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ABC Four Corners: five articles to get you informed on sugar and Big Sugar’s role in food policy
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Sasha Petrova, The Conversation
Tonight’s ABC Four Corners program investigates the influence of the sugar industry on global policy efforts to curtail the rise of obesity. This includes the industry’s involvement in thwarting implementation of a sugar tax, and in watering down Australia’s now largely ineffective health star rating system.
Called Tipping the Scales, the program will highlight some of the tactics the industry employs. The ABC reports companies such as Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Unilever, Nestle and Kelloggs “have a seat at the table setting the policies that shape consumption of their own sugar-laced products”.
A public health advocate is quoted as saying:
The reality is that industry is, by and large, making most of the policy. Public health is brought in so that we can have the least worse solution.
The Conversation’s experts in health policy and economics have weighed into this debate over the years. Here’s our pick of five analysis pieces that will get you informed before tonight’s program.
1. How industry influences research
The sugar industry hasn’t only had its finger in the policy pie, it has also pulled some strings behind the scenes of scientific research into sugar’s health effects.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in November 2016 revealed that, in the 1960s, the sugar industry paid scientists at Harvard University to minimise the link between sugar and heart disease. The paper’s authors suggested the sugar industry may largely have shaped many of today’s dietary recommendations. And some experts have since questioned whether such misinformation may have led to today’s obesity crisis.
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In an essay on health, the University of Sydney’s Professor Lisa Bero – an internationally renowned expert in the integrity of scientific research and its use in policy-making – has outlined how food companies can sneak bias into scientific research:
She writes:
Pharmaceutical, tobacco or chemical industry funding of research biases human studies towards outcomes favourable to the sponsor…
A 2007 paper that compared over 500 studies found those funded by pharmaceutical companies were half as likely to report negative effects of corticosteroid drugs (used to treat allergies and asthma) as those not funded by pharmaceutical companies.
Read more:
Essays on health: how food companies can sneak bias into scientific research
2. Sugar’s role in health star ratings
The ABC’s Four Corners team interviews the Obesity Policy Coalition’s executive manager, Jane Martin, who is frustrated that industry lobbying has scuttled efforts to make the health star system mandatory.
The health star rating system was introduced in June 2014. It’s a front-of-pack labelling system that rates the nutritional profile of packaged food and assigns it a rating from ½ a star to 5 stars. The more stars, the healthier the choice.
As Deakin University’s public health and nutrition professor, Mark Lawrence, and Curtin University’s public health research fellow, Christina Pollard, explained:
The system is supposed to help consumers discriminate between similar foods within the same food category that contain different amounts of undesirable ingredients. It should, for instance, help compare two loaves of bread in terms of their salt content …
Writing a year after the rating system’s implementation, the authors note the flaws in the policy. The main flaw is its voluntary nature, which can lead to manufacturers putting labels on only those foods that will get a high rating:
While manufacturers might be happy to display stars on foods that attract between two and five stars, they are less likely to put one or half a star on their products.
Read more:
A year on, Australia’s health star food-rating system is showing cracks
3. How a sugar tax would benefit health
Since Mexico introduced a sugar tax in 2014, nearly 30 countries have gone on to do the same. Last month the UK introduced a levy that manufacturers must pay for their high-sugar products.
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Companies will have to pay 18 pence per litre on drinks with more than 5g of sugar per 100g. Drinks with more than 8g per 100ml will face a tax rate equivalent to 24p per litre.
But the ABC reports efforts to introduce such a policy in Australia have failed, due to the lobbying efforts of the Beverages Council.
The evidence for sugar’s negative effects on our health is well known. A study published in the journal PLOS ONE in April 2016 showed a tax on sugary drinks in Australia would prevent 4,000 heart attacks and 1,100 strokes.
The researchers examined the potential impact of a 20% rise in the prices of sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drinks and flavoured mineral waters on health, healthcare expenditure and revenue.
Writing for The Conversation, the study’s authors note:
As expected, the tax would result in people decreasing their consumption of sugary drinks. The influence of a price increase would be greatest on those who drink a lot of sugary drinks, so the greatest impact would be on younger age groups. This is an important result that is difficult to achieve through other obesity-prevention measures.
