by Marion Nestle

Search results: corn refiners

Nov 2 2012

Mother Jones: How the industry minimized (and minimizes) the health effects of sugars

One of the great ironies of food politics these days is this: while journalists and scientists are increasingly documenting the health consequences of diets way too high in added sugars, the producers of two forms of those sugars—sucrose and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—are doing everything they can to decrease their rivals’ market shares.

Once the election is over, I will write about the ugly legal battles between the producers of sugar cane and beets (sucrose) and the corn refiners who produce HFCS.  But in the meantime, don’t miss the current issue of Mother Jones.

It has just published an investigative report by journalist Gary Taubes and dental health administrator Cristen Kearns Couzens:  Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies: How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?

Their report is a detailed account of how the sugar industry manipulated scientists and government officials into overlooking the health problems caused by overconsumption of sugars and instead focusing on overconsumption of dietary fat (both removed from their caloric context, alas).

Their winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers had come to see sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might exacerbate, if not cause, heart disease and diabetes.

With an initial annual budget of nearly $800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of Dixie Crystals, Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the association recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to allay the public’s fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold, and bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a “highly supportive” FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made it “unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in coming years.”

The report is accompanied by riveting background information, examples of sugar advertisements, and formerly confidential documents:

Much of what’s in this report came as news to me, but is consistent with what I know.  Here, for example, is a comparison of the increasingly complicated and obfuscated sugar recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans from 1980 through 2010:

  • 1980     Avoid too much sugar.
  • 1985     Avoid too much sugar.
  • 1990     Use sugars only in moderation.
  • 1995     Choose a diet moderate in sugars.
  • 2000    Choose beverages and foods to moderate your intake of sugars.
  • 2005     Choose and prepare foods and beverages with little added sugars or caloric sweeteners, such as amounts suggested by the USDA Food Guide and the DASH eating plan.
  • 2010     Reduce the intake of calories from solid fats and added sugars.

“Avoid too much sugar” is still good advice.
And here’s a photo of a billboard in Guatamala, taken a couple of years ago by anthropologist Emily Yates-Doerr.  If the sugar industry isn’t selling enough sugar here, might as well push it onto people in emerging economies.

Curl up with Mother Jones over the weekend , hopefully one free of hurricanes (I, along with many others, am still waiting for electricity, water, and heat).

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Sep 25 2012

HFCS vs. Sugar, and vice versa: eat less of both!

I’ve been trying to keep track of the legal dispute between the Corn Refiners (representing manufacturers of high fructose corn syrup—HFCS) and the Sugar Association, which represents growers of sugar beets and cane (sucrose).

Recall: HFCS is glucose and fructose separated, whereas sucrose is glucose and fructose stuck together.  Because they are biochemically pretty much the same (enzymes that split sucrose act quickly), they have the same effects in the body.

So the dispute is about market share, not science.

First, the Corn Refiners tried to change the name of HFCS to “corn sugar.”  The FDA turned this down (as well it should).

Then, the Sugar makers sued the Corn Refiners, claiming that the Corn Refiners’ public education marketing campaign was false and misleading because it promoted HFCS as “natural” (It’s not, in my opinion) and nutritionally and metabolically equivalent to other forms of sugar (which it is).

Then, the Corn Refiners countersued on the basis that Sugar lobbying groups are tricking the public into believing that sucrose is healthier than HFCS (it’s not) and trying to create a “health halo” for sucrose (absurd).

As Food Navigator puts it, the two associations are “trading insults.”

While all this is going on, a group called Citizens for Health has filed a petition with FDA to put the concentration of fructose in HFCS on package labels.  HFCS is usually 42% or 55% fructose (it is 50% in sucrose).  These forms of HFCS are considered by FDA to be generally recognized as safe (GRAS).

The petition argues that some products have more fructose—65% or 90%—and should say so.

All sugars should be consumed in small quantities, but fructose especially so.

The Corn Refiners say that Citizens for Health, which sponsors a website called foodidentitytheft.com, is funded by the Sugar Association.

Also in the meantime, a new study says HFCS has nothing whatsoever to do with obesityGuess who sponsored the study.

