That Sugar Film

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Damon Gameau, Documentary Film, Film review, Food Industry, Health and wellbeing, Sugar, That Sugar Film

Sweet and deadly

Now this is a film which is right up my street, as I am enormously interested in the politics of the food industry and how it deliberately dupes us and deceives us – and even more interested in matters related to health and wellbeing.

Damon Gameau, an Australian actor and film-maker did not really tell me anything I didn’t already know (because I read a lot of books about the subject) but, my did he tell it entertainingly!

It is because this film is not just talking heads stuff by the prophets of doom that I rate it so highly. Neither does it fall into the other side trap of being all pizazz and flashy dumbed down soundbites without any reference and substance.

Instead, there is a very assured tightrope walked between giving lots of facts, having various experts talk through the science of how the body metabolises sugar, in its different forms, all accompanied by `turns’ by various luminaries, including Stephen Fry, giving us some of the scientific information in a more engaging and witty way.

There is even, I kid you not, a star turn rock star number with Gameau as a kind of Presley/Alvin Stardust/Rocky Horror combo sugar devil in an outrageous pink jumpsuit leering seductively at a group of babes dunking themselves in chocolate mousse! This by the way is Gameau at the end of his 60 day 40 teaspoons of the stuff ‘normal Australian sugar consumption’.

Behind all the fun `sweeteners’ though, is a shocking story (one we DO know, though, it seems, ignore) Gameau engages in a particularly shocking experiment to show the devastating effects of sugar.

Gameau’s diet had been completely sugar free for three years, and he had not drunk alcohol for about ten years. He ate a particularly healthy, wholefood diet. At the start of the film he is clearly someone glowing with vitality and energy, and when tested by nutritionists and medics, was pronounced extremely healthy, with no markers for fatty liver, heart problems, or raised blood lipid levels and the like.

The `experiment’ was that for 60 days he would keep to the same calorific intake, – normally most of his calories came from healthy fats, protein and complex carbohydrates – but would consume the amount of sugar and hidden sugar (processed foods) eaten and drunk by the average Australian – 40 teaspoons a day. But he would not do this by consuming junk food, instead, it would be by the consumption of food wrongly supposed to be `healthy’ – for example, fruit juice, smoothies, `high energy’ muesli bars and the like.

Part of the lie we have been fed is that ‘calorie control’ is where it’s at – but calories from different food sources do not metabolise the same way – the calories in sugar behave differently in the body than the calories in fat and protein

By 18 days in, this vibrant trim man was looking more than a little pasty and jaded, puffy around the eyes, which had lost their sparkle. His skin and hair looked dull, he was visibly developing a paunch. He was also suffering mood swings. Part of the brief for the experiment was that he would keep up his normal good exercise patterns. The `normal sugar consumption of the average Australian’ diet was eating into his energy, creating those sugar rush manic surges followed quickly by listless slumps and the inevitable (cocaine like) cravings for more of that white death stuff. He was finding it hard to exercise, as he lacked the energy.

Even more alarmingly his liver was showing signs of damage after 18 days – liver cells dying, releasing their contents, becoming cirrhotic, the signs of fatty liver disease. Fortunately, at the end of the 60 days, and the resumption of his old, healthy diet, all the bad effects had gone after a couple of months, though Gameau did say that the first week of cutting out the addictive sugar (it affects brain chemistry and hits the `reward’ centre of the brain and its neurochemistry exactly like cocaine) was pretty tough, and he certainly had `cold turkey’ symptoms

If Gameau and the visible evidence of the shocking changes sugar produced on him are not enough to make spoon on its way to sugar dish pause, there is the heartbreaking 26 tooth extraction on a Kentucky boy, just shy of his 18th birthday, caused primarily by a variant of Pepsi called Mountain Dew, which he had imbibed since he was 3.

Also explored tellingly in this film are the obvious parallels between big tobacco and the sugar industry. Just as the tobacco companies leaned muscle and spurious science funding scientists to do research to deliver skewed results to disprove links between smoking and disease, so the sugar industry does exactly the same.

