Swallow This

by Joanna Blythman

  Products sold on these premises contain one or more of the following – additives, antioxidants, sweeteners, colours, flavourings, flavour enhancers, preservatives.

  More informative in a specific sort of way was the ‘typical meat contents’ information for savoury products, often described as ‘man snacks’ because of their supposedly sustaining carnivorous contents. This showed, for example, that the pork element in a Greggs jumbo sausage roll accounted for just 19 per cent of the total ingredients – not much in the way of primal food – and that the pork contained natural colour and preservative.

  It was a similar story with the chicken bake: the chicken element accounted for only 18 per cent of the ingredients, and the chicken itself contained natural flavour and natural colour. Bridies, Scotch pies, steak bakes, fajita chicken lattices and more, all contained a colour, flavour or preservative, and some contained all three. And there were a few more intriguing flashes of detail. It stated, for instance, that ‘ham used in some of our products is formed from selected cuts of pure pork leg’, which is to say that it wasn’t cut from a whole ham in the traditional sense of that word. It also informed me that the ‘breakfast sausage contains beef protein’, but it didn’t tell me what, exactly, ‘beef protein’ is, as opposed to straight beef as we know it. After all, beef is naturally rich in protein, so why the semantic word play? Had beef protein in some other form been added to pork sausage? This wording didn’t enlighten me.

  Nevertheless, the customer notice was rounded off with an upbeat and generous flourish: ‘If you have any queries, do not hesitate to ask the staff in the shop who will be pleased to help you’. Well, I had tried that, but they didn’t seem to know the full story either. So I contacted the public relations company that handles media enquiries for Greggs, and asked for the ingredients listings for their products. ‘We’ll look into this for you’, they promised. In a week, I hadn’t heard a thing, so I followed up my request. Three weeks later, I received this response from the senior manager handling the Greggs account:

  Unfortunately whilst nutritional information is available on the Greggs website, ingredient lists are not because Greggs wishes to protect the recipes of its iconic products.

  In other words, get lost. We don’t need, by law, to tell you what’s in our products, so we’re not going to. Greggs just wanted me to take it on trust that it puts only the freshest and finest ingredients into its ‘iconic products’. And yet, in the absence of reassuring transparency, I felt unable to do so.

  PART TWO

  The defining characteristics of processed food

  6

  Sweet

  Jason Reitman’s black comedy about the dark art of lobbying, Thank You for Smoking, starred Aaron Eckhart as a high-earning lobbyist for the tobacco industry. At one point in the film, Eckhart is seen in cynical conversation with fellow professional lobbyists (for the alcohol industry and gun lobby) debating who amongst them has the toughest reason and evidence-denying job. Were he making that film now, Reitman might well put a lobbyist for the sugar industry around the table, because sugar is in big trouble, and needs all the help it can get. Despite their best efforts, sugar companies and sugar-dependent manufacturers find themselves in a deep, defensive silo, as sticky, dark and hard to get out of as treacle. Sugar, as the headlines read, is the new tobacco.

  Changed days. When saturated fat was the nutrition establishment’s wicker man, the health-wrecking effects of sugar sneaked in under the radar. The fatwa on fat was a cash cow for sugar refiners, spawning legions of processed products with ramped-up levels of sugar to cover up the inevitable loss of taste that occurs when flavour-centric fat is removed.

  So fixated was the dietetic establishment with promoting fat avoidance, that, on occasion, it even ended up promoting sugar because the healthiness of foods was defined by the absence of fat. In 2014 a baffled friend of mine was given a copy of a document known as the Good Hearted Glasgow Diet Sheet by her GP on the grounds that she had high cholesterol. The introduction read: ‘Cutting down on the amount of fat which you eat will help lower the level of cholesterol in your blood.’ This is a highly debatable statement because the putative link between fat consumption and raised cholesterol is based on over-simplistic science, as is the contention that reducing cholesterol improves health outcomes. The vexed question of cholesterol apart, it was alarming to read the diet advice: sugar, jam, marmalade, honey, boiled sweets, pastilles and gums all appeared in the ‘recommended foods’ column.

