30: The Inconvenient Truth about Sugar with Dr. Karen Throsby (Part 2)
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I’m Laura Thomas, I’m an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter.
Today I’m sharing part 2 of my conversation with Professor Karen Throsby, author of Sugar Rush. If you’re just joining us then make sure you go back and listen to part 1 of this episode before you jump into this one. We talk about mortified mothers, how removing sugar from the diet is gendered work that falls on women, and how the certainty around the ‘badness’ of sugar belies a lot more doubt and ambiguity coming from the scientific community. So go back and check out part 1 if you haven’t listened already.
Today we’re getting into why the so-called ‘war on ob*sity’ has to constantly reinvent itself to stay relevant, and how it fails to meet its own objectives. We also talk about how ultra-processed foods are quickly becoming the new sugar and how that conversation fails to acknowledge the role that convenience foods play in offering immediate care or the privilege in being able to eat for some nebulous future health. And we couldn’t talk about sugar and not talk about Jamie Oliver and the sugar tax.
INTRO
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Alright team, I know you’re going to love the second installment of this episode so let’s get straight to it - here’s part two of my conversations with professor Karen Throsby.
Here’s the transcript in full:
MAIN EPISODE
Laura: Karen, I want to come back to this idea that you articulate so well in the book. You say that “the so-called war on ob*sity has been unable to warrant its core empirical claims” – I'm quoting you now, “and has been a notable failure when measured against its own goals of sustained population level weight loss.”
Can you explain how in order to sustain itself, the war on ob*sity had to reinvent itself like Madonna? By casting a new villain…and kind of talk about that arc a little bit?
Karen: Yeah. So if we think about, I mean, obviously the sort of attack on fat bodies has, has a very long history, but if we think about its most recent history in, in the form of the war on ob*sity, which dates to around the turn of the millennium as a new kind of intensified attack where dietary fat was seen as the core problem.
Sugar has always been seen as a problem. We can even go back to the 1960s and the rise of artificial sweeteners. and their take up in the diet industry. So it's always been there as a problem, but it was really fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. And that's why, when I looked at the newspaper articles, sugar was hardly talked about because the focus was different.
And I think what we get is then with that repeated failure, where there has been a base, I mean, there's…in the UK, there's been a leveling off of ob*sity rates, but it doesn't meet the aspirations of the attack on ob*sity. It has been a failure. And I think it runs out of steam because it's not achieving the change.
And, and yet you get this kind of constant hectoring and sort of constant renewal. I can't…there's been…I can't remember. It's like 17 policies or something, you know, in the last 20 years. And it's, you know, none of them are successful, have been successful. And then, so we get to about 2012, and one of the things that happened in the UK, of course, was the Olympics, where there was a lot of anti-ob*sity talk.
It was seen as a way of refreshing the war on ob*sity, and I think that partly opened the door.
Laura: Yeah. I'm sort of smirking, because I was in the States at that point doing my PhD, so I kind of, like, missed a lot of what was going on here, around 2012 in the Olympics. So yeah, it's really interesting that you're, you're not, you noted that, that that kind of anti…
Karen: Like a core, a core justification for the, for funding, you know, a mega event like the Olympics was that it would boost sport, which would boost attempts to reduce ob*sity. And so you've got that in the background, you've got the fact that it is losing steam, you know, and so it needs to find another, another enemy, something to pick it back up again.
And sugar, I think…because at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, we've got austerity measures being consolidated through the Welfare Reform Act in 2012, all of those welfare cuts in place. So then the idea of sugar, and the kind of an austerity worked really well together, the idea that individuals should make small economies to get by to manage their own consumption, that you shouldn't over consume because it costs the state, it costs other people money. And so those narratives came together perfectly and sugar just became this, this model enemy for the moment.
And then what we see then is the rise of interest in the sugar tax. which was announced in 2016, which is the peak in the newspaper coverage, and then was launched in 2018. So in a, in a sense, the history of the social life of sugar during this moment is an arc that sort of covers the rise to the sugar tax and then its implementation.
But all of the expectation that had been laid on fat is then laid onto sugar as the problem. If only we can solve this problem. And so again, as I said before, it creates this erasure of the absolute complexity of food and eating. The idea that food is only ever swallowing and metabolising, it's, you know, it's so social, it forms so many social functions around love, care, comfort, you know, all of those things that it’s just completely inadequate.
And then what we've got now is a tailing off. And actually it tailed off during the pandemic, there was a little peak at the beginning, if you can remember when Boris Johnson launched an anti-obesity policy, when he came out of hospital, he was blaming his own body size on the fact that he'd been very unwell. And so we saw a little peak then, but it's basically dropped off now.
So in sort of 10 years, we've had a sort of complete focus on sugar and then this tailing off of interest in it. And I think now what's coming in instead is ultra processed food is now filling that gap, but it's folded sugar into it because obviously ultra processed food is, as almost all, I mean, has always got sugar in it. And so it's picked up the sugar as it's gone. So it's, all of that is still there, but it's now being talked about in terms of ultra processed food.
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