This is a wonderful, hard hitting film, delivering its punches of fact wrapped nicely in a ….lethal candy coating. `Sweet,’ being so much linked to pleasure and reward, is hard wired in our brains BECAUSE in nature readily available fructose , is RARE, so we are programmed to want it, and respond to it, as a useful source of energy which can be stored as a long term energy resource, as fat. The problem for us of course being that now, fructose is readily available and what was an evolutionary advantage is now the sweet kiss of death.

I have one disappointment – little mention is made about artificial sweeteners, which carry as many, and in some cases, MORE problems associated with their use. Sweeteners, and the perfidious ubiquitousness of THEIR presence, as food manufacturers respond to and create new possibilities for our desire for that sweet taste, are every bit as dangerous. Many, for reasons of weight control, have got as far as checking the labels and avoiding sugar in their processed food and drink, but are surrendering to the hugely profitable diet industry and ‘going diet food’. There have been plenty of studies about the artificials, but, again, these are not hugely funded because the funders are those big, powerful, vested interest concerns who of course are not going to be giving money to researchers to prove that their products are dangerous! A little mention is made of sweeteners in the Extras section of the DVD, but the lack of much information is likely to just see the sugarholics switch to sacchaholic behaviour, in the belief they might be sparing themselves from the dangers of fructose consumption. Not so

Bravo to Gameau, making such a brilliant documentary

He also authored a companion book, That Sugar Book, where a lot of the research studies are cited
That Sugar Book Amazon UK
That Sugar Book Amazon USA

I received the DVD as a review copy, from the Amazon Vine programme, UK. It will be released for sale on 27th July in the UK. A visit to Amazon USA site shows it is unavailable to view/buy. It probably just means that video rights have not yet been negotiated, but I smelt a conspiracy around the evil empire of sugar. Well, they suppressed studies showing the perfidious nature of the stuff, so surely, an indie film is small fry to them.

That Sugar Film DVD Amazon UK

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Ruth Ozeki – My Year Of Meats

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Big Pharma, Book Review, Food Industry, My Year Of Meats, Politics Of Food, Ruth Ozeki, Soapbox and Issue Novel

Hippocrates Spinning in his grave: Let Food Be Your Poison, and Poison Your Food

I had never heard of the Japanese/American/Canadian novelist Ruth Ozeki before delightedly coming across her Booker shortlisted novel A Tale for The Time Being. I am now working through her hardly even handful of earlier titles

Like Time Being, My Year Of Meat, also published at one time as My Year Of Meats,  is told in two voices, a hybrid American Japanese one, living in America, and a Japanese one, in Japan.

The Japanese voice is that of Akiko, a woman suffering hugely in a culture which is part way its own history, but also being bent and bending itself, into American obsession. The second voice is Jane, a version of Ozeki herself, a Westernised independent woman of Japanese American birth, born in the USA, who nevertheless is ‘hybrid’ and therefore, whilst seeing herself as American, is viewed partly as outsider from both cultures, and indeed views both cultures from the outside.

Jane Tagaki-Little  is a documentary film maker. The Beef Industry, keen to spread its markets more globally, is producing a series of real-life documentaries which are designed to sell more meat, and persuade Japanese people to ‘cook more American’ exchanging a largely fish diet for one containing huge slabs of cow. The production company has to sell the product by selling the (artificial, air-brushed) corn-fed blonde view of the American family. The highlight of each programme in My American Wife involves cooking the slab of cow in some way,  for example  – in a tin of mushroom soup, rolled in dried powdered onion soup after marinating in Coca-Cola (not Pepsi-Cola)

The programmes are car-crash rubberneckingly awful, and hysterically funny – Oprah confessional style, all at once. So is poor Akiko, disturbingly frail and flawed, married to an awful husband (an executive for the company, Beef-Ex, trying to push and expand its markets) Akiko’s vision both acts as a commentary on her own society, and, as she is forced to give her opinion of the programmes, of the unreal-American-dream culture – ‘not authentic, not likeable’

Meanwhile Jane, who is warm about America, is warm about a very different sort of America, recognising the multicultural nature of the country, which, from the start, was patchwork and ethnically rich. The families she wants to celebrate are not the airbrushed ones, but those of eccentricity, individuality, complex ethnicity and authenticity.

