everything on us, as calories is calories." But there is something interesting with liquids. Science is starting to show that our brains are less able to detect calories in liquids. So, people in the know, including food industry executives, when they run into health trouble, the first thing they do is cut calories out of all the liquids that they drink as a way of maintaining their weight.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you most shocked by?

MICHAEL MOSS: Well, it was one—one was that, how on a personal level, how so many executives I met don’t eat their own foods. The other thing I think that really shocked me was when I get to salt in the book, which is how dependent and how hooked the food companies are on salt, because it’s a miracle ingredient for them. It lets them avoid using more costly ingredients like spices and herbs, and of course has this thing they called "flavor bursts," which just gets you so excited about eating snack foods, especially.
But the other thing is, salt masks off-notes or bad flavors that are inherent to some processed foods. In meat, it’s called "warmed-over flavor," which happens when the fat in meat oxidizes when it reheats, and salt is one of those things that can cover up that taste. So I was really struck. And Kellogg invited me into their research and development department, made for me special versions of their icons, like Cheez-Its, which I could normally eat all day long. Without any salt, it was the most God-awful experience you can imagine, tasting those items. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moss, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is called Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. His cover story in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Michael Moss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. He won in 2010 for his investigation into the dangers of contaminated meat.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated news program, Democracy Now!.

Nanoparticles Are in Our Food, Clothing and Medicine -- And No One Knows for Sure How Dangerous They Might Be

Environment  

Orion Magazine / By Heather Millar

Nanoparticles Are in Our Food, Clothing and Medicine -- And No One Knows for Sure How Dangerous They Might Be

Inside nanotechnology’s little universe of big unknowns.

 

February 23, 2013  |  

This article first appeared at Orion Magazine under the title "Pandora's Boxes." You can enjoy future Orion articles by signing up to the magazine's free trial subscription program.

A pair of scientists, sporting white clean-suits complete with helmets and face masks, approach a prefab agricultural greenhouse in a clearing at Duke University’s Research Forest. Inside are two long rows of wooden boxes the size of large horse troughs, which hold samples of the natural world that surrounds them—the pine groves and rhododendron thickets of North Carolina’s piedmont, which at this moment are alive with bird song.

Looking a lot like the government bad guys in E.T., the two men cautiously hover over a row of boxes containing native sedges, water grasses, and Zebra fish to spray a fine mist of silver nanoparticles over them. Their goal: to investigate how the world inside the boxes is altered by these essentially invisible and notoriously unpredictable particles.

The researchers are part of a multidisciplinary coalition of scientists from Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Howard, Virginia Tech, and the University of Kentucky, headquartered at Duke’s Center for the Environmental Implications of NanoTechnology (CEINT), that represents one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure how nanoparticles affect ecosystems and biological systems.

So far the questions about whether nanoparticles are an environmental risk outnumber the answers, which is why the Duke scientists take the precaution of wearing clean-suits while dosing the boxes—no one’s sure what exposure to a high concentration of nanoparticles might do. Among the few things we do know about them are that they sail past the blood-brain barrier and can harm the nervous systems of some animals.

The regulation of nanoparticles has been recommended for more than a decade, but there’s no agreement on exactly how to do it. Meanwhile, the lid has already been lifted on nanotechnology. The use of man-made nanoparticles has spread into almost every area of our lives: food, clothing, medicine, shampoo, toothpaste, sunscreen, and thousands of other products.

Regulatory structures, both here and abroad, are completely unprepared for this onslaught of nanoproducts, because nanoparticles don’t fit into traditional regulatory categories. Additionally, companies often shield details about them by labeling them “proprietary”; they’re difficult to detect; we don’t have protocols for judging their effects; and we haven’t even developed the right tools for tracking them. If nanotechnology and its uses represent a frontier of sorts, it’s not simply the Wild West—it’s the Chaotic, Undiscovered, Uncontrollable West.

And yet, when I visit the boxes on a warm spring day filled with the buzzing of dragonflies and the plaintive call of mourning doves, they look perfectly benign and could easily be mistaken for a container garden. But there are hints that more is going on: each “mesocosm” (a middle ground between microcosm and macrocosm) is studded with probes and sensors that continually transmit data to CEINT’s central computer.

As I instinctively squint my eyes to try and locate evidence of the silver nanoparticles inside each box, I realize I might as well be staring down at these research gardens from another arm of the galaxy. The scale of these two worlds is so disparate that my senses are destined to fail me.

As with many things that are invisible and difficult to understand—think subatomic particles such as the Higgs boson, muons, gluons, or quarks—any discussion of nanoparticles quickly shifts into the realm of metaphor and analogy. People working in nanoscience seem to try to outdo each other with folksy explanations: Looking for a nanoparticle is like looking for a needle in the Grand Canyon when the canyon is filled with straw. If a nanoparticle were the size of a football, an actual football would be the size of New Zealand. A million nanoparticles could squeeze onto the period at the end of this sentence.

But what is a nanoparticle? The very simplest explanation is that a nanoparticle is a very small object. It can consist of any bit of matter—carbon, silver, gold, titanium dioxide, pretty much anything you can imagine—that exists on the scale of nanometers. One nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter. A nanoparticle may range in size from one nanometer to one hundred nanometers, although the upper boundary remains a matter of debate among scientists.

Nanoparticles exist in nature, but they can also be manufactured. One way is top-down: grinding up things that are big until they are really, really small, an approach used in nanolithography for electronics. Or you can make them from the bottom up, following instructions that read like a chemistry textbook: mixing one chemical with another by pyrolysis (heating a material in a partial vacuum), or with electrolysis (running a current through a liquid), or by other means.

But what do they look like? Raju Badireddy, a postdoctoral researcher, is happy to satisfy my curiosity. He greets me with a smile at the door to one of CEINT’s basement labs and guides me around his little domain. For much of his work, Badireddy uses a “dark field” microscope that excludes certain wavelengths of light, reducing the “noise” in the image to provide unparalleled clarity. Sensing my anticipation, he doses a slide with silver nanoparticles similar to those in the mesocosm boxes in the forest, and slips it under the lens.