  Simmering away in the background, of course, there has long been a persistent narrative on sugar and its capacity to damage our health. Back in 1972, physiologist John Yudkin published his book, Sweet and Dangerous, subsequently retitled more explicitly in further editions as Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It. If that message isn’t clear enough, what is? But for many years, the sugar lobby suppressed such explicit attack, using a two-pronged strategy.

  The first tactic was to neutralise any embedded concerns about sugar we might have by creating a spurious positive association with health. The aim here is to create a feel-good message that clashes with, and hopefully overrides, any negative perception. (This is a classic damage-limitation manoeuvre used by potentially unpopular companies, the reason why polluting oil companies often sponsor wildlife projects, for example.)

  In the case of companies whose products are loaded with sugar, the easiest response was to link their products to sport, athleticism and physical activity. So Coca-Cola was all too happy to be the official soft drinks provider for the London 2012 Olympic Games as this enabled it to demonstrate its strong commitment to the ‘Olympic values – participation, friendship, excellence and respect’, and ‘build deeper relationships with the people who enjoy our products’. Isn’t that nice? Irn-Bru, the amber-coloured, sweet fizzy drink ‘made in Scotland from girders’ by A.G. Barr, was declared the ‘Official Soft Drink of Glasgow’ for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Bear in mind that Glasgow is the city with the lowest life expectancy in the UK, in the country (Scotland) that has the worst health record in Europe. ‘Retailers will be able to generate excellent visibility in-store with the point of sale [material] we are providing and capitalise on the unrivalled opportunity to drive soft drinks’ sales before, during and after Glasgow 2014’, the company’s head of marketing purred. However much purveyors of sweet products appear to encourage physical exercise, it’s clear that upping sales is their overriding preoccupation.

  The sugar lobby’s second tactic was not on show in any public sports arena, but highly effective behind the scenes: it dismissed its critics as mavericks and heretics on the fringes of scientific consensus. In the case of John Yudkin, who first blew the whistle on sugar, his stance cost him dearly. Jobs and research grants that might otherwise have come Yudkin’s way did not materialise, and attacks on him included the abrupt cancellation of conferences where he might advance the anti-sugar case. The sugar lobby dismissed Pure, White, and Deadly as a work of fiction, and continued for decades to bullishly pursue anyone who dared to disseminate any anti-sugar views.

  I have first-hand experience of this. In 2009, a representative of the UK sugar lobby, then known as the Sugar Bureau, a body that has since changed its name to the less partisan and more scientific-sounding Sugar Nutrition UK, wrote to my editor at a popular magazine, demanding that I provide scientific evidence to justify every reference I had made about the negative impact of sugar on health in an article. He even asked, without any hint of irony, that I back up my assertion that sugar can cause tooth decay, a statement that had been uncontroversial for decades. Nevertheless, all this I duly did, at some length, and in time-consuming detail.

  Not satisfied with my response, the pugnacious sugar lobby representative referred the matter back to my editor. She batted the complaint upstairs to the department that deals with legal affairs. It was already well acquainted with sugar lobby complaints as a result of its habit of stamping on any journalist, editor
or broadcaster who dared to let it be said that sugar might be anything other than good for us. In my case, the sugar lobby eventually gave up, but for years this general strategy paid off. It effectively silenced critics by keeping them tied up in lengthy, work-intensive exchanges of letters, constantly refusing to accept their very credible sources and demanding that letters ‘correcting’ the ‘misleading’ and outlandish notion that sugar isn’t good for you, be printed. Knowing how combative and demanding the sugar lobby was, editors and journalists tended to self-censor, by avoiding the subject, or writing about it in a softly-softly, inoffensive way. To do otherwise would probably mean getting caught up in a protracted, seemingly interminable dialogue. The media soon got the message: ‘Don’t say anything negative about sugar unless you’re up for a lorry load of hassle.’