And then she begins to run into the politics of the food industry.

The fact that my favourite writer on the politics, and machinations of that unholy combination of the food, agribusiness and pharmaceuticals industry, Michael Pollan, ‘wowed’ Ozeki’s book will give an idea of its flavour. Ozeki, like Barbara Kingsolver, is a writer with environmental concerns, and there is a strong element of exposure of cynical derring-do, with profit being put before people, with the evidence of a corrupt industry or industries tampering with food, using banned drugs, long after they have been banned in one place, in another. As an example DES (diethylstilboestrol), banned in the chicken industry, neatly sideswept for another couple of decades into the beef industry, neatly sideswept improperly tested, as a maintainer of pregnancy world-wide to help women avoid miscarriage, until the inevitable side effects began to surface. Then re-marketed as a morning after pill to inhibit implantation of a fertilised ovum.

The politicisation of Jane in this area, and therefore her role as an educator on the science of all this, is not in any way difficult or gratuitous. Ozeki’s magnificent ability to give hard facts light touch sees the reader through without feeling overwhelmed. First and foremost Ozeki is after all a novelist. It is just she is a novelist ABOUT, a social, journalistic novelist if you like. And the social, political rationale for the novel has a fine pedigree – which we can trace from Victorian writers like Dickens and Trollope, exposing the seamy side of their society, to Upton Sinclair and well beyond. Upton Sinclair was a radical so called issue ‘muckraking journalist’ novelist, and Pulitzer prizewinner. His book about the lives of immigrant in the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, published in 1906 was exposing even THEN the seamy corruption of the food industry and capitalism as bedfellows.

Where Ozeki differs from these authors, is her gender, and her hybrid, therefore outsider viewpoint from any culture. If you are not interested in a book about the food and pharmaceuticals industry – read this as a fascinating, painful and funny book about feeling like an outsider, about changing cultures, cultures in collision, delivered playfully and with subtlety. Just be prepared, every now and again, for a hammer blow to set you reeling.

Ozeki IS a polemic writer, but she is not only a polemicist.

Brilliant. I will definitely now be buying Ozeki the second!

My Year Of Meats Amazon UK
My Year Of Meats Amazon UK

Meanwhile, for those who would like to find out more about DES the blog DES Daughter Network may be of sobering interest

Professor Jonathan Brostoff and Linda Gamlin – The Complete Guide to Food Allergy and Intolerance

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Book Review, Food Industry, Jonathan Brostoff, Linda Gamlin, The Complete Guide To Food Allergy and Intolerance

‘5 stars’ are not enough – this book is the gold standard!

Professor Jonathan Brostoff and Linda Gamlin have produced an amazing (and shocking) piece of work in this book, which appears and disappears – I suspect a further edition/update is in the pipeline, as this 4th edition was published in 2008.

Their work (in any edition) is the best and most comprehensive book I have read on this subject – and it works superbly for however you wish to use it!

If you are a sufferer, or suspect you may suffer from food allergies, and you are looking for a clear and comprehensive guide to self-treatment, this is the book for you.

If you are a practitioner, and are looking for a clear and detailed understanding of these issues, in order to best advise your clients (and my advice would be ‘buy this book’) this is the book for you

If you are a teacher, and looking for help for a clear way to present information on the subject, this is for you.

If you are fascinated by the politics of the food industry – this is for you – I can’t begin to express how horrified I was to discover the extent of the use of food colourings, linked with potentially highly dangerous effects, which have been banned all over Europe and the USA, but which are allowed in the UK. There are some very suspect actions taken by the food industry in this country.

If you admire clearly presented scientific writing, this is for you.

A great read, a great reference text, a survivors kit for many

Oh, and if anyone is really worried and appalled by the tie-up between the food industry and dodgy substances, and lives in the UK (where we really don’t seem to care that much about it) – the best place to live is Norway, who seem to ban EVERYTHING where studies have shown problems with additives.