Advice for today: eat less sugar(s), meaning sucrose, glucose, fructose, table sugar, HFCS, corn sugar, and all the other euphemisms food companies use to deflect attention from how much their products contain.

Sep 14 2012

Maker of “pink slime” sues everyone who calls it that

You have to hand it to BPI (Beef Products Inc), the producer of  “Lean Finely Textured Beef (LFTB)”—a.k.a. “pink slime.”  The company deserves a prize for chutzpah (translation: outrageous audacity).

It has just filed a defamation (“veggie libel”) lawsuit for $1.2 billion (!) against an amazing cast of characters:

  • ABC News (owned by Disney)
  • TV news anchor Diane Sawyer
  • ABC correspondent Jim Avila
  • ABC correspondent David Kerley
  • Gerald Zirnstein , former USDA employee who invented the term “pink slime”
  • Carl Custer, former USDA employee
  • Kit Foshee, whistleblower former BPI employee

South Dakota, apparently, has a veggie libel law to protect companies making food products from people who say mean things about them (recall: the Texas cattlemen vs. Oprah Winfrey).  Nobody has ever tested the constitutionality of veggie libel laws but I don’t know anyone who thinks they will stand up in court—free speech and all that.

BPI says the company lost 80% of its sales, a loss of $20 million per month, following news broadcasts about “pink slime.”  It had to close three facilities—in Texas, Kansas, and Iowa—and fire 650 workers at those places as well as 85 others at the company’s headquarters in South Dakota.

As I’ve written before, I see the “pink slime” episode as reflecting a lack of transparency in the beef industry and BPI’s efforts to defend its products as an example of power politics in action.

BPI is fighting back, hard.

The responses:

ABC News says, “The lawsuit is without merit. We will contest it vigorously.”

Bill Marler, the Seattle attorney who specializes in representing victims of food poisonings, has taken on this case and is representing Custer and Zirnstein.

Marler points out:

  • You can buy a lot of Pink Slime for $1.2 billion.
  • Someone should have told BPI’s lawyer it is not a great PR move to repeat the same charge that your client is now claiming harmed them in the first place.
  • The lawsuit is without merit.
  • We intend to defend this bogus, unwarranted and frivolous claim brought by BPI against these two former FSIS public employees.
  • We are also contemplating filing a counter-claim against PBI.

Let the charges and countercharges begin!

This one will be almost as much fun to watch as the equally absurd legal squabbles between the Sugar Association and the Corn Refiners Association over what to call High Fructose Corn Syrup.  I’ll do a post on that next week sometime.

Jun 13 2012

Who benefits most from food stamps? Follow the money!

While Congress is fussing over the farm bill, Michele Simon’s new report, Food Stamps: Follow the Money, identifies the businesses that most stand to gain from the $72 billion spent last year on SNAP.  This program, formerly known as food stamps, gave 46 million Americans an average of  $134 per month to spend on food in late 2011.

Just as health and anti-obesity advocates are working to bring agricultural policy in line with health policy by getting the farm bill to promote production of healthier foods, they also are looking at ways to encourage SNAP recipients to make healthier food choices.  At present, SNAP recipients have few restrictions on what they can buy with their benefit cards.

In contrast, participants in the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC), which is not a farm bill program, can only use their benefits to buy foods of high nutritional value.  The idea of requiring SNAP recipients to do the same has split the advocacy community.

Anti-hunger advocates fear that any move to restrict benefits to healthier foods, or even to evaluate the current food choices of SNAP recipients, will make the program vulnerable to attacks and budget cuts.  They strongly oppose such suggestions.

Follow the Money explains some of the politics behind efforts to maintain the status quo:

  • Food industry groups such as the American Beverage Association and the Snack Food Association teamed up with anti-hunger groups to oppose health-oriented improvements to SNAP.
  • Companies such as Cargill, PepsiCo, and Kroger lobbied Congress on SNAP, while also donating money to America’s top anti- hunger organizations.
  • At least 9 states have proposed bills  to make health-oriented improvements to SNAP, but  none have passed, in part  due to opposition from the food industry.
  • Coca-Cola, the Corn Refiners of America, and Kraft Foods  all lobbied against a Florida bill that aimed  to disallow SNAP purchases for soda and junk food.
  • Nine Walmart Supercenters in Massachusetts received more than $33 million in SNAP dollars in one year.
  • Walmart received about half of the billion dollars in SNAP expenditures in Oklahoma over a 2-year period.
  • J.P. Morgan Chase holds contracts in 24 states to administer SNAP benefits.
  • Banks and other private contractors are reaping significant windfalls from the economic downturn and increasing SNAP participation.