As I look into the scope, it fairly takes my breath away. There are so many dots of light that I’m reminded of staring up at the Milky Way on a trip across the Tibetan Plateau years ago. Yet the silver dots throb and undulate as if alive. Here and there, giant spheres of dust, as large as Goodyear blimps, porpoise through the nanoparticles. I pull back from the oculars, feeling as if I’ve intruded upon something private. This world is so close—it’s even inside me—yet it looks so other, so mysterious.

Scientists don’t really have a full theoretical foundation to explain reality at this scale. But all agree that one of the most important aspects of nanoparticles is that they are all surface. Consider a conventional chemical process: When one element is reacting with another, it’s really just the surface molecules that are involved in the lock-and-key dance of classical chemistry. The vast majority of the molecules remain interior, and stable. But there are many fewer molecules in a nanoparticle, so most of the molecules are on the outside, thus rendering nanoparticles more reactive.

Myriad surface imperfections cause randomness to dominate the nano world. If you hit a billiard ball with a clean shot at the macro level, you can have a good idea where it will go. But at the nano level, a billiard ball might shoot straight up, or even reverse direction. These bits of matter are hot to trot: ready to react, to bond, and to do so in unpredictable ways.

This makes life at the nano scale more chaotic. For instance, aluminum is used everywhere to make soda cans. But in nanopowder form, aluminum explodes violently when it comes in contact with air. At the macro level, gold is famously nonreactive. At the nano level, gold goes the opposite way, becoming extremely reactive. Bulk carbon is soft. But at the nano level, if you superheat it, the molecules bend into a tube that is very strong and semiconductive. In the nano world, gravity fades to the background, becoming less pronounced, the melting temperature of materials changes, and colors shift. At 25 nanometers, spherical gold nanoparticles are red; at 50 nanometers they are green; and at 100 nanometers they’re orange. Similarly, silver is blue at 40 nanometers and yellow at 100 nanometers.

So chemistry and physics work differently if you’re a nanoparticle. You’re not as small as an atom or a molecule, but you’re also not even as big as a cell, so you’re definitely not of the macro world either. You exist in an undiscovered country somewhere between the molecular and the macroscopic. Here, the laws of the very small (quantum mechanics) merge quirkily with the laws of the very large (classical physics). Some say nanomaterials bring a third dimension to chemistry’s periodic table, because at the nano scale, long-established rules and groupings don’t necessarily hold up.

These peculiarities are the reason that nanoparticles have seeped into so many commercial products. Researchers can take advantage of these different rules, adding nanoparticles to manufactured goods to give them desired qualities.
Scientists first realized that nanomaterials exhibit novel properties in 1985, when researchers at Rice University in Houston fabricated a Buckminsterfullerene, so named because the arrangement of sixty carbon atoms resembles the geodesic domes popularized by architect Richard Buckminster Fuller. These “Buckyballs” resist heat and act as superconductors. Then, in 1991, a researcher at the Japanese technology company NEC discovered the carbon nanotube, which confers great strength without adding weight. Novel nano materials have been reported at a feverish pace ever since.

With these engineered nanoparticles—not even getting into the more complex nanomachines on the horizon—we can deliver drugs to specific cells, “cloak” objects to make them less visible, make solar cells more efficient, and manufacture flexible electronics like e-paper.

In the household realm, nanosilica makes house paints and clothing stain resistant; nanozinc and nano–titanium dioxide make sunscreen, acne lotions, and cleansers transparent and more readily absorbed; and nanosilicon makes computer components and cell phones ever smaller and more powerful. Various proprietary nanoparticles have been mixed into volumizing shampoos, whitening toothpastes, scratch-resistant car paint, fabric softeners, and bricks that resist moss and fungus.

A recent report from an American Chemical Society journal claims that nano–titanium dioxide (a thickener and whitener in larger amounts) is now found in eighty-nine popular food products. These include: M&Ms and Mentos, Dentyne and Trident chewing gums, Nestlé coffee creamers, various flavors of Pop-Tarts, Kool-Aid, and Jell-O pudding, and Betty Crocker cake frostings. According to a market report, in 2010 the world produced 50,000 tons of nano–titanium dioxide; by 2015, it’s expected to grow to more than 200,000 tons.

At first some in the scientific community didn’t think that the unknown environmental effects of nanotechnology merited CEINT’s research. “The common view was that it was premature,” says CEINT’s director, Mark Wiesner. “My point was that that’s the whole point. But looking at risk is never as sexy as looking at the applications, so it took some time to convince my colleagues.”
Wiesner’s team at CEINT chose to study silver nanoparticles first because they are already commonly added to many consumer products for their germ-killing properties. You can find nanosilver in socks, wound dressings, doorknobs, sheets, cutting boards, baby mugs, plush toys—even condoms. How common is the application of nanoparticles? It varies, but when it comes to socks, for example, hospitals now have to be cautious that the nanosilver in a patient’s footwear doesn’t upset their MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines.

Wiesner and his colleagues spent several months designing the experiments that will help them outline some general ecological principles of the unique nanoverse. He knew they wanted to test the particles in a system, but a full-scale ecosystem would be too big, too unmanageable, so they had to find a way to container-ize nature. They considered all sorts of receptacles: kiddie pools (too flimsy), simple holes in the ground (too dirty, too difficult to harvest for analysis), concrete boxes (crack in winter). Finally, they settled upon wooden boxes lined with nonreactive, industrial rubber: cheap to build, easy to reuse, and convenient to harvest.

They built thirty boxes and a greenhouse to hold them. The large number would make it easier to replicate experiments, and to answer the spectrum of questions being posed by CEINT’s interdisciplinary team. The ecologists were interested in community diversity and how the biomass shifts over time. The biologists wanted to know whether the nanoparticles become concentrated as they move up the food chain. The toxicologists wanted to track where the particles went and how fast they got there. The chemists wanted to know about reactivity.

Whatever the goal of the experiment it houses, each mesocosm features a slanted board upon which a terrestrial ecosystem slowly gives way to an aquatic one. It’s a lot more complicated than a test tube in a lab, but it remains an approximation. The team had hoped to run streams through the mesocosms, but the computing power and monitoring vigilance necessary to track nanoparticles in the streams proved prohibitive.