4. How a sugar tax would save us money
The UK’s Treasury is estimating the sugar tax will raise £240 million per year. Modelling done in Australia by the Grattan Institute shows that a tax of 40 cents per 100 grams of sugar could raise about A$400-$500 million per year.
The Institute’s Stephen Duckett and Trent Wiltshire write that the sugar industry’s concerns over the tax are overblown. They say:
A sugar-sweetened beverages tax will reduce domestic demand for Australian sugar by around 50,000 tonnes, which is only about 1% of all the sugar produced in Australia. And, while there may be some transition costs, this sugar could instead be sold overseas (as 80% of Australia’s sugar production already is).
Read more:
A sugary drinks tax could recoup some of the costs of obesity while preventing it
5. How bad is sugar, really?
And finally, if you’re wondering how much sugar you can eat to stay healthy, here’s an article written by Flinders University nutrition lecturers Kacie Dickinson and Louise Matwiejczyk that explains exactly that.
In brief:
If you’re an average-sized adult eating and drinking enough to maintain a healthy body weight (roughly 8,700 kilojoules per day), 10% of your total energy intake from free sugar roughly translates to no more than 54 grams, or around 12 teaspoons, per day.
A 600ml bottle of Coke contains more than 14 teaspoons of sugar.
Read more:
Health Check: how much sugar is it OK to eat?
Sasha Petrova, Deputy Editor: Health + Medicine, The Conversation
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Taxing sugary drinks would boost productivity, not just health
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Lennert Veerman, Cancer Council NSW
Many studies have looked at the potential benefits of a sugar tax in
terms of the longer, healthier lives and reduced health expenditure associated with tackling obesity.
But our new study goes one step further. It predicts that higher taxes on sugar-sweetened drinks will benefit the wider economy through increased economic productivity, by having more, healthier people in paid and unpaid work.
Obesity delivers a double whammy
A total of 63% Australian adults and one in four children are overweight or obese, making this both a health and an economic problem.
Obesity increases the risk of diseases including cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Obesity has also been estimated to cost Australia about A$8.6 billion a year or more. Not only does obesity drive up health-care costs, by causing illness and premature death, it also reduces people’s ability to work and contribute to the economy.
Added sugar contributes energy to the diet, but no useful nutrients. Increasingly, health experts suggest we should be treating sugar, and in particular sugar in soft drinks, as we do tobacco or alcohol, by taxing it to reduce consumption and so reduce obesity rates.
Taxing sugar is not a new concept. In the 1700s, Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:
Sugar, rum, and tobacco, are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.
Smith’s proposal to tax sugar was not aimed at improving health, as it is today. Now organisations like the World Health Organisation, the Australian Medical Association and many non-governmental organisations are advocating a tax on drinks with added sugar, as part of wider efforts to tackle obesity.
What we did and what we found
Until our study, few worldwide had looked at the wider economic effects of taxing sugary drinks.
We modelled the Australian adult population as it was in 2010, in terms of consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks, body mass, obesity-related diseases, death rates, and the amount of paid or unpaid work people were likely to do.
We compared a scenario in which the prices of sugared drinks went up by 20%, compared to business-as-usual, and estimated what difference this would make for the number of obese people, the number of years lived, and for overall economic production.
Further reading: Dietary guidelines don’t work. Here’s how to fix them
We used data from the 2011-12 Australian Health Survey and found that obese people aged 15-64 had a lower chance of being in a paid job, compared to people whose weight was normal. We assumed this was related to illness.
Of people in work, obese workers needed more sick leave, but only about an hour a year.
We also looked at unpaid work (like cooking, cleaning and caring, and volunteer work). We included gains due to more people surviving for longer due to lower body weight. We assumed that if work was not done as unpaid work, somebody would have to be hired to do it (so there would be a replacement cost).
Our results show that a 20% sugar tax would mean about 400,000 fewer people would be obese. Three-quarters of these would be in the workforce, so that about 300,000 fewer employed people would be obese.
Further reading: Australian sugary drinks tax could prevent thousands of heart attacks and strokes and save 1,600 lives
Over the lifetime of the adult population of Australia in 2010, this would add about A$750 million to the formal, paid economy, due to more, healthier people producing more goods and services.
The gains in unpaid work were even larger at A$1.17 billion. Fewer obese people means more healthy people, who have a greater likelihood to do unpaid work, in the household or as volunteers.
