For more than half a century, the sugar industry has used Big Tobacco tactics to suppress sugar/cancer link and to confuse the science

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/11/22/expensive-profitable-doubt.html

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/me puts down the cookie

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. . . I’ll wait for people who are better able to evaluate the evidence to chime in, but this is giving me a vaguely chemtrails vibe

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Reading this the day before Thanksgiving…I’m still not skipping dessert.:cake::pie::ice_cream::yum:

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Well, the biggest problem with chemtrails theories (other than the obvious lack of any independently confirmable evidence supporting them) is that there’s no profit commensurate with the costs of such a program.

Here, there’s a very clear profit motive… did you know that the sugar industry once touted cane sugar as a diet aid?

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So now that we know that Big Sugar is scum, does this mean Boing Boing will no longer be doing the yearly Halloween candy hierarchy survey?

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So two notes on sugar, not necessarily the article:

  1. Got a Post magazine from a bunch of stuff in an ebay auction (went after 1 thing, got a few cool things I want, and several i need to get rid of). In there was an ad asking if little Timmy is getting enough sugar or not? And that with sugar he will have the energy to play all day. (Circa 1968)

  2. I think the biggest issue with sugar is we are using it EVERYWHERE, even in stuff that traditionally wouldn’t have any or have a very small amount. It is partly because our brains are hardwired to crave the previously hard to get, but full of cheap energy stuff. And so in taste test for everything from bread to frozen dinners, the stuff with sugar usually tests out as tasting better.

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"no credible link between ingested sugars and cancer has been established."

White sugar is legalized poison.

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All the links appear to point back, some directly, some indirectly, to the same PLOS paper. The paper (from my quick read) seems to say that a study was done indicating a possible link, but that the study was dropped before anything conclusive was determined. I would like to see more research done on the link between sugar and cancer before I throw my Christmas gingerbread out for the birds to eat. Does this mean that HFCS is now a good guy?

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If you want real sugar scumminess, look into the corporate history of CSR.

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And that’s how we ended up with the outdated, unhealthy USDA food pyramid from 1992. (Note the added sugars everywhere.)

USDA_Food_Pyramid.gif730×569 66.8 KB

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If you haven’t seen it yet - find “That Sugar Film” - pay for it - and watch it. Meanwhile:

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If sugar causes cancer, it’s not just white cane sugar, it’s every kind of sugar - honey, juice, corn syrup, etc, etc. There’s no “healthy” kind of carbohydrate sweetener. And you don’t need to wait for confirmation of the PLOS paper to know that they are all bad for you (the only open question is how bad) – the link between sugar and simple carbohydrate consumption and diabetic syndrome has been well established for a long time.

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I believe the phrase you need to keep in mind is ‘in moderation’. People who are susceptible to their bodies misusing sugars do need to monitor their intake of the various simple carbs, and no one thinks it’s a good idea to live on a steady diet of Super Sugar Crisp. OTOH, an occasional dose of sweetener in your coffee will probably not give you cancer or drive you into insulin shock.

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Two 54 minute radio programs:


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Yes, after lurking here (is that still a word?) for years, I created a login just to post about this.

Next time you shop check the ingrediant list on a box of good old SIFTO salt.
Or I assume any of it’s ilk. Not the upscale stuff but the regular restaurant type you see everywhere. Right near the top after Salt, it says Sugar. What??? Sugar in Salt? What gives? Well, sugar is cheaper and extremely addictive so what a great way to cut costs. And that salt tastes great!
Been going on for decades.

Ok that’s it.

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Thanks!

This is the one that woke me up.

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The thing is, sugar makes a lot of people really bad at moderation.

Maybe we shouldn’t want our government bodies to advise everybody to take “just a little bit” of something that is addictive, hard to avoid and clearly bad for us, maybe we should instead be discouraging it’s use?

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Moderation is hard to do when food manufacturers keep adding it to things that don’t need it.

One example from many:
I had a brand of chilli salt that I used to buy until recently. It changed the ingredients so that it had 26g of carbohydrate per 100g of chilli salt (20g refined sugar), when it used to have 6g of carbohydrate (from the dried chilli).

Why does anyone need added sugar in salt?!

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Thanks for that. It’s certainly part of a longer history of sugar’s relationship to the development of capitalism and to slavery more specifically…

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