The point here is that banks that administer SNAP have a vested interest in keeping SNAP enrollments high and makers of junk foods have a vested interest in making sure that there are no restrictions on use of benefits.

Another point: data on use of SNAP benefits exist but are either proprietary or not made available.

The report concludes with these recommendations:

  • Congress should maintain SNAP funding in this time of need for millions of Americans;
  • Congress should require collection and disclosure of SNAP product purchase data, retailer redemptions, and national data on bank fees;
  • USDA should evaluate state EBT contracts to determine if banks are taking undue advantage of taxpayer funds.

I’ve not seen this kind of analysis before and this report deserves attention.  At the very least I hope that it will encourage Congress to make sure that the poor get their fair share of SNAP benefits.

Dec 1 2011

Sugar vs. HFCS, continued

The increasingly absurd fight between the Sugar Association and the Corn Refiners Association over what to call High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) seems never to end.

Trade associations representing growers of sugar cane and sugar beets (sucrose–the white stuff on the table) have gone to court to charge that corporate members of the Corn Refiners Association (HFCS) are behind a “conspiracy” deliberately designed to “deceive the public.”  Why?  Because—in an equally absurd move—they want to change the name of HFCS to corn sugar. 

The sucrose-growers lawsuit argues Corn Refiners conspired to engage in false advertising as part of a $50 million campaign to promote HFCS by changing its name to “corn sugar,” thereby implying that HFCS is equivalent to “real” sugar from cane and beet plants.

Oh please.  Sucrose is glucose and fructose linked together.  HFCS is glucose and fructose separated.  Both are sugars (note: plural).  Sucrose is extracted from sugar beets and cane in a series of boiling, extracting, and cleaning steps.  HFCS does the same from corn, but uses one more enzyme so is somewhat less “natural,” but so what?

Both are sugars and empty calories, and everyone would be better off eating less of both.

What’s really at issue here is the encroachment of HFCS into sucrose territory.  Americans used to eat much more sucrose than HFCS.  Now we consume about 60 pounds of each of them a year—way too much of either.

My opinion: the name change is frivolous and so is the lawsuit. 

Both are a waste of time and distract from the real message: eat less sugar(s).

Nov 8 2011

Food politics semantics: the meaning of “natural”

Are you puzzled, annoyed, or irritated beyond belief by the word “natural” on food product labels?

FoodNavigator must think so.  It conducted an opinion survey on what to do about marketing foods as “natural”.

FoodNavigator asked: Do we [food companies] need a clearer definition of ‘natural’ for food marketing?

The response options:

  • Yes. The FDA should come up with a formal definition (63% checked this one)
  • Yes. The industry should develop voluntary guidance (20%)
  • No. The FDA’s 1993 guidance is sufficient (~1%)
  • No. The term is meaningless and manufacturers should stop using it (16%)

Hello FDA.  How about it?

The FDA has never defined “natural” for labeling purposes.  But it does have an answer to the question “what is the meaning of ‘natural’ on the label of a food,” one that requires self-cancelling nots (my emphasis):

From a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth.

That said, FDA has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives. However, the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.

By this non-definition, High Fructose Corn Syrup is “natural” even though to make it, corn refiners must extract the starch from corn, treat the starch with an enzyme to break it into glucose, and treat the glucose with another enzyme to turn about half of it into fructose.

This is “natural,” according to the FDA, because the enzymes are fixed to a column, do not actually mix with the starch, and HFCS does not contain added colors or flavors.

In contrast, the USDA is way ahead and has defined what “natural” means for meat and poultry products.  “Naturally raised” means  no growth promoters, antibiotics, animal by-products, or fish by-products.

The USDA says meat and poultry products can be labeled “natural” if they are only minimally processed and don’t have any artificial flavorings, colorings, preservatives, or other additives.