These indirect economic benefits from increased employment in the workforce and from greater participation in unpaid work were larger than the savings in health care costs, which we estimated at about A$425 million over the lifetime of the adult population.
In all, the tax could deliver over A$2 billion in economic benefits in indirect economic benefits plus health care savings. And that does not even include the value of the gains in people’s quality of life and how long they lived.
Further reading: Fat nation: the rise and fall of obesity on the political agenda
The exact size of the benefits depend on assumptions about what people would drink (and eat) if they drink fewer sugared drinks. In this study, we used Australian evidence that found an increase only for diet drinks, which contain virtually no energy.
Other evidence finds a sugar tax reduces the consumption of sugar and energy-rich foods, but may also lead to people eating fewer fruit and vegetables and more salt. This would reduce the health benefit, and that study suggests it would be even better to tax all sugar instead of only sugared drinks.
Nevertheless, the available evidence shows health benefits of increased taxation of sugared drinks.
What’s happening overseas?
Studies in other countries have predicted similar effects of a sugar tax on the proportion of obese people. For example, a 20% tax is expected to reduce the number of obese people by about 1.3% in the UK and 2-4% in South Africa.
And an increasing number of countries, including the UK, France, Denmark, Finland, Hungary and recently Estonia and Saudi Arabia, have already announced or have implemented a tax on drinks with added sugar.
If Australia introduces a 20% tax on sugar-sweetened drinks, as many health advocates and economists have called for, that would not only improve health, our results predict it would also promote economic growth.
The author of this article will be available for a live Q&A today 1-2pm. Please post your questions in the comments below.
Lennert Veerman, Senior health economist, Cancer Council NSW
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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After Fatwa, Pastor in Pakistan Beaten with Bricks
Convert, a former fighter in Afghanistan, had protested Islamic attack.
SARGODHA, Pakistan, November 5 (CDN) — Muslim extremists in Islamabad on Monday (Nov. 1) beat with bricks and hockey sticks a Christian clergyman who is the subject of a fatwa demanding his death.
The Rev. Dr. Suleman Nasri Khan, a former fighter in Afghanistan before his conversion to Christianity in 2000, suffered a serious head injury, a hairline fracture in his arm and a broken bone in his left ankle in the assault by 10 Muslim extremists; he was able to identify two of them as Allama Atta-Ullah Attari and Allama Masaud Hussain.
The attack in Chashma, near Iqbal Town in Islamabad, followed Islamic scholar Allama Nawazish Ali’s Oct. 25th fatwa (religious ruling) to kill Khan, pastor of Power of the Healing God’s Church in the Kalupura area of Gujrat city. A mufti (Islamic scholar) and member of Dawat-e-Islami, which organizes studies of the Quran and Sunnah (sayings and deeds of Muhammad), Ali is authorized to issue fatwas.
Khan, 34, had relocated to a rented apartment in Islamabad after fleeing his home in Gujrat because of death threats against him and his family, he said. The fatwa, a religious order to be obeyed by all Muslims, was issued after Khan protested anti-Christian violence in Kalupura last month.
Muslim extremists who learned of his conversion had first attacked Khan in 2008 – killing his first child, 3-month old Sana Nasri Khan. He and wife Aster Nasri Khan escaped.
“During the Kalupura Christian colony attacks, once again it came into the attention of Muslim men that I was a converted Christian who had recanted Islam, deemed as humiliation of Islam by them,” Khan said.
In this week’s attack, Khan also sustained minor rib injuries and several minor cuts and bruises. He said the Muslim radicals pelted him with stones and bricks while others kicked him in the chest and stomach. They also tried to force him to recite Islam’s creed for conversion; he refused.
On Monday night (Nov. 1) Khan had gone out to buy milk for a daughter born on July 19 – named after the daughter who was killed in 2008, Sana Nasri Khan – when during the wee hours of the night five unidentified Muslim extremists began kicking and pounding on the door.
“When my wife asked who they were, they replied, ‘We have learned that you have disgraced Islam by recanting, therefore we will set your house on fire,” Khan told Compass. “When my wife told them that I was not at home, they left a letter threatening to torch the house and kill my whole family and ordered me to recant Christianity and embrace Islam.”