In 2011, the team dosed the boxes with two kinds of nanosilver made on campus: one coated in PVP, a binder used in many medicines, and the other coated in gum arabic, a binder used in numerous products, including gummi candies and cosmetics. Both coatings help to stabilize the nanosilver. In some boxes, the researchers let the silver leach slowly into the box. In other boxes, they delivered the silver in one big pulse. In some, they introduced the silver into the terrestrial part of the box; in others, they put the silver into the water.

Then the researchers watched and waited.

Reading through descriptions of nanoparticle applications can make a person almost giddy. It all sounds mostly great. And the toxicology maxim “Dose makes the poison” leads many biologists to be skeptical of the dangers nanoparticles might pose. After all, nanoparticles are pretty darn small.

Yet size seems to be a double-edged sword in the nanoverse. Because nanoparticles are so small, they can slip past the body’s various barriers: skin, the blood-brain barrier, the lining of the gut and airways. Once inside, these tiny particles can bind to many things. They seem to build up over time, especially in the brain. Some cause inflammation and cell damage. Preliminary research shows this can harm the organs of lab animals, though the results of some of these studies are a matter of debate.

Some published research has shown that inhaled nanoparticles actually become more toxic as they get smaller. Nano–titanium dioxide, one of the most commonly used nanoparticles (Pop-Tarts, sunblock), has been shown to damage DNA in animals and prematurely corrode metals. Carbon nanotubes seem to penetrate lungs even more deeply than asbestos.

What little we know about the environmental effects of nanoparticles—and it isn’t very much—also raises some red flags. Nanoparticles from consumer products have been found in sewage wastewater, where they can inhibit bacteria that help break down the waste. They’ve been found to accumulate in plants and stunt their growth. Another study has shown that gold nanoparticles become more concentrated as they move up the food chain from plants to herbivores.
“My suspicion, based on the limited amount of work that’s been done, is that nanoparticles are way less toxic than DDT,” says Richard Di Giulio, an environmental toxicologist on the CEINT team. “But what’s scary about nanoparticles is that we’re producing products with new nanomaterials far ahead of our ability to assess them.”

As a society, we’ve been here before—releasing a “miracle technology” before its potential health and environmental ramifications are understood, let alone investigated. Remember how DDT was going to stamp out malaria and typhus and revolutionize agriculture? How asbestos was going to make buildings fireproof? How bisphenol A (BPA) would make plastics clear and nearly shatterproof? How methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) would make gasoline burn cleanly? How polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were going to make electrical networks safer? How genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were going to end hunger?

The CEINT scientists are trying to develop a library that catalogues all the different kinds of engineered nanoparticles. They’re designing methods for assessing potential hazards, devising ways to evaluate the impact nanoparticles have on both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and creating protocols that will help shape environmental policy decisions about nanoparticles.

Wiesner says the boxes in the forest provide “ground truth” for experiments in the lab. Sometimes, he says, environmental research leads to generalizations that become so abstracted that they have no relationship to reality. The example he likes to give is Freon: if you were to study the toxicology of Freon in the traditional way, you’d never get to the ozone hole. “Nature changes things,” Wiesner says. “So we need to be able to understand those transformation processes, and we need to understand them in complex systems.”

The first large set of CEINT experiments ended about a year ago, and the team spent most of last year figuring out where the nanoparticles went, what they did, and how they added up. They superimposed a grid on each box, then harvested the plants and animals section by section. They clipped the grasses, sorted them by type, and ground them up. They took bore samples of the soil, the water, and the rocks. They anesthetized and flash froze the vertebrates. Then they started measuring the nanoparticle concentrations in the plants, the animals, and core-sample slices.

But consider the magnitude of the scientific problems that face the scientists at CEINT, or anyone else trying to answer a multitude of questions as nanotech applications gallop into the market and man-made nanoparticles begin to litter our world. Just try tracking something a billion times smaller than a meter in even a modestly sized ecosystem, say, a small wetland or a lake. Do carbon nanotubes degrade? And if not, then what? And how do you tell the nanotubes from all the other carbon in your average ecosystem? Even if we did regulate nanoparticles, how would we detect them? There’s no “nanoprobe” that could find them today, and given the challenges of developing such a thing, the team at CEINT considers it unlikely that there will be one any time soon. Thus, gathering evidence of nanoparticles’ effects—whether positive or negative—turns out to be a titanic task. Simply finding them in the experiment samples seems about as complicated as finding that needle in a haystack the size of the Grand Canyon.
Lee Ferguson, a chemistry professor who directs the nanoparticle analysis, meets me in the basement of the CEINT building and leads me on a tour of all the hulking, pricey instruments the researchers use. Despite the cutting-edge aura of this machinery, none of it is fully up to the task of locating and analyzing the proverbial nanoneedle.

“With nanoparticles, we’re playing catch-up as a scientific community—not only to ask the right questions, but to have the right tools to investigate them,” Ferguson says as he pushes through a door into the first lab. “We were well prepared to answer questions about PCBs—we’d spent half a century refining the chemistry and the instruments that were used to analyze the molecules in those chemicals. But simply measuring nanoparticles is a challenge. It’s one thing if they’re concentrated, but if you’re looking for nanoparticles in soil, for instance, you just can’t find them.”

He spends the next hour showing me how the CEINT team has back-engineered methods to detect and characterize nanoparticles. The fluorometer aims three lasers at carbon nanotubes. Another instrument uses ultrasonic waves to flush out its tiny quarry. Across campus, huge electron microscopes train electron beams on the nanoparticle samples, projecting their images onto a charge-coupled device camera, like the ones used on the Hubble Telescope, and atomic force microscopes form images of them by running a probe over samples like a hypersensitive, high-tech record player.

As the team’s methods continue to advance, their experiments have resulted in some surprising data. “After we dosed the water, we took some of it to the lab and exposed fish to it,” says Wiesner’s research assistant, Benjamin Espinasse. “Some of the particles turned out to be more toxic in the lab. And the reverse also happened: some things didn’t appear to be toxic in the lab, but they were more toxic in the boxes. It seems that the organic matter in the mesocosms changed the coatings of the particles, making them more toxic or less toxic,” Espinasse continues. “We could never have imagined that.”

