Sugar coating it

Here’s a no-brainer headline if I ever saw one: “Study: Sugary Soda Boosts Diabetes Risk.”

Who could have possibly seen THAT one coming?

What’s a little surprising is WHERE it came from.

You are what you drink

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health examined nine years of dietary and medical data on more than 51,000 women who participated in the Nurses’ Health Study II. From this group, well over 700 cases of type 2 diabetes were diagnosed during the study period.

After crunching the data, the Harvard team concluded that the excess calories and high levels of rapidly absorbable sugars found in non-diet soft drinks promote weight gain and a greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes. In fact, women who drink one or more soft drinks per day may have an 80 percent increased risk of type 2 diabetes compared to women who pass on this type of beverage.

Another problem: The calories in a soft drink don’t cause a feeling of fullness in the way that calories from food do, promoting a higher calorie and sugar intake.

But a soft drink trade group disagreed with the Harvard results. Their spokesperson stated that “unhealthy lifestyles” are to blame for obesity and diabetes, not soft drink consumption.

Which is sort of like saying that cars don’t cause traffic accidents, it’s the driving around in cars that causes accidents.

Good timing

When I came across the sugar study I couldn’t help but wonder why researchers – from Harvard no less – would devote their time and research dollars to a study with an almost certain foregone conclusion. Even more curious: The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), arguably the biggest of the Big Kahunas of medical journals.

Seems like much ado about the glaringly obvious. But then a New York Times article reminded me that what may be obvious out here in the real world is sometimes much less apparent in the world of food marketing.

Last week the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee submitted its report containing the recommendations for the 2005 revision of USDA Dietary Guidelines. As I told you in the e-Alert “Sweetening the Pyramid” (8/27/03), lobbying efforts from the sugar industry have made a huge impact on the previous revisions of the guidelines. And those efforts were strongly felt this time as well.

The Times article reports that, last May, the 12-person committee was deadlocked – 6 to 6 – on whether or not the guidelines should include a statement about sugar intake being related to obesity and nutrient deficiency. But over the past three months, some recent studies won over three of the committee members. The final vote was 9 to 3 in favor of including a sugar statement.

And according to the Times, the Harvard JAMA study was instrumental in tipping the balance.

The fine print

The final recommendations of the advisory committee are just that: recommendations. So what the final 2005 guidelines will eventually say about sugar is anybody’s guess. And even if the guidelines do suggest that added sugars should be avoided, that doesn’t mean the general public will necessarily hear much about it.

In any case, it’s going to take a lot more than the advice of a government panel to get people to wise up and lay off the huge consumption of soft drinks and other foods that are loaded with added sugars.

So what in the world are people supposed to drink if they’re advised to stop guzzling soda pop? The lead researcher of the Harvard study, Dr. Meir Stampfer, has a suggestion. He told the Associated Press that, generally, your best beverage option is water.

Water! Imagine!

The sugar lobby won’t be happy to hear about that.

To Your Good Health,

Jenny Thompson
Health Sciences Institute

Sources:

“Sugar-Sweetened Beverages, Weight Gain, and Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes in Young and Middle-Aged Women” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 292, No. 8, 8/25/04, jama.ama-assn.org
“Study: Sugary Soda Boosts Diabetes Risk” The Associated Press, 8/24/04, thewbalchannel.com
“Added Sugars, Less Urgency? Fine Print and the Guidelines” Marian Burros, The New York Times, 8/25/04, nytimes.com