Khan had sold some of his clothes at a pawnshop in order to buy milk for the baby, as he has been financially supporting six Christian families from his congregation who are on a Muslim extremist hit list. Islamic militants have cordoned off parts of Kalupura, patrolling the area to find and kill the families of Allah Rakha Masih, Boota Masih, Khalid Rehmat, Murad Masih Gill, Tariq Murad Gill and Rashid Masih.
Often feeding her 5-month-old daughter water mixed with salt and sugar instead of milk or other supplements, Aster Nasri Khan said she was ready to die of starvation for the sake of Jesus and His church. Before her beaten husband was found, she said she had heard from neighbors that some Muslim men had left him unconscious on a roadside, thinking he was dead.
The Rev. Arif Masih of Power of the Healing God’s Church in Islamabad told Compass that he was stunned to find Khan unconscious in a pool of blood on the roadside. Saying he couldn’t go to police or a hospital out of fear that Muslims would level apostasy charges against Khan, Masih said he took him to the nearby private clinic of Dr. Naeem Iqbal Masih. Khan received medical treatment there while remaining unconscious for almost four hours, Masih said.
Born into a Muslim family, Khan had joined the now-defunct Islamic militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which later emerged as Jaish-e-Muhammad, fighting with them for eight and half years in Kashmir and Afghanistan.
While fighting in Afghanistan’s civil war in 2000, he said, he found a New Testament lying on the battlefield. He immediately threw it away, but a divine voice seemed to be extending an invitation to him, he said. When he later embraced Christ, he began preaching and studying – ending up with a doctorate in biblical theology from Punjab Theological Seminary in Kasur in 2005.
Upon learning of the Oct. 25 fatwa against him, Khan immediately left Gujrat for Islamabad, he said. He was living in hiding in Chashma near Iqbal Town when Muslims paid his landlord, Munir Masih, to reveal to them that Khan was living at his house as a tenant, he said. A young Christian whose name is withheld for security reasons informed Khan of the danger on Oct. 29, he said.
The young Christian told him that Munir Masih revealed his whereabouts to Allama Atta-Ullah Attari, a member of Dawat-e-Islami.
Khan said he confided to Christian friends about the dangers before him, and they devised a plan to hide his family in Bara Koh, a small town near Islamabad.
“But as I had sold and spent everything to help out Kalupura Christians,” he said, “I was penniless and therefore failed to move on and rent a house there.”
Report from Compass Direct News
In Defense of my Vice: Coca Cola
In answering this question I’m using the word ‘vice’ in its modern day usage – as in meaning something which isn’t quite good for you.
My vice? Well this is a ‘different’ type of question. I wouldn’t be prepared to defend any type of ‘vice’ that I would describe as being sinful or ungodly – these are to be repented of and are not to be defended. So, what I will say is that I do drink a lot of coke, which is necessarily the best beverage to be drinking I suppose – but what is, other than water perhaps. They all have their problems without moderation. How did I start drinking coke? Well, someone must have given me a drink of it at some point – probably my father I’m guessing. Anyhow, it is simply a drink that I like. Why would I quit? Well, there are a number of answers for this question, which include reducing caffeine intake, less calories each day, less sugar each day, drink more water, etc – the list can go on a bit.
SOMALIA: CHRISTIAN SHOT DEAD NEAR KENYA BORDER
Muslim extremists kill convert from Islam they were monitoring.
NAIROBI, Kenya, August 22 (Compass Direct News) – Muslim extremists seeking evidence that a Somali man had converted from Islam to Christianity shot him dead Tuesday morning (Aug. 18) near the Somali border with Kenya, according to underground Christians in the war-torn nation.
Al Shabaab rebels killed 41-year-old Ahmed Matan in Bulahawa, Somalia, according to Abdikadir Abdi Ismael, a former leader of a secret Christian fellowship in Somalia to which Matan belonged. Matan had been a member of the underground church since 2001.
The early morning shooting comes at a time when Islamist groups led by al Shabaab are hunting down converts to Christianity as they seek to establish sharia (Islamic law) throughout Somalia.
Ismael, who fled the area in 2005, said he received a telephone call from Matan two weeks ago in which the convert told him that monitoring by the Islamic extremists kept him from leaving his home and carrying out his small-trade business across the border in Mandera, in eastern Kenya.
“I am afraid for my life – the al Shabaab want to get a proof that I follow the Christian faith,” Matan told Ismael. “They have not been seeing me in the mosque and seem to have realized that I am not part of them.”
