ALICE RAP Addiction and Lifestyles in Contemporary Europe Reframing Addictions Project

Sugar, Industry documents and research on corporate influences on addiction

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Created on Sunday, 28 April 2013 23:13

by David Miller and Claire Harkins

The debate about whether sugar is addictive or not is watched closely by the food industry. Scientific and policy acceptance that sugar is addictive would have very significant consequences for their ability to continue the global over-production of sugar [1]. But while there is a real debate over how precisely to conceive of sugar, it is also plain that industry has been actively attempting to manufacture doubt about the known harm that sugar causes to public health. The industry has, in fact, been doing so for more than forty years. This was emphasised recently with the disclosure of a cache of documents chronicling how the sugar industry undermined evidence based policy by influencing both the science of sugar and how responses to the over-consumption of sugar are handled by policy elites.

1,500 pages of documents including internal memos show how the sugar industry used similar tactics to the tobacco industry to manufacture doubt on the harms caused by dietary sugars ‘to ensure that government agencies would dismiss troubling health claims against their products’ [2]. The documents came to light after a dental health administrator Cristin Kearns Couzens was so shocked at the downplaying of the risks of sugars at a dental conference that she started investigating how science was being distorted [3]. Couzens found the documents in a cardboard box at the Colorado State University archives.

‘The first folder that I opened jumped right out at me,’ she said. ‘It was on the Sugar Association letterhead which is the trade association in Washington for cane and beet sugar producers. And the word "confidential" was right under the letterhead. So the first document I saw was a confidential Sugar Association memo talking about their PR strategies in the 70s.’ [4]

The files showed how the Sugar Association had managed to win a ‘Silver Anvil’ award for ‘the forging of public opinion’ at the 1976 conference of the Public Relations Society of America. The campaign was run by Carl Byoir and Associates a landmark Public Relations firm since before the Second World War. Back in the 1930’s Byoir’s firm was perhaps most famous for being indicted for ‘devious manipulations’ and fined $5,000 after creating fake grass-roots groups in order to defend the spread of ‘chain-stores’. [5]  Byoir’s campaign on sugar used similar tactics:

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.’ [6]

The message the industry used ‘in confronting our critics,’ the Sugar Association president John Tatem explained in 1976, was ‘we try never to lose sight of the fact that no confirmed scientific evidence links sugar to the death-dealing diseases. This crucial point is the lifeblood of the association.’ [7] [8]     

The Sugar Association wrote of its ‘desire to maintain research as a main prop of the industry's defence’. $230,000 was allocated to fund scientific research, in 1977. This funded 17 different scientists at leading universities, including M.I.T., Harvard, and Yale. Money was supplied by ‘contributing research members,’ including ‘Coca-Cola, Hershey, General Foods, General Mills and Nabisco’ who contributed the funds specifically for the lobby group's scientific effort. Each company ‘contributed $10,000 to our general research fund.’ [9] Today firms like these and many others continue to fund bodies like the Sugar Association to defend their interests.

Couzens later put her findings to the industry. ‘They gave a comment like, that was in the past and does not reflect the mission of the sugar association currently,’ she said. But then she found one more document, an internal Sugar Association e-newsletter from August, 2003 that announced ‘the Sugar Association is committed to the protection and promotion of sucrose consumption. Any disparagement of sugar will be met with forceful, strategic public comments and the supporting science.’ [10]  

According to Couzens the document showed ‘the sugar industry is still very active in nominating scientists to serve on the dietary guidelines advisory committee, and it is still publishing research through connections with the World Sugar Research Organization, based in London. These scientific reviews that are published by the sugar industry are still considered in the evidence review for the dietary guidelines.’ [11]

The WSRO is headed by Richard Cottrell, formerly director of the UK sugar lobby group the Sugar Bureau. Although clearly a lobby group, the Bureau tries to encourage the idea that it is a research based organisation. [12] This orientation is emphasised in its name change undertaken in January 2012 when it rebranded itself as ‘Sugar Nutrition UK’. Its website claims: ‘Our staff includes degree-qualified nutritionists, and we liaise regularly with academics and health professional organisations both in the UK and around the world.’ [13]

The WSRO today still advances the same argument used by the US Sugar Association in the 1970s. Its ‘Facts about sugar’ notes: ‘People all around the world eat sugar as part of a healthy, nutritious and balanced diet. Many people worry that eating sugar may be bad for their health. Their concern is unnecessary as extensive research has not been able to link the consumption of sugars to any chronic disease except dental caries (tooth decay).’ [14]

What does all this tell us for the ALICE RAP project? First, it indicates that, the techniques used by the tobacco industry to manufacture doubt on the science and to manage policy are being used by other industries, such as the sugar companies. Second, it shows the importance of internal industry documents for research on corporate strategy on addictions. They give a valuable counterpoint to public statements made by industry or their spokesperson in the lobbying or PR industry or think tanks. So we do have to look for leaks, archival sources, documents disclosed in court proceedings. But we can also find such data by using other techniques such as using ‘Access to documents’ rules with the European institutions and ‘Freedom of Information’ legislation in various EU member states. Data on meetings, financial relations or correspondence between corporate actors and civil servants, regulators and ministers can give really important insights.

On the other hand there are other methods for uncovering corporate activities and for triangulating the data that can be accessed. As well as trying to locate previously hidden documentary sources we are using digital research methods to gather (or ‘scrape’) large quantities of data from publically available websites. We will use this to gather organisational and biographical data on corporations, trade associations, lobby groups and think tanks. We can then map the structure of industry influence. Previously secret documents can help us to fill in the practical agency that depends on the structure or corporate action. To conclude: We welcome any offers of documents that on these issues. We will put them to good use.