  Try as hard as they might, lobbyists can only suppress bad news for so long. In the words of one British Medical Journal editorial, ‘the pendulum is now definitely swinging away from fat as the root of all evil’. As the nutritional case against saturated fat has begun melting away, sugar has replaced it as public health enemy number one. The global sugar lobby really began to feel the heat in 2012 with the publication of Dr Robert Lustig’s book, Fat Chance, which powerfully argued that sugar, not fat, is the real villain in the global obesity epidemic. Publication in the science journal Nature of an article written by Dr Lustig and two colleagues, entitled ‘The Toxic Truth About Sugar’, upped the temperature further. It argued persuasively that an excess of sugar contributes to 35 million deaths a year worldwide, by making us fat, disrupting our metabolism, raising blood pressure, throwing hormones off balance and damaging the liver.

  By 2014, the case against sugar was bubbling up uncontrollably all over the place, like an untended saucepan of rapidly darkening, blisteringly hot caramel. And when the World Health Organization announced draft guidance recommending that people should halve their maximum daily intake of free sugars – that’s added sugars, including those from honey, syrups and fruit juice – from 10 per cent of total calories to 5 per cent, citing growing concern about sugar’s contribution to obesity and dental diseases, sugar was obviously on the back foot.

  True to type, companies up to their necks in sugar continued to mount the same old defence. Major refiner, AB Sugar, complained loudly that sugar was being singled out unfairly as the leading culprit in the obesity epidemic. Buying time, CAOBISCO, the Association of Chocolate, Biscuits and Confectionery Industries of Europe, tried to muddy the waters by insisting that the scientific case against sugar required ‘further scientific substantiation’. The British Nutrition Foundation, which, despite its neutral, professorial name, is a partisan defender of industrial food production, hailed the ‘sugar is the new tobacco’ attack as ‘misleading’, clinging to its dog-eared script that sugar is only harmful in excess, and nutritionally necessary otherwise. ‘Sugar’, it says, ‘is a type of carbohydrate that provides energy for the body in the form of glucose. In particular the brain needs glucose to function, as do muscles during exercise’. Far from sugar being bad for us, we are asked to believe that sugar is actually necessary for our bodies to function properly. Using this logic, candy floss can be a desirable part of a ‘balanced’ diet.

  Disturbingly, the founder of one baby food company wrote passionately that ‘outrageous headlines’ were ‘simplifying this serious national issue to a single, too simple, witch-hunt of one foodstuff’. What infant needs sugar added to its food? And when I wrote a column for the Grocer magazine saying that we had to face facts and cut our consumption of sugar, Terry Jones, the director of the Food and Drink Federation – a body that acts as a mouthpiece for the processed food and drink industry – responded with yet another letter to the editor:

  Although the balance of scientific evidence shows that sugars, like any other nutrient, can be enjoyed as part of a varied and balanced diet, a vocal minority persist in demonising this ingredient. The simple balanced diet and physical activity message has lost out to alarming narratives.

  That exasperated final line expressed a dawning realisation in the food industry that sugar has been outed as public health enemy Number One, and there is no going back. The defence of sugar is doomed. However much the sugar lobby blusters, it has lost its war, leaving manufacturers vulnerable to criticism for using it in such great quantity, and under immense pressure to reduce added sugar content in food and beverages. These days, mention of sugar on a product is not quite as bad as having a skull and crossbones on the label, but it is heading that way.

  From a public relations and sales point of view, that troublesome, toxic word ‘sugar’ has to be shooed off labels as fast as possible, and supermarkets have to be seen to be responding. Waitrose, for example, announced in 2014 that it was adjusting and reformulating its chilled juice and smoothie range, removing 7.1 tonnes of sugar a year, a gesture of commitment towards the new reduced sugar era. This meant delisting several lines in PepsiCo’s Copella and Tropicana range. Product delistings such as these send shock waves through the processed food industry. Ouch, that hurts! What’s next for the chop?