While CEINT has only published the results of the preliminary mesocosm experiments, the team has been able to make a few conclusions: When the nanoparticles come in a burst, they tend to stay in the soil. But if they bleed into the system slowly, they filter into the water column. Regardless, nanoparticles seem to have a tendency to stick around—that was also the case with DDT.
Meanwhile, CEINT has begun a new set of experiments in the boxes: testing nanoparticles that have been combined with various other substances.

“The materials we most see now are nanomaterials incorporated into other products: textiles, foams, mattresses, nanotubes in display screens,” Wiesner explains. “How it will get out into the environment will be very different than just the pristine particle.”

And then there are the nanobots to plan for. “As we get closer to even simple nanobots, we will need to understand how to do research on them, too,” Wiesner says. Although they remain a marvel of the future, scientists are working toward nanomachines that may someday be able to replicate red blood cells, clean up toxic spills, repair spinal cord injuries, and create weapon swarms to overwhelm an enemy. Researchers are already working on simple versions of nanobots using the chemical principles of attraction and repulsion to help nanostructures arrange and build themselves in a process akin to the way DNA works: a strand of DNA can only split and rebuild in one particular way, and the desired structure is preserved, no matter how many times the DNA replicates.

As if trying to figure out the effects of simple nanoparticles weren’t enough of a futuristic challenge, concerns surrounding nanobots that replicate like DNA are so theoretical they’re spoken about in narratives resembling science fiction. Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy famously warned that, if released into the environment, self-assembling and self-replicating nanomachines could spread like pollen or bacteria, and be too tough and too small to stop before invading every part of the biosphere, chewing it up and reducing all life on earth to “gray goo.” In nanotech circles, this is called the “gray goo problem,” but no one really knows if this vision is prophetic or simply hysterical.

Down the basement hallway, postdoc Badireddy motions to me to join him at a computer monitor next to the dark field microscope in his lab. He clicks on a movie he’s made from images he’s captured. It shows silver nanoparticles interacting with bacteria.

At first, the nanoparticles don’t seem to be doing much. Then, all of a sudden, they start to clump to the outside of a bacterium. The nanoparticles build up and build up until the bacterium’s cell membrane bursts. Then the nanoparticle clumps dissolve into small units before clumping back up again and attacking more bacteria. “The whole cycle happens in about thirty minutes,” Badireddy says. “It’s so fast. If you leave the nanoparticles overnight, when you come back in the morning, all the bacteria are ground mush.”

If you’re looking for stink-free athletic socks, maybe this is a good thing. But could that same process someday turn out to have some sort of nasty biological effect? We just don’t know yet.

“The fact that they re-cycle suggests they might persist for a long time,” Badireddy says as we watch the movie a second time. “They might enter the food chain. And then, who knows what will happen?”

For more on the topic, listen to theaudio recording of the forum Orion hosted with Millar, a researcher, ethicist, and consumer advocate on the topic, here, which expanded on several themes Heather didn't have room for in this article. 

Heather Millar has covered science, health, and technology for twenty years, contributing to magazines such as Sierra, Smithsonian, and The Atlantic. She lives with her family in San Francisco.

Oceana Uncovers Rampant Seafood Fraud Across United States

Food  

Huffington Post / By Angela Kinsey, Andrew Sharpless

Oceana Uncovers Rampant Seafood Fraud Across United States

Oceana's study tested more than 1,200 seafood samples and found that 33 percent of seafood tested was mislabeled. Sushi joints had a national mislabeling rate of 74 percent.

Photo Credit: © Josh Withers/ Shutterstock.com

February 25, 2013  |  

 

 

Imagine yourself at a restaurant ready to order your favorite dish and being told by your server that there is a one in three chance you will not receive the same item that is on the menu. It might be the real thing... or it could be a completely different food in disguise. Would you order it anyway? Most consumers would probably say no because when you eat at a restaurant or purchase food at a grocery store you expect to get exactly what you paid for. Unfortunately, this may not be the case for the seafood you order in America, according to a new nationwide study released today by Oceana that found high levels of seafood fraud at restaurants and grocery stores across the country.

Oceana's study tested more than 1,200 seafood samples through DNA analysis in Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and other major cities, and found that 33 percent of seafood tested was mislabeled, according to Food and Drug Administration guidelines. In some cities the amount of fraud found was even higher than the national average. In Austin and Houston for example, 49 percent of the samples were fraudulently labeled. In Boston (including testing done by the Boston Globe) the mislabeling rate was 48 percent. And in Southern California, more than half the seafood (52 percent) was mislabeled!

Of all the places Oceana tested, sushi joints were the biggest culprits, with a national mislabeling rate of 74 percent. The most common type of sushi fraud was the substitution of escolar for white tuna, which occurred 84 percent of the time. Escolar, nicknamed the "ex-lax" fish, is a snake mackerel and not actually a tuna at all, and can cause serious digestive issues for some people who eat more than a few ounces. The FDA warns against eating this fish in large portions and it is even outright banned in Italy and Japan. But avoiding escolar is nearly impossible if you are unaware that it is actually being served.

Generally with seafood fraud, desirable and more expensive species like snapper are substituted for cheaper, more abundant fish such as tilapia. It can happen during shipping, processing, in grocery stores and restaurants or anywhere in between on the seafood supply chain. Wherever it happens though, consumers and our oceans ultimately pay the price. Seafood fraud compromises our ability to make healthy and conservation-friendly seafood choices, while also hurting our wallets.

So what is the solution to seafood fraud? Simply put -- traceability, or tracking our fish from boat to plate. More than 90 percent of the seafood we eat in America is imported and less than 1 percent is tested by the FDA for fraud. It may seem like a daunting task to monitor it all, but it really should not be. While some voluntary seafood traceability programs already exist in the U.S., tracking our seafood should be the norm, not a rare occurrence. We must demand that all seafood sold in the U.S. is traced from boat to plate, ensuring that it is safe, legal and honestly labeled. While U.S. fishermen provide much of this information at the dock, like where, when and how a fish was caught, little to none of it follows the fish throughout the rest of the supply chain. The technology for this kind of traceability already exists and the federal government simply needs to make it a mandate.

