50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)

"Trust the science."

Based on personal observations I find it very hard to believe sugar consumption has decreased across the US population in the last 13 years.

There's a near constant line out every Starbucks drive-thru I pass. Whenever I go in one to work while caffeinated, those definitely aren't unsweetened beverages being prepared for the masses. Supposedly the whole reason Starbucks espresso is so bitter is so it works well with their sweetened beverages, straight espresso drinkers are in the extreme minority.

Calories in calories out (CICO) is the what, not the why. If you saw someone who spent $1000 on jewelry every month and didn't pay their electricity bills, would you tell them to learn to budget? Heck no, you'd tell them they need therapy to fix much deeper root causes. So why are we telling obese people they need to "budget" by saying that CICO is the one and only solution?

CICO is great if you want to lose a few pounds, and if an obese person sticks to it, they will lose weight. But while CICO is a great tool, followers of CICO as the one and only way frustrate me, as they turn weight loss into a moral struggle solely about willpower. To them, the only reason someone is fat is because they are weak willed and any desire for an "easy way" out through anything other than CICO is viewed as laziness. Yet, while most of these "easy ways" out are indeed fake, we do know that in several specific cases there is a root cause separate from willpower, such as thyroid disorders and PCOS.

In these cases, it is not simply a matter of the affected person having less willpower, but rather that they need greater willpower to use CICO to overcome their obesity than their non-obese counterparts. Note that in these cases CICO does still work, but once you shift the perspective from "these people have less willpower" to "something is requiring these people to have greater willpower to do the same thing" then a new question immediately arises: "what is that something?"

Considering we know such root causes are possible, is it so unreasonable that rather than 1/3 of the population having bad willpower, that instead they have some sort of invisible disorder that is the root cause? Before 1982, gastritis and peptic ulcers had unknown causes and were attributed to stress. These days, we understand there is a bacteria H Pylori that is the root cause that we can give antibiotics for and "magically" cure. My personal belief is that within 100 years we will find some sort of similar root cause for obesity and if we are lucky, we may similarly be able to find a "magic cure" for it too.

Meanwhile, as someone who is obese and is working on it, I absolutely do recommend CICO as the best tool we currently have. But it's strikingly similar to trying to get a homeless person to budget in that there are likely other things that need to be fixed first, we just don't know what they are.

It's processed food! Thinking it's sugar, fat, or some other macro/micronutrient is reductionist "nutritionism".

Food processing and industrial cooking is the culprit. It took me about 20 years to understand this.

Michael Pollan wrote lucidly about it starting ~15 years ago, and he wrote about the marketing patterns that the food industry uses (to this day) to cast blame.

And this is being made rigorous, e.g. by the NIH. Great article with history and science: How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket (includes recent Brazilian public health policy, and the NIH study)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-proce...

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21071809

You can eat ANYTHING except processed food: traditional Asian, Italian, Mexican, Indian, etc. with the ingredients and recipes they used. Really! The problem is that this is quite difficult to get in many areas, because so much food is processed and enhanced to sell.

For a rough picture, processed food was probably 5% of the American diet in 1940, and when I grew up in the 80's and 90's it was maybe 50%. But now it's more like 80%.

> what did they do in the rest of the 50 years?

There's a bit at the end about Coca Cola and candy companies continuing to manipulate research. I assume it's been a constant battle, not just a one-time $50k expenditure. But, it must have been worth the money for the sugar producers.

>Do journalists only look at review papers? ... Public discourse also completely ignored sugar, somehow.

It definitely did not ignore sugar. Artificial sweeteners have been a thing for a long time, for example. I'm sure there have been scientists and doctors screaming about this since the day the paper was published (as the article notes, there was already a ton of research speaking out against sugar). We knew sugar was bad, we just thought it was maybe a litttttle bit better than fat, which was exactly what the industry wanted.