ROB BEAGLEHOLE

Anti-sugar man

Afive-year-old came into Rob Beaglehole’s surgery to have half his teeth pulled out. He was clutching a bottle of Powerade, the sugary drink that Beaglehole believes had ruined the boy’s teeth.

‘‘I said to him, ‘Why do you drink that?’ He said, ‘Because Richie does’.’’

This was Richie McCaw, former captain of the All Blacks, long-term promoters of the energy drink.

Beaglehole says he was ‘‘disappointed’’ to hear a victim of the drinks praise the national heroes who pushed them.

Or is it perhaps worse than ‘‘disappointed’’?

‘‘Yeah, it is. I was outraged,’’ says the dentist. ‘‘You hear all these old wives’ tales – ‘Parents give their kids baby bottles full of Coke or Milo.’ The reality is I see it on a dayto-day basis.

‘‘People do give their kids Coke in baby bottles, and Milo, or juice. They’re all going to hammer your teeth.’’

Another time the 45-year-old was pulling the teeth of a child, a heavy sugary drinks user though he was still in nappies, ‘‘and in the next door I heard the chainsaw starting.

‘‘The surgeons were amputating the lower leg of a patient who had type-2 diabetes complications of these sugary drinks.’’

Beaglehole sees the public health problem when he looks in the mouths of his patients. This ‘‘also sort of fires me up, because I can see that it’s unjust. It just shouldn’t be like this’’.

He helped persuade the World Health Organisation last year to launch a worldwide campaign against the ‘‘sickness in a bottle’’. It wants special taxes, promotion bans, advertising restrictions and a whole lot of other things.

Beaglehole would like to see photographs on soft drink cans and bottles of children with tiny rotten teeth, just as cigarette packets now feature ghastly images of rotting lungs.

The same weapons are needed against sugary drinks that have proved so successful against tobacco, he says. He imbibed this idea from his father, Robert, another public health expert and a leader of the campaign against smoking since the 1980s.

The arguments ‘‘are identical’’, he says. In both cases commercial interests were ruining people’s health, and the government was afraid to act because it feared it would be called names, especially ‘‘nanny state’’. So it’s personal with Rob Beaglehole. The principal dental officer of health for the Nelson-Marlborough DHB is married to yoga teacher Sam Loe. The family love to holiday in Abel Tasman National park, communing with nature and living the simple life.

He might seem as driven as any missionary, but he’s not religious: ‘‘I don’t get called by a higher power’’, although he does have a ‘‘spiritual outlook’’.

But reality is messy and public health campaigners have kids. What do his two young sons, aged 8 and 11, say about his crusade against Coca-Cola? Do they ever ask him to stop spoiling their fun?

‘‘That’s a great question. We have honey, jam, icecream and yoghurt at home.

‘‘Every now and then they [the boys] can have some juice, although diluted, obviously.

‘‘And every now and then if they’re going out or have a birthday here they can order a ginger ale. That’s OK.’’

But boys become teenagers. Maybe they will succumb to all those ads linking Coke with being part of the fun crowd?

Beaglehole proposes to meet any adolescent pushback with facts and reason.

‘‘The wise approach is to be honest about what these things are and why people want to drink them. And then give them information about it, information and more information.

‘‘For instance, companies are taking the profit off you, all the profits go back, it’s not taxed in New Zealand, it’s causing A, B and C.

‘‘You make the decision about what you are going to do.’’

Beaglehole didn’t defy his anti-smoking dad by taking up cigarettes. And he’s lived to see the day when adolescent smokers have changed in teenagers’ eyes from glamorous ‘‘rebels’’ to sad ‘‘losers’’.

Reformers can also appeal to adolescent idealism. More and more high school students are taking up the sugary drinks cause, he says, campaigning to stop dairies near schools selling them to students in uniform.

Information has its own power, he says. Whenever he gives talks he asks: ‘How many people here have had a glass of juice today?’’

Many hands shoot up, and then he tells them fruit juice is full of sugar: ‘‘It would have been better to have a can of Coke than that glass of orange juice.’’

That’s why taxes that apply only to drinks with added sugar don’t go far enough.

Coca-Cola says consumption of sugary drinks is going down and so special taxes are no longer needed. No, says Beaglehole.

Any small decline is dwarfed by the massive increase in consumption in the years after 2000, the same period in which obesity and type-2 diabetes rates have skyrocketed.

Beaglehole was for two years a political adviser to Labour MP Damien O’Connor, associate minister of health during the Helen Clark government. ‘‘I know what goes on,’’ he says. No politician ‘‘is actually being paid’’, he says. But they are given tickets to the corporate box, stuff like that. And a National Government is already sympathetic to a corporate’s anti-tax arguments.

But hasn’t National been heavily taxing tobacco? Beaglehole points to the ‘‘crucial role played by the Maori Party’’, its coalition partner.

Health Minister Jonathan Coleman says sugary-drinks taxes don’t necessarily work. In fact, says Beaglehole, the evidence is overwhelming.

‘‘It’s economics 101. If you put the price up, consumption goes down.’’ It worked with cigarettes, why not with sugary drinks?

Aren’t sugary taxes tougher on the poor? Yep, says Beaglehole, but the poor benefit most from it. Nanny state? It’s not about nanny, says Beaglehole, it’s about leadership. Do the politicians want to stop the damage or don’t they? And don’t they want to stop the cost to the state of preventable illness?

Beaglehole tries not to make the argument personal. ‘‘It’s not about Rob Beaglehole,’’ he says, and it’s not about Richie McCaw either. ‘‘Richie’s a great guy,’’ he says, but the All Blacks are still pushing sugary drinks.

And those little kids keep coming to his surgery with bad drink bottles in their hands.

"It's economics 101. If you put the price up, consumption goes down." Rob Beaglehole on why sugary drinks should be taxed.