Consumers can also take steps on their own to stop seafood fraud. They should start by asking questions -- what kind of fish are they being served, is it wild or farmed-raised, and where and how was it caught. Buy seafood that is traceable and support the voluntary programs that are already in place. Check the price. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. And finally, when possible, purchase the whole fish. Species are easier to identify this way and seafood fraud is much harder to pull off if the fish is not already filleted and processed.

"Eat more fish!" is the common cry we've all heard from our doctors over the years and there's a lot of truth behind it. Wild seafood is healthier than other forms of animal protein. It's better for the environment. It's more cost effective to produce. But the seafood we eat must be honestly labeled so we can make informed decisions -- for our own personal health and for the sake of the oceans. We would not stand for beef or chicken being swapped for other forms of meat one-third of the time and we should not stand for the same being done with our seafood.

Andrew Sharpless has led Oceana since 2003 as its Chief Executive Officer. Oceana is the largest international conservation organization fully dedicated to protecting the oceans.

Does Sugar Kill? How the Sugar Industry Hid the Toxic Truth

Mother Jones / By Gary Taubes, Cristin Kearns Couzens

Does Sugar Kill? How the Sugar Industry Hid the Toxic Truth

For decades, the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?

November 15, 2012  |  

 

 

This article first appeared in Mother Jones Magazine. Get your magazine  subscription here. 
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."
The story of sugar, as Tatem told it, was one of a harmless product under attack by "opportunists dedicated to exploiting the consuming public." Over the subsequent decades, it would be transformed from what the New York Times in 1977 had deemed "a villain in disguise" into a nutrient so seemingly innocuous that even the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association approved it as part of a healthy diet. 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. So effective were the Sugar Association's efforts that, to this day, no consensus exists about sugar's potential dangers. 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. (The chart below uses sugar "availability" numbers rather than the USDA's speculative new consumption figures.)

Click to enlarge.

Precisely how did the sugar industry engineer its turnaround? The answer is found in more than 1,500 pages of internal memos, letters, and company board reports we discovered buried in the archives of now-defunct sugar companies as well as in the recently released papers of deceased researchers and consultants who played key roles in the industry's strategy. They show how Big Sugar used Big Tobacco-style tactics to ensure that government agencies would dismiss troubling health claims against their products. Compared to the tobacco companies, which knew for a fact that their wares were deadly and spent billions of dollars trying to cover up that reality, the sugar industry had a relatively easy task. With the jury still out on sugar's health effects, producers simply needed to make sure that the uncertainty lingered. But the goal was the same: to safeguard sales by creating a body of evidence companies could deploy to counter any unfavorable research.
This decades-long effort to stack the scientific deck is why, today, the USDA's dietary guidelines only speak of sugar in vague generalities. ("Reduce the intake of calories from solid fats and added sugars.") It's why the FDA insists that sugar is "generally recognized as safe" despite considerable evidence suggesting otherwise. It's why some scientists' urgent calls for regulation of sugary products have been dead on arrival, and it's why—absent any federal leadership—New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt compelled to propose a ban on oversized sugary drinks that passed in September.
In fact, a growing body of research suggests that sugar and its nearly chemically identical cousin, HFCS, may very well cause diseases that kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, and that these chronic conditions would be far less prevalent if we significantly dialed back our consumption of added sugars. Robert Lustig, a leading authority on pediatric obesity at the University of California-San Francisco (whose arguments Gary explored in a 2011 New York Times Magazine cover story), made this case last February in the prestigious journal Nature. In an article titled "The Toxic Truth About Sugar," Lustig and two colleagues observed that sucrose and HFCS are addictive in much the same way as cigarettes and alcohol, and that overconsumption of them is driving worldwide epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes (the type associated with obesity). Sugar-related diseases are costing America around $150 billion a year, the authors estimated, so federal health officials need to step up and consider regulating the stuff.

The Sugar Association dusted off what has become its stock response: The Lustig paper, it said, "lacks the scientific evidence or consensus" to support its claims, and its authors were irresponsible not to point out that the full body of science "is inconclusive at best." This inconclusiveness, of course, is precisely what the Sugar Association has worked so assiduously to maintain. "In confronting our critics,"Tatem explained to his board of directors back in 1976, "we try never to lose sight of the fact that no confirmed scientific evidence links sugar to the death-dealing diseases. This crucial point is the lifeblood of the association."

THE SUGAR ASSOCIATION'S earliest incarnation dates back to 1943, when growers and refiners created the Sugar Research Foundation to counter World War II sugar-rationing propaganda—"How Much Sugar Do You Need? None!" declared one government pamphlet. In 1947, producers rechristened their group the Sugar Association and launched a new PR division, Sugar Information Inc., which before long was touting sugar as a "sensible new approach to weight control." In 1968, in the hope of enlisting foreign sugar companies to help defray costs, the Sugar Association spun off its research division as the International Sugar Research Foundation. "Misconceptions concerning the causes of tooth decay, diabetes, and heart problems exist on a worldwide basis," explained a 1969 ISRF recruiting brochure.
As early as 1962, internal Sugar Association memos had acknowledged the potential links between sugar and chronic diseases, but at the time sugar executives had a more pressing problem: Weight-conscious Americans were switching in droves to diet sodas—particularly Diet Rite and Tab—sweetened with cyclamate and saccharin. From 1963 through 1968, diet soda's share of the soft-drink market shot from 4 percent to 15 percent. "A dollar's worth of sugar," ISRF vice president and research director John Hickson warned in an internal review, "could be replaced with a dime's worth" of sugar alternatives. "If anyone can undersell you nine cents out of 10," Hickson told the New York Times in 1969, "you'd better find some brickbat you can throw at him."