As I’ve discussed previously, Horizon Organics now has “natural” milk that does not meet standards for organic certification.  It must hope that consumers can’t tell the difference.

To do something about this confusing situation, FoodNavigator reports that  the Natural Products Association (NPA) is developing standards for use of the word “natural” in food marketing.  This will be similar to the NPA’s Natural Seal Certification for personal home-care products.  NPA is doing this to “give consumers confidence that foods featuring the seal adhere to clear set of standards.”

NPA has not yet worked out the details but says some ingredients are unlikely to qualify:  those extracted with organic solvents, modified starch, high fructose corn syrup, and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.

Oops.  What about GMOs?  NPA hasn’t decided yet, mainly because it is so hard to find soy products that are not GMO.

This situation is a mess and runs the risk of undercutting organic standards.  And we hardly need another certification system.

It’s time for the FDA to step in and give the food industry—and the public—some guidance about what counts as “natural” and what does not.

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Oct 27 2011

Sugar 1, HFCS 0, at least for the moment

The public relations firm for the Sugar Association, Levick Strategic Communications, sent me a press release celebrating the victory of sugar producers against corn refiners over the question of whether high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) can be renamed “corn sugar.”

A federal judge ruled that the case brought by the Sugar Association against the Corn Refiners can proceed to trial. If you want the details, see the  judge’s “order denying in part and granting in part defendents’ motion to dismiss”, and “order granting defendents’ motion to strike.”

I cannot even begin to tell you how funny I think all this is.

The Sugar Association represents growers of sugar beets and cane.  They produce table sugar—sucrose—a double sugar composed of glucose and fructose linked together.  In the body, sucrose is quickly split to glucose and fructose.

The Corn Refiners represent processors of corn (obviously).  They produce HFCS, a syrup made of glucose and fructose.

From a biological standpoint, glucose and fructose are the same no matter where they come from.  Biochemically, sucrose, glucose, and fructose are all sugars.

HFCS used to be a lot cheaper than sucrose, but what with all the corn used for ethanol, the price gap has narrowed.  As a result, and because HFCS has gotten a bad reputation, companies are dropping it in favor of sucrose.  The Corn Refiners are upset about that and think a name change would help.

The Sugar Association thinks it’s just great that HFCS has a bad reputation and does not want table sugar to be confused with corn sugar.

Both of these trade associations are acting totally in self-interest.  Neither cares at all about public health.  The lawsuit is entirely about corporate profits, not public welfare.

The Sugar Association is famous for protecting a system of quotas and tariffs that transfers money from American consumers to the coffers of sugar producers.  Its aggressive actions in its own self interest are legendary (see, for example, its threatening letter to me when Food Politics came out—this and my reply are posted at the end of the About section).

And I’ve written previously about the Corn Refiners’ consistently bad self-interested behavior.

Both trade associations behave with appalling disregard for the public.

In this case, the public interest is clear: everyone would be healthier eating less table sugar and HFCS.

 

Apr 29 2011

Sugar politics in action: Sugar sues HFCS

Philip Brasher of the Des Moines Register reports: the Western Sugar Cooperative has just filed suit against the Corn Refiners and corn processors to stop them for falsely advertising HFCS as “corn sugar.”

Oh please.  Western Sugar is trying to claim that HFCS is not sugar, when it most definitely is.  To sugar associations, which represent cane and beet producers, sugar means sucrose (the white stuff on the table).

When the Sugar Association threatened to sue me for saying that soft drinks had sugar and nothing else (when they also contained HFCS), I patiently explained the biochemistry.  If you would like to read what they said, I’ve posted the threatening letter and my response at the bottom of this link. Here’s the biochemistry:

  • Sucrose: a double sugar of 50% glucose and 50% fructose linked together
  • HFCS: a syrup of about 45% glucose and 55% fructose, separated

The 5% differences are biologically insignificant and the body can’t tell them apart.

I never heard from the Sugar Association again, but I try to to remember to say sugars, plural.

Whether the FDA should allow the defendants to change the name of HFCS to Corn Sugar is a matter of some debate (see previous posts and comments on them).  The FDA will make its decision in due course.

In the meantime, this lawsuit is about marketing competition among sources of sugars (plural).  It has nothing to do with health.