During the 1970's, sugar was the big dietary evil. Sugar made kids hyperactive. Sugar gave kids cavities. Sugar made adults and adolescents fat and unhealthy. Any responsible grocery-shopping mom knew to read labels, and knew that the words ending in "-ose" designated something in the sugar family, and therefore should appear toward the end of an ingredient list (if at all). Ah yes, the days before the "Nutrition Facts" labels. But I will get to that in a moment. . .
The food industry fought back and answered our sugar paranoia. We were blessed with Tab cola and carob. Remember carob? Wasn't it fabulous? It tastes JUST LIKE chocolate- in the way I imagine chocolate flavored Ex-Lax(R) tastes just like chocolate. The decade came in with white sugar and went out with saccharin. All was good with the world, right?
Nope- not for the corporate world and not for consumers. In the 1980's, the food industry widely began replacing sucrose (aka table sugar or white sugar, one fructose molecule bonded to one glucose molecule) with something mysterious called "high fructose corn syrup." It started with the soft drink industry but quickly spread to other products. I've read a few creative theories about why this happened, but the clear reason is money. Since the 1960s trade embargo with Cuba, the cost of real sugar had skyrocketed, and the soda companies could not keep adding that cost onto the consumer without losing some business. High fructose corn syrup had two advantages: 1) It was cheap to make, and 2) It was sweeter than sugar, so less could be used to achieve the same sweetness levels. Win-Win!
Along came the Pepsi Challenge and New Coke to launch these new super-sweet sodas. Malcolm Gladwell has a great discussion about why the Pepsi Challenge succeeded and New Coke failed miserably in his book Blink. The short version is that sweetness has an advantage in one sip, but not in a whole can.
Still, for most consumers, the HFCS swap went under the radar. The USDA, media, and medical community were focussing on fat and cholesterol during this period- not added sugars. Eggs were the new evil! Low fat and fat-free were the new carob and Tab. Salad dressing makers replaced vegetable oils with HFCS to reduce fat. Entemann's introduced us to fat-free donuts and coffee cake.
In the 1990s, out of US government concern for the new rise in obesity despite a national trend toward decreased fat intake, the USDA Nutrition Facts label was born. Consumers could easily read how many grams of fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates and fiber a product contained, on a per serving basis and make an informed decision. All was good with the world now, right?
Wrong again. Remember that this new label was introduced around 1990, but HFCS began making its way into our products as early as the 1970s, and the fat free version of products (where much of the added fat was replaced with HFCS) came on the market toward the late 1980s. The food industry had not-so-gradually been increasing simple sugar (carbohydrate, HFCS) in its products during this time to much higher levels. While consumers could compare one current product to another, they had no reference point for how many grams of sugars an Oreo cookie had in 1975 vs 2005.
Fact: The easiest way to make a food more palatable to humans is to introduce more fat, sugar, and/or salt.
Fact: Sugar (HFCS) is now very cheap.
Fact: Americans were getting fatter.
Thank goodness someone came along to explain it all. Dr Atkins introduced his new version of the Diet Revolution in 2002. Carbs are bad! Fat and protein are good! Note that this guy introduced his first version in 1973, coasting the wave of the anti-sugar sentiment. Now he was propelling a second wave. Americans bought his book by the tens of thousands; hundreds of thousands admitted that they were on the Atkins diet. Many lost a lot of weight when they adhered closely to the protocol. Some lost a gall bladder or got kidney stones due to the toll high protein intake has on the human body.
Fact: Fat is higher in calories, gram per gram than carbohydrate or sugar.
Fact: All highly restrictive diets are difficult to maintain over a period of more than 6 months.
Fact: None of these trends focussed on eating the right things (fruits, vegetables, low fat protein sources, minimally processed food)- only on avoiding the "bad" things, by which I mean whatever was trendy to avoid.
Fact: Americans were not only continuing to become fatter, they were becoming fatter faster.
In 2011, the question remains: Is it fat, or is it sugar making Americans fatter? Is it just HFCS? While fat is getting surprising little attention these days from the media or the medical community (despite the fact that its accumulation in arteries is directly linked to heart attack and stroke), many equate all sugars as bad, regardless of source. Ignoring the evidence that HFCS is probably worse for humans than table sugar, there are other factors in play, most obviously physical activity.
Fact: Americans are markedly less active now than they were 30-40 years ago. Jobs are more sedentary due to the advent of the personal computer and email.
Fact: Kids are more sedentary due to the current parenting climate which strongly discourages unsupervised outdoor play.
Fact: A calorie is a calorie is a calorie, whether it comes from fat, sugar, HFCS, or protein. What goes in must be used in growth, activity, repair, or be stored as fat somewhere on the body.
Fact: Exercise has been proven to be beneficial in controlling Type 2 diabetes, weight gain, even in reducing the number and duration of colds in a year.
Conclusion: Americans eat too much of everything and aren't active enough. It's making us fat, and it's killing us.