By then, the sugar industry had doled out more than $600,000 (about $4 million today) to study every conceivable harmful effect of cyclamate sweeteners, which are still sold around the world under names like Sugar Twin and Sucaryl. In 1969, the FDA banned cyclamates in the United States based on a study suggesting they could cause bladder cancer in rats. Not long after, Hickson left the ISRF to work for the Cigar Research Council. He was described in a confidential tobacco industry memo as a "supreme scientific politician who had been successful in condemning cyclamates, on behalf of the [sugar industry], on somewhat shaky evidence." It later emerged that the evidence suggesting that cyclamates caused cancer in rodents was not relevant to humans, but by then the case was officially closed. In 1977, saccharin, too, was nearly banned on the basis of animal results that would turn out to be meaningless in people.
Meanwhile, researchers had been reporting that blood lipids—cholesterol and triglycerides in particular—were a risk factor in heart disease. Some people had high cholesterol but normal triglycerides, prompting health experts to recommend that they avoid animal fats. Other people were deemed "carbohydrate sensitive," with normal cholesterol but markedly increased triglyceride levels. In these individuals, even moderate sugar consumption could cause a spike in triglycerides. John Yudkin, the United Kingdom's leading nutritionist, wasmaking headlines with claims that sugar, not fat, was the primary cause of heart disease.
In 1967, the Sugar Association's research division began considering "the rising tide of implications of sucrose in atherosclerosis." Before long, according to a confidential 1970 review of industry-funded studies, the newly formed ISRF was spending 10 percent of its research budget on the link between diet and heart disease. Hickson, the ISRF's vice president, urged his member corporations to keep the results of the review under wraps. Of particular concern was the work of a University of Pennsylvania researcher on "sucrose sensitivity," which sugar executives feared was "likely to reveal evidence of harmful effects." One ISRF consultant recommended that sugar companies get to the truth of the matter by sponsoring a full-on study. In what would become a pattern, the ISRF opted not to follow his advice. Another ISRF-sponsored study, by biochemist Walter Pover of the University of Birmingham, in England, had uncovered a possible mechanism to explain how sugar raises triglyceride levels. Pover believed he was on the verge of demonstrating this mechanism "conclusively" and that 18 more weeks of work would nail it down. But instead of providing the funds, the ISRF nixed the project, assessing its value as "nil."

The industry followed a similar strategy when it came to diabetes. By 1973, links between sugar, diabetes, and heart disease were sufficiently troubling that Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota convened a hearing of his Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to address the issue. An international panel of experts—including Yudkin and Walter Mertz, head of the Human Nutrition Institute at the Department of Agriculture—testified that variations in sugar consumption were the best explanation for the differences in diabetes rates between populations, and that research by the USDA and others supported the notion that eating too much sugar promotes dramatic population-wide increases in the disease. One panelist, South African diabetes specialist George Campbell, suggested that anything more than 70 pounds per person per year—about half of what is sold in America today—would spark epidemics.
In the face of such hostile news from independent scientists, the ISRF hosted its own conference the following March, focusing exclusively on the work of researchers who were skeptical of a sugar/diabetes connection. "All those present agreed that a large amount of research is still necessary before a firm conclusion can be arrived at," according to aconference review published in a prominent diabetes journal. In 1975, the foundation reconvened in Montreal to discuss research priorities with its consulting scientists. Sales were sinking, Tatem reminded the gathered sugar execs, and a major factor was "the impact of consumer advocates who link sugar consumption with certain diseases."
Following the Montreal conference, the ISRF disseminated a memo quoting Errol Marliss, a University of Toronto diabetes specialist, recommending that the industry pursue "well-designed research programs" to establish sugar's role in the course of diabetes and other diseases. "Such research programs might produce an answer that sucrose is bad in certain individuals," he warned. But the studies "should be undertaken in a sufficiently comprehensive way as to produce results. A gesture rather than full support is unlikely to produce the sought-after answers."

A gesture, however, is what the industry would offer. Rather than approve a serious investigation of the purported links between sucrose and disease, American sugar companiesquit supporting the ISRF's research projects. Instead, via the Sugar Association proper, they would spend roughly $655,000 between 1975 and 1980 on 17 studies designed, as internal documents put it, "to maintain research as a main prop of the industry's defense." Each proposal was vetted by a panel of industry-friendly scientists and a second committee staffed by representatives from sugar companies and "contributing research members" such as Coca-Cola, Hershey's, General Mills, and Nabisco. Most of the cash was awarded to researchers whose studies seemed explicitly designed to exonerate sugar. One even proposed to explore whether sugar could be shown to boost serotonin levels in rats' brains, and thus "prove of therapeutic value, as in the relief of depression," an internal document noted.
At best, the studies seemed a token effort. Harvard Medical School professor Ron Arky, for example, received money from the Sugar Association to determine whether sucrose has a different effect on blood sugar and other diabetes indicators if eaten alongside complex carbohydrates like pectin and psyllium. The project went nowhere, Arky told us recently. But the Sugar Association "didn't care."
In short, rather than do definitive research to learn the truth about its product, good or bad, the association stuck to a PR scheme designed to "establish with the broadest possible audience—virtually everyone is a consumer—the safety of sugar as a food." One of its first acts was to establish a Food & Nutrition Advisory Council consisting of a half-dozen physicians and two dentists willing to defend sugar's place in a healthy diet, and set aside roughly $60,000 per year (more than $220,000 today) to cover its cost.
Working to the industry's recruiting advantage was the rising notion that cholesterol and dietary fat—especially saturated fat—were the likely causes of heart disease. (Tatem even suggested, in a letter to the Times Magazine, that some "sugar critics" were motivated merely by wanting "to keep the heat off saturated fats.") This was the brainchild of nutritionist Ancel Keys, whose University of Minnesota laboratory had received financial support from the sugar industry as early as 1944. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Keys remained the most outspoken proponent of the fat hypothesis, often clashing publicly with Yudkin, the most vocal supporter of the sugar hypothesis—the two men "shared a good deal of loathing," recalled one of Yudkin's colleagues.
So when the Sugar Association needed a heart disease expert for its Food & Nutrition Advisory Council, it approached Francisco Grande, one of Keys' closest colleagues. Another panelist was University of Oregon nutritionist William Connor, the leading purveyor of the notion that it is dietary cholesterol that causes heart disease. As its top diabetes expert, the industry recruitedEdwin Bierman of the University of Washington, who believed that diabetics need not pay strict attention to their sugar intake so long as they maintained a healthy weight by burning off the calories they consumed. Bierman also professed an apparently unconditional faith that it was dietary fat (and being fat) that caused heart disease, with sugar having no meaningful effect.
It is hard to overestimate Bierman's role in shifting the diabetes conversation away from sugar. It was primarily Bierman who convinced the American Diabetes Association to liberalize the amount of carbohydrates (including sugar) it recommended in the diets of diabetics, and focus more on urging diabetics to lower their fat intake, since diabetics are particularly likely to die from heart disease. Bierman also presented industry-funded studies when he coauthored a section on potential causes for a National Commission on Diabetes report in 1976; the document influences the federal diabetes research agenda to this day. Some researchers, he acknowledged, had "argued eloquently" that consumption of refined carbohydrates (such as sugar) is a precipitating factor in diabetes. But then Bierman cited five studies—two of them bankrolled by the ISRF—that were "inconsistent" with that hypothesis. "A review of all available laboratory and epidemiologic evidence," he concluded, "suggests that the most important dietary factor in increasing the risk of diabetes is total calorie intake, irrespective of source."

