Does sugar make us fat?
Sweetener industry-funded studies say no, but critics decry bias
When the titans of the U.S. sweetener industry — sugar producers on one side and makers of highfructose corn syrup on the other — faced off in court last month, a Canadian university professor stood ready to wade into the battle.
Dr. John Sievenpiper was retained by the Corn Refiners Association as an expert witness to further its case that the much-maligned but ubiquitous syrup is no less healthy than sugar.
For the University of Toronto nutrition-science professor and physician, a consultant to the corn refiners’ law firm, it was just the latest collaboration with the producers of sweeteners — and of foods that amply use sucrose and fructose.
Sievenpiper, world-renowned in the field, is among a small group of Canadian academic scientists who have received hundreds of thousands in funding from soft-drink makers, packaged-food trade associations and the sugar industry, turning out studies and opinion articles that often coincide with those businesses’ interests.
The links highlight a burgeoning debate about the relationship between academia and industry amid an epidemic of obesityrelated disease.
The issue came to the fore again last week as an-anti obesity centre at the University of Colorado announced it was shutting down in the wake of news it had received more than $1 million from Coca-Cola Co.
The support in Canada includes more than $265,000 that CocaCola provided to University of Toronto researchers in the past few years, $50,000 of it for a child-nutrition centre.
University faculty members have also reported funding for studies, or fees for speaking engagements, consulting and travel from PepsiCo, Dr Pepper-Snapple, General Mills and Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s biggest producers of high-fructose corn syrup.
Some of their research and public pronouncements would not displease those companies.
Last year at a “Sweet Symposium” sponsored by Coke in Australia and a program put on by the Corn Refiners Association in San Diego, Sievenpiper argued sweeteners are not the culprit in obesity and related ailments — eating too much is the problem.
Harvey Anderson, another highly respected University of Toronto nutrition scientist who receives funding from Coke and sweetener companies, co-wrote a 2011 paper with four employees of Archer Daniels Midland.
Its conclusion? Contrary to some other research, fructose and other sugars are not linked to body mass or metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms that raises the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
The scientists say such financial ties are needed to bolster scarce public research funds and involve the private sector in improving public health.
Other experts say it only leads to bias, aiding businesses at the heart of the obesity problem.
“According to the World Health Organization … diet-related disease is the leading cause of death, period,” says Bill Jeffery of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, a food-regulation advocacy group. “When studies are conducted with funding from organizations that have a vested interest in the outcome, they sow doubt, they sow doubt with public-policy makers.”
A Spanish study in 2013 concluded that just 17 per cent of company-supported review studies found a link between “sugarsweetened beverages” and body weight. More than 80 per cent of those free of such financing suggested drinking pop led to weight gain.
Indeed, the Canada Food Guide and government-mandated nutrition labels still fail to address the sugar that manufacturers add to their foods.
Researchers who get industry money are good people who likely consider themselves impervious to influence, but the practice will one day be considered taboo — much as independent scientists no longer take tobacco funds, predicts Yoni Freedhoff, an Ottawa obesity doctor.
But Anderson defends accepting industry money, calling it part of an effort to engage companies and make them part of the solution to diet-related disease. “If we want to change public health, we have to work with the agri-food industry. It’s the delivery system,” he said. “To say ‘We’re not going to talk to you, and we know better,’ is frankly nuts.”
Some other experts view the issue much differently. Americans’ ingestion of sweetened drinks quadrupled between 1950 and 2000 to almost 50 U.S. gallons per person yearly, says George Bray, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center.
“I grant we may have poor eating habits, but that is no excuse for what the beverage industry is foisting on us,” he said. “I’m not an ostrich with my head buried in the sand.”