CBC’s The Fifth Estate “The Secrets of Sugar” Documents How Sugar Industry Lobbying Tactics Smell like Tobacco

CBC’s The Fifth Estate “The Secrets of Sugar” Documents

How Sugar Industry Lobbying Tactics Smell like Tobacco

OTTAWA (October 7, 2013)— Bill Jeffery, LLB, National Coordinator of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest provided the following statement on Friday night’s The Fifth Estate program.

“Added sugars add nothing but empty calories to the diets of Canadians.  The Fifth Estate served-up some bitter truth after decades of sweet talk by the sugar industry, including some worrisome preliminary evidence about the contribution of high sugar intake to the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, type II diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

No amount of food-industry-motivated quibbling about the new research or leaked old company memos will dampen the need for better food labelling and other policies to put sugar in a more realistic light and place, nutritionally.  Nearly two-thirds of Canadians are overweight or obese, and consumption of whole grains, fruits and vegetables is way too low for good health. Canadian consumers and policy-makers can ill-afford to hear misinformation about sugar science and read labels that are silent and often sneaky about the amounts of added sugars in processed foods.  No wonder so few of us realize the typical North American swallows almost a kilogram of added sugars per week.  There is simply no room in a healthy diet for so much added sugars. 

A decade ago, the Canadian Government was the voice of reason when the sugar lobby tried to foul-up a World Health Organization expert report on diet and health.  Since then, the federal government has repeatedly eschewed public health nutrition reforms that could have helped prevent many of the 48,000 deaths and at least $7 billion economic drain that nutrition-related heart attacks, strokes, cancers and diabetes cause each year.  Since then, governments around the world have begun experimenting with a range of policy reforms to better inform consumers (such as traffic light labelling on packaged foods and nutrition labelling on restaurant menus) and line-up economic incentives (like food tax rules) with public health goals.  This summer in Canada, the federal government launched a two-year long ‘Food Label Modernization’ initiative but, expressly excluded health and nutrition from the scope of the review. Whose interests are served by that?

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For more information, call: Bill Jeffery at 613-244-7337 (ext. 1).  “The Secrets of Sugar” can be viewed on CBC’s website at: http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/episodes/2013-2014/the-secrets-of-sugar

See the Canadian Food Inspection Agency consultation which precludes input on health and nutrition issues: http://cspinet.org/canada/pdf/discussionpaper.foodlabellingmodernizationinitiative.2013.pdf  

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Bill Jeffery, LLB, National Coordinator
Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)
Suite 2701, CTTC Bldg.
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5R1 Canada
Tel: 613-244-7337 (ext. 1)
jefferyb@istar.ca
http://www.cspinet.ca

CSPI is an independent health advocacy organization with offices in Ottawa and Washington. CSPI's advocacy efforts are supported by more than 100,000 subscribers to the Canadian edition of its Nutrition Action Healthletter, on average, one subscribing household within a one block radius of every Canadian street corner. CSPI does not accept industry or government funding and Nutrition Action does not carry advertisements.

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