The point man on the industry's food and nutrition panel wasFrederick Stare, founder and chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. Stare and his department had a long history of ties to Big Sugar. An ISRF internal research review credited the sugar industry with funding some 30 papers in his department from 1952 through 1956 alone. In 1960, the department broke ground on a new $5 million building funded largely by private donations, including a $1 million gift from General Foods, the maker of Kool-Aid and Tang.
By the early 1970s, Stare ranked among the industry's most reliable advocates, testifying in Congress about the wholesomeness of sugar even as his department kept raking in funding from sugar producers and food and beverage giants such as Carnation, Coca-Cola, Gerber, Kellogg, and Oscar Mayer. His name also appears in tobacco documents, which show that he procured industry funding for a study aimed at exonerating cigarettes as a cause of heart disease.
The first act of the Food & Nutrition Advisory Council was to compile "Sugar in the Diet of Man," an 88-page white paper edited by Stare and published in 1975 to "organize existing scientific facts concerning sugar." It was a compilation of historical evidence and arguments that sugar companies could use to counter the claims of Yudkin, Stare's Harvard colleague Jean Mayer, and other researchers whom Tatem called "enemies of sugar." The document was sent to reporters—the Sugar Association circulated 25,000 copies—along with a press release headlined "Scientists dispel sugar fears." The report neglected to mention that it was funded by the sugar industry, but internal documents confirm that it was.

The Sugar Association also relied on Stare to take its message to the people: "Place Dr. Stare on the AM America Show" and "Do a 3 ½ minute interview with Dr. Stare for 200 radio stations," note the association's meeting minutes. Using Stare as a proxy, internal documents explained, would help the association "make friends with the networks" and "keep the sugar industry in the background." By the time Stare's copious conflicts of interest were finally revealed—in "Professors on the Take," a 1976 exposé by the Center for Science in the Public Interest—Big Sugar no longer needed his assistance. The industry could turn to an FDA document to continue where he'd left off.
While Stare and his colleagues had been drafting "Sugar in the Diet of Man," the FDA was launching its first review of whether sugar was, in the official jargon, generally recognized as safe (GRAS), part of a series of food-additive reviews the Nixon administration had requested of the agency. The FDA subcontracted the task to the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology, which created an 11-member committee to vet hundreds of food additives from acacia to zinc sulfate. While the mission of the GRAS committee was to conduct unbiased reviews of the existing science for each additive, it was led by biochemist George W. Irving Jr., who had previously served two years as chairman of the scientific advisory board of the International Sugar Research Foundation. Industry documents show that another committee member, Samuel Fomon, had received sugar-industry funding for three of the five years prior to the sugar review.
The FDA's instructions were clear: To label a substance as a potential health hazard, there had to be "credible evidence of, or reasonable grounds to suspect, adverse biological effects"—which certainly existed for sugar at the time. But the GRAS committee's review would depend heavily on "Sugar in the Diet of Man" and other work by its authors. In the section on heart disease, committee members cited 14 studies whose results were "conflicting," but 6 of those bore industry fingerprints, including Francisco Grande's chapter from "Sugar in the Diet of Man" and 5 others that came from Grande's lab or were otherwise funded by the sugar industry.

The diabetes chapter of the review acknowledged studies suggesting that "long term consumption of sucrose can result in a functional change in the capacity to metabolize carbohydrates and thus lead to diabetes mellitus," but it went on to cite five reports contradicting that notion. All had industry ties, and three were authored by Ed Bierman, including his chapter in "Sugar in the Diet of Man."
In January 1976, the GRAS committee published its preliminary conclusions, noting that while sugar probably contributed to tooth decay, it was not a "hazard to the public." The draft review dismissed the diabetes link as "circumstantial" and called the connection to cardiovascular disease "less than clear," with fat playing a greater role. The only cautionary note, besides cavities, was that all bets were off if sugar consumption were to increase significantly. The committee then thanked the Sugar Association for contributing "information and data." (Tatem would later remark that while he was "proud of the credit line...we would probably be better off without it.")
The committee's perspective was shared by many researchers, but certainly not all. For a public hearing on the draft review, scientists from the USDA's Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory submitted what they considered "abundant evidence that sucrose is one of the dietary factors responsible for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease." As they later explainedin the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, some portion of the public—perhaps 15 million Americans at that time—clearly could not tolerate a diet rich in sugar and other carbohydrates. Sugar consumption, they said, should come down by "a minimum of 60 percent," and the government should launch a national campaign "to inform the populace of the hazards of excessive sugar consumption." But the committee stood by its conclusions in the final version of its report presented to the FDA in October 1976.

For the sugar industry, the report was gospel. The findings "should be memorized" by the staff of every company associated with the sugar industry, Tatem told his membership. "In the long run," he said, the document "cannot be sidetracked, and you may be sure we will push its exposure to all corners of the country."
The association promptly produced an ad for newspapers and magazines exclaiming "Sugar is Safe!" It "does not cause death-dealing diseases," the ad declared, and "there is no substantiated scientific evidence indicating that sugar causes diabetes, heart disease or any other malady...The next time you hear a promoter attacking sugar, beware the ripoff. Remember he can't substantiate his charges. Ask yourself what he's promoting or what he is seeking to cover up. If you get a chance, ask him about the GRAS Review Report. Odds are you won't get an answer. Nothing stings a nutritional liar like scientific facts."