  Yet even under heavy pressure from supermarkets, there’s only so much sugar manufacturers can shed because they rely so heavily on a sweet taste to construct their products. A 100 gram, one-person can of cola contains up to nine teaspoons of sugar and, if you think about it, many highly profitable soft drinks are essentially water with sugars or sweeteners, colours and flavourings added – and this includes many products sold as juices, not just soft drinks.

  Sugar is not only a cornerstone of manufactured drinks, confectionery, bakery, breakfast cereals and desserts, but also a surprisingly important ingredient in many savoury products: mayonnaise, ketchup, soups and pasta sauces, ready meals, gravy and bread. When Which? investigated ready meals, it found that Sainsbury’s sweet and sour chicken with rice, and Tesco’s Everyday Value sweet and sour chicken with rice, contained around ten teaspoons of sugar in a meal for one. Sweetness is a hallmark of the lion’s share of processed foods.

  Sugar also has lots of other important technological properties for food manufacturers. It makes drinks more viscous and acts as a preservative in foods with long best before dates. Its water-binding property helps moisture retention, so you feel like you’re getting more for your money. Knowing we eat with our eyes, manufacturers use it to create enticing golden crusts and the appearance of patiently roasted meat. Added sugar makes dough more voluminous. In the words of one industry report, ‘sugar provides bulk, textural elements, browning, caramelisation and other necessary functional elements [in food manufacture] beyond its sweet taste’. In fact, telling food manufacturers to go easy on the sugar is like asking a builder to construct a house without joists.

  Sugar is such a lynchpin of food and drink manufacture, reformulating products so that they contain less, or none, is far from straightforward: it cannot usually be replaced by a single ingredient. Removing or replacing sugar will change taste, texture and appearance. To compensate, the whole recipe needs to be reformulated. So the hunt is on to find an alternative sweet substance with all the functional attributes needed in large-scale food and drink processing, one that can plausibly be presented to the public as more benign than sugar.

  Now, the food industry has been quietly working on losing mentions of the toxic word ‘sugar’ on its products for quite some time, using a series of ploys. Foremost here was the grooming of fructose, the type of sugar found naturally in fruit, for its role as a healthier type of sugar. This worked for a while. As every junk food marketer knows, the mere mention of fruit is a shortcut to creating a healthy image for a product. Fruit sugar sounds so much more health-enhancing than plain old sugar, doesn’t it? However, while the fructose in whole fruit comes hand-in-hand with fibre, which slows and reduces the body’s absorption of sugar, this is not the case when fructose is added in a highly refined, 100 per cent purified form, as it is in processed foods. When Mother Nature designed fruit, she thought it thr
ough properly. The potential poison in it (fructose) comes in the same wrapper as the antidote (fibre), which seems to prevent the former having any negative effects on our metabolism. But when pure fructose is used in food manufacture, it is every bit as disastrous for health as sucrose, the more familiar white table sugar; some scientists argue that its effect is even worse. Indeed, fructose now looks like the once promising new pupil in the class who turned out to be a nightmare.

  Of intense concern has been the highly refined form of fructose, extracted from corn using enzyme technology, called high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). In the UK, it more commonly appears on labels as glucose/fructose syrup, or vice versa. It is widely used in food manufacturing because it is cheaper than sugar and being liquid, it is easier to handle in industrial-scale production. Consumption of this sweetener has been linked to gout, hypertension, fatty liver disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity. North American corn refiners continue to argue that HFCS is ‘safe, natural and nutritionally the same as sugar’, but it has become so hot to handle that consumers on both sides of the Atlantic are voting with their feet and avoiding it. David Rosenthal, Senior Vice-President of the US Corn Refiners Association, voiced the industry’s image problem: