U.S. cuts estimate of sugar intake of citizens
It was repeated so often it was accepted as true: The typical U.S. citizen consumed from 95 to 100 pounds of sugar each year. Health experts said that consumption was surely contributing to a nationwide crisis of obesity.
But in a move that has largely gone unnoticed, the Agriculture Department, keeper of the statistics on the United States’ sweet tooth, has employed new methodology that overnight shaved 20 pounds off its estimate and brought the number down to a precise 76.7 pounds. The move by the department raises questions about the entire notion of per-capita consumption just as the battles over sugar and sweeteners are reaching a peak.
“There’s such an implication of precision and accuracy in that decimal point — boy, we’ve got this nailed now,” said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “But when you take a good look, it’s built on a foundation of sand.”
Jean Buzby, the agricultural economist who headed the department’s team responsible for the data that led to the revision in sugar consumption, agreed that it was far from perfect but said it was better than what was used in the past.
She pointed to the note on each page of the government’s data that labeled them “first estimates” that “are intended to serve as a starting point for additional research and discussion.”
Few people are aware of the change, which quietly occurred two months ago. Jacobson stumbled across it recently while working on a project on sugar consumption.
He takes issue with the new methodology and contends it could be a setback in the push for healthy eating. Suggestions that sugar consumption is down, or dropping, could take some pressure off companies that make sugary foods, for example.
In e-mails the center obtained through a Freedom of Information request, officials at sugar industry trade groups discussed the benefits of the lower estimate and how they might persuade the USDA to make a change that would reduce it even more.
“We perceive it to be in our interest to see as low a percapita sweetener consumption estimate as possible,” Jack Roney, director of economics and policy analysis at the American Sugar Alliance, wrote in an e-mail on March 30, 2011.
Estimating sugar consumption is a tricky proposition, fraught with potential for misjudgments. It is based loosely on an educated guess at how much of various sweetener- laden foods that consumers buy is actually eaten, versus how much is thrown away. “It is difficult to obtain nationally representative estimates of consumer-level food loss,” Buzby wrote in an e-mail.
There had long been a sense that the estimates the department was using failed to capture all of the loss that was occurring, Buzby said. Five years ago, just as debate over sugar use was heating up, the USDA began an overhaul of what it called “consumerlevel food-loss estimates.” It hired RTI International, a nonprofit consulting firm, to help it come up with new loss estimates more firmly anchored in data.
Mary Muth, director of food and nutrition policy research at RTI, said she had used data from the Nielsen Co.’s Homescan surveys of consumer food purchases and interviews done for the Centers for Disease Control’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to come up with the new loss estimates for sugar and sweeteners.
“It’s an improvement over how it was done before but an incremental one, and surely more work can be done,” Muth said.
In all, RTI’s revisions called for higher loss estimates for 84 foods and lower losses of 54, while leaving a handful unchanged.
The new estimate includes the amount of sugar consumers reported in the CDC’s survey that they had eaten, by, say, stirring it into coffee or sprinkling it on oatmeal and experts’ estimates of how much sugar was used in food products — and subsequently discarded.
“The new estimate is still relying heavily on experts making what seem to me to be largely guesses,” Jacobson said. “Other than the 4 percent they’re getting” from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, “what do they really know for certain?”
The sugar industry argued that the loss estimates for high fructose corn syrup, glucose and dextrose should match those of sugar since they are used in much the same way as an ingredient. The USDA agreed with the industry’s reasoning, Buzby wrote.
The effect was to increase the amount of sweeteners lost, further reducing the amount eaten, from 88 pounds to 76.7 pounds, according to Roney’s e-mail.
“I don’t disagree that high fructose corn syrup and the rest shouldn’t be looked at the same way as conventional sugar,” Jacobson said. “My objection is more fundamental — that they are just picking numbers, 20 percent, 17 percent, 34 percent, and giving them an authority that they don’t really have.”