THE SUGAR ASSOCIATION WOULD SOON get its chance to put the committee's sugar review to the test. In 1977, McGovern's select committee—the one that had held the 1973 hearings on sugar and diabetes—blindsided the industry with a report titled "Dietary Goals for the United States," recommending that Americans lower their sugar intake by 40 percent(PDF). The association "hammered away" at the McGovern report using the GRAS review "as our scientific Bible," Tatem told sugar executives.
McGovern held fast, but Big Sugar would prevail in the end. In 1980, when the USDA first published its own set of dietary guidelines, it relied heavily on a review written for the American Society of Clinical Nutrition by none other than Bierman, who used the GRAS committee's findings to bolster his own. "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar does not seem to cause diabetes," the USDA guidelines concluded. They went on to counsel that people should "avoid too much sugar," without bothering to explain what that meant.
In 1982, the FDA once again took up the GRAS committee's conclusion that sugar was safe, proposing to make it official. The announcement resulted in a swarm of public criticism, prompting the agency to reopen its case. Four years later, an agency task force concluded, again leaning on industry-sponsored studies, that "there is no conclusive evidence...that demonstrates a hazard to the general public when sugars are consumed at the levels that are now current." (Walter Glinsmann, the task force's lead administrator, would later become aconsultant to the Corn Refiners Association, which represents producers of high-fructose corn syrup.)
The USDA, meanwhile, had updated its own dietary guidelines. With Fred Stare now on the advisory committee, the 1985 guidelines retained the previous edition's vague recommendation to "avoid too much" sugar but stated unambiguously that "too much sugar in your diet does not cause diabetes." At the time, the USDA's own Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory was still generating evidence to the contrary and supporting the notion that "even low sucrose intake" might be contributing to heart disease in 10 percent of Americans.
By the early 1990s, the USDA's research into sugar's health effects had ceased, and the FDA's take on sugar had become conventional wisdom, influencing a generation's worth of key publications on diet and health. Reports from the surgeon general and the National Academy of Sciences repeated the mantra that the evidence linking sugar to chronic disease was inconclusive, and then went on to equate "inconclusive" with "nonexistent." They also ignored a crucial caveat: The FDA reviewers had deemed added sugars—those in excess of what occurs naturally in our diets—safe at "current" 1986 consumption levels. But the FDA's consumption estimate was 43 percent lower than that of its sister agency, the USDA. By 1999, the average American would be eating more than double the amount the FDA had deemed safe­—although we have cut back by 13 percent since then.

ASKED TO COMMENT ON SOME of the documents described in this article, a Sugar Association spokeswoman responded that they are "at this point historical in nature and do not necessarily reflect the current mission or function" of the association. But it is clear enough that the industry still operates behind the scenes to make sure regulators never officially set a limit on the amount of sugar Americans can safely consume. The authors of the 2010 USDA dietary guidelines, for instance, cited two scientific reviews as evidence that sugary drinks don't make adults fat. The first was written by Sigrid Gibson, a nutrition consultant whose clients included the Sugar Bureau (England's version of the Sugar Association) and the World Sugar Research Organization (formerly the ISRF). The second review was authored by Carrie Ruxton, who served as research manager of the Sugar Bureau from 1995 to 2000.
The Sugar Association has also worked its connections to assure that the government panels making dietary recommendations—the USDA's Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, for instance—include researchers sympathetic to its position. One internal newsletter boasted in 2003 that for the USDA panel, the association had "worked diligently to achieve the nomination of another expert wholly through third-party endorsements."

In the few instances when governmental authorities have sought to reduce people's sugar consumption, the industry has attacked openly. In 2003, after an expert panel convened by the World Health Organization recommended that no more than 10 percent of all calories in people's diets should come from added sugars—nearly 40 percent less than the USDA's estimate for the average American—current Sugar Association president Andrew Briscoe wrote the WHO's director general warning that the association would "exercise every avenue available to expose the dubious nature" of the report and urge "congressional appropriators to challenge future funding" for the WHO. Larry Craig (R-Idaho, sugar beets) and John Breaux (D-La., sugarcane), then co-chairs of the Senate Sweetener Caucus, wrote a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, urging his "prompt and favorable attention" to prevent the report from becoming official WHO policy. (Craig had received more than $36,000 in sugar industry contributions in the previous election cycle.) Thompson's people responded with a 28-page letter detailing "where the US Government's policy recommendations and interpretation of the science differ" with the WHO report. Not surprisingly, the organization left its experts' recommendation on sugar intake out of itsofficial dietary strategy.
In recent years the scientific tide has begun to turn against sugar. Despite the industry's best efforts, researchers and public health authorities have come to accept that the primary risk factor for both heart disease and type 2 diabetes is a condition called metabolic syndrome, which now affects more than 75 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Metabolic syndrome is characterized by a cluster of abnormalities—some of which Yudkin and others associated with sugar almost 50 years ago—including weight gain, increased insulin levels, and elevated triglycerides. It also has been linked tocancer and Alzheimer's disease. "Scientists have now established causation," Lustig said recently. "Sugar causes metabolic syndrome."

Newer studies from the University of California-Davis have even reported that LDL cholesterol, the classic risk factor for heart disease, can be raised significantly in just two weeksby drinking sugary beverages at a rate well within the upper range of what Americans consume—four 12-ounce glasses a day of beverages like soda, Snapple, or Red Bull. The result is a new wave of researchers coming out publicly against Big Sugar.
During the battle over the 2005 USDA guidelines, an internal Sugar Association newsletter described its strategy toward anyone who had the temerity to link sugar consumption with chronic disease and premature death: "Any disparagement of sugar," it read, "will be met with forceful, strategic public comments and the supporting science." But since the latest science is anything but supportive of the industry, what happens next?
"At present," Lustig ventures, "they have absolutely no reason to alter any of their practices. The science is in—the medical and economic problems with excessive sugar consumption are clear. But the industry is going to fight tooth and nail to prevent that science from translating into public policy."
Like the tobacco industry before it, the sugar industry may be facing the inexorable exposure of its product as a killer—science will ultimately settle the matter one way or the other—but as Big Tobacco learned a long time ago, even the inexorable can be held up for a very long time.

Gary Taubes, author of the 2011 best-seller Why We Get Fat, has written for Discover, Science, and the New York Times Magazine. He is currently writing a book about sugar.

Cristin Kearns Couzens took a two-year break from her career in dental health administration to pursue independent research on the sugar industry.