Ismael subsequently learned from a member of the underground church who requested anonymity that on Aug. 18 Matan was shot dead as he was about to enter Mandera with a donkey carrying goods for sale such as sugar, batteries and shampoo. He was a father of three, his last child just 3 months old.
Since the beginning of this year, Ismael said, the Islamic militants had been questioning Matan about why he was carrying on business outside of Somalia.
“They then began monitoring him, especially from the beginning of this year,” said Ismael.
Besides his infant child, Matan leaves behind a widow, Fatuma, and children ages 7 and 4.
Ismael was visibly shaken by the death of his close friend.
“We have been going through difficult times because of choosing to follow Christianity,” Ismael told Compass. “We have lost everything. We even lack words to share our feelings. I have been always on the run from one refugee camp to another. The Muslims have issued a fatwa on me.”
Ismael had been the leader of the underground church in Bulahawa before fleeing in 2005. Bulahawa has gained a reputation for harboring Islamic extremists, mainly al Shabaab militants said to be linked with al Qaeda terrorists.
Matan, who is from a Maharan sub-clan called Habar Yaqub, was an industrious small-scale merchandise trader. His problems with the Islamist militia began long ago when he expanded his business sojourns to Kenya’s northern town of Mandera, Ismael said.
The border area near Mandera, including Bulahawa, has become the site of frequent kidnappings. Lack of security forces in the area has given free rein to brutal activities by al Shabaab, which kidnapped three foreigners in the area on July 17 and spirited them into Somalia. Ismael described Bulahawa as “a very insecure and sensitive area.”
In Mahadday Weyne, 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of the Somali capital of Mogadishu, al Shabaab Islamists on July 20 shot to death another convert from Islam, Mohammed Sheikh Abdiraman, at 7 a.m., eyewitnesses told Compass. They said the Islamic extremists appeared to have been hunting the convert from Islam.
The sources told Compass that Abdiraman was the leader of an underground “cell group” of Christians in Somalia. He was survived by two children, ages 15 and 10, and his wife died three years ago due to illness.
Intent on “cleansing” Somalia of all Christians, al Shabaab militia are monitoring converts from Islam especially where Christian workers had provided medical aid, such as Johar, Jamame, Kismayo and Beledweyne, sources said. Mahadday Weyne, 22 kilometers (14 miles) north of Johar, is the site of a former Christian-run hospital.
Already enforcing sharia in large parts of southern Somalia that they control, al Shabaab rebels have mounted an armed effort to topple President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s Transitional Federal Government and impose Islamic law.
The militants reportedly beheaded seven Christians on July 10. Reuters reported that they were killed in Baidoa for being Christians and “spies.”
Report from Compass Direct News
More Pakistanis flee new offensive against Taliban
About 40,000 more Pakistanis are leaving their homes in South Waziristan as Pakistan’s military prepares to launch a new offensive against the Taliban, Reuters reports. They join over 2 million other people who have fled the violence since May, reports MNN.
The Christian Reformed World Relief Committee is providing $500,000 of food aid for the refugees through the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. It will deliver 708 metric tons of lentils, oil, fortified wheat flour, sugar, iodized salt, and chili powder to internally displaced person (IDP) camps in the Swabi district of North West Frontier Province, Pakistan.
Two thousand families, or about 14,000 people, live in the camps. CRWRC will give first priority to widows with children and to families who have lost loved ones.
CRWRC received a testimonial from Muhammad Akber Khan.
“I am a senior citizen and the oldest person in my family,” he said. “The continuous shelling compelled us to leave our native town and home. We left everything back home as we were given only 20-25 minutes to leave the town. All that we could have carried were the clothes that we were wearing at the time of migration. We want to go back to our homes as soon as possible as our lifetime investment is there; moreover, we have to supervise our crops that were the only sources of our livelihood. I am grateful to the staff of I-LAP and CRWRC who shared their love and care through giving.”
CRWRC has already distributed mosquito nets, sleeping mats, and water containers in the camps. Its International Disaster Response team responds to natural and man-made disasters all over the world, bringing relief and aid to those who need it most. It works in cooperation with local and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in order to respond quickly and effectively to the urgent needs of a community.
Report from the Christian Telegraph
Random Thoughts 