Or you could just make sure you don’t buy any packaged food with ingredients that are  not obvious ‘foods’

A fantastic companion to this book would be Michael Pollan’s In Defence Of Food – his sensible advice, encapsulated, is:

Eat food. Not too much. Eat more plants.

Beg, borrow, or preferably BUY this book. (the Brostoff/Gamlin one). The information in the book goes way beyond artificial additives (which are LOT of problems are linked with) and does also look at ‘real’ foods which can be problematic, and how to identify allergies and intolerances for yourself

Flicr Commons terren in Virginia’s photostream

For some reason (poor Statesiders!) the version available there has an amended title and is an earlier version (2000) – I’m guessing it may be a little less ‘international’ than the UK version, where information is given about additives banned in many different countries.

The Complete Guide To Food Allergy and Intolerance Amazon UK
The Complete Guide To Food Allergy and Intolerance Amazon USA

Felicity Lawrence – Not On The Label: What Really Goes Into The Food On Your Plate

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Book Review, Felicity Lawrence, Food Industry, Not on the Label: What Really Goes Into the Food on your Plate, Nutrition

Angering and disturbing

As someone who has always found feeding, eating, preparing and sharing food one of life’s pleasures, and as a vegetarian, with a keen interest in health and wellbeing, who has read fairly widely about the subject, I thought this passionate and starkly laid out book would have little to teach me about ‘what really goes into the food on your plate’

I’m a keen follower of information about the paucity of nutrition in the average Northern Europe and North American shopping basket. I abjure and loathe junk food, eat far more than my 5-7 portions of fruit and vegetables, avoid trans fats, prefer butter to marge, avoid anything labelled ‘low fat’ (what is put into it, is the question for me, what ghastly made up synthetic chemistry or manipulated molecular structure we are not evolved to process), never knowingly eat anything with artificial sweeteners, read labels to make sure that ingredients are RECOGNISABLE if I do buy anything ready made.

So I thought I was going to be smugly and superiorly nodding at everything I knew, and patting myself approvingly on the back for my nutritional choices. Which, in the main, I was.

However, where Lawrence delivered a huge gut punch to me was in her section on what is staple in my diet – fresh fruit and vegetables. And the punch was not due to nutritional value information – I knew already that monoculture factory agribusiness, intensive crop growing has depleted the soil, is depleting the soil, and that in the main our fruit and vegetables are no where near as nutritious as they used to be, since the trace nutritional minerals have been taken out of the soil plants grow in. Way back, we husbanded, and grew crops in rotation, and were prepared to leave fields fallow, allow weeds to grow and die back in, to remineralise. Different plants have different mineral needs, so rotation growing was a skilful nurturing of the earth, what grew in it, and what we ate.

The big shocker for me was Lawrence’s revelation of the existence of virtual slavery, yes, even in this sometimes green and pleasant land. The bullying techniques of supermarkets and just in time delivery has placed all the power in the hands of multinational bullies and their shareholders. Farmers are forced to comply, the independent small holding goes to the wall – this I knew, but what I didn’t realise was how deeply the grower’s margins are squeezed – so that in the end, the only way to make a profit, is to cut what costs you can – wages, of a mainly unskilled, often seasonal, often migrant, ununionised workforce. The production of even our ‘buy British’ fruit and vegetables is often linked with terrorised, exploited workers, living in overcrowded, substandard accommodation, recruited (often by being forced to pay hefty backhanders to gangmasters – some of whom are linked with organised crime and human trafficking). Lawrence shocked me by saying ‘do not think slavery was abolished a couple of hundred years ago – it is still going on, in all but name – and in THIS country’

She comes from a solid, investigative journalist tradition, and indeed worked undercover to experience what goes on in this country (as well as others) in slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, bakeries, and in the fields.

And, sadly I believe that though this book is quite elderly now, its lessons are still largely unheeded

Other books, by another writer writing equally well and starkly about how far we have departed from any sort of sensible relationship with our daily bread and more, is the excellent Michael Pollan Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual; In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating: An Eater’s Manifesto

Not on the Label Amazon UK
Not on the Label Amazon USA