The article Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies,” by Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens discusses the controversy over sugar the past few decades and the health problems that it has caused such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. The authors states that the sugar association’s president and associates were able to convince the public that sugar was not as harmful as once proposed due to infusing some uncertainty into some of the research studies and results that have been revealed to the public, including the FDA and other experts.
Said the authors about the Sugar Association members, “As John “JW” Tatem Jr. and Jack O’Connell Jr., the Sugar Association’s president and director of public relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the coup they’d just pulled off” (Taubes and Crisitn paragraph 1). The main point that the authors are trying to say is that the Sugar Association members were able to make sugar look healthy by creating doubt surrounding studies citing sugar as harmful. I feel that the authors were able to convince readers of their argument.
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One thing that the authors did quite well was to provide solid evidence that Tatem and O’Connell were creating uncertainty. The authors discuss how the sugar companies had about 1,500 pages of internal memos, letters, and company board reports that past researchers and consultants used to help create a strategy to increase positive PR for the sugar industry. The authors showed further evidence through the following passage that discussed the people’s strategies by stating, “They show how Big Sugar used Big Tobacco-style tactics to ensure that government agencies would dismiss troubling health claims against their products. . .With the jury still out on sugar’s health effects, producers simply needed to make sure that the uncertainty lingered. But the goal was the same: to safeguard sales by creating a body of evidence companies could deploy to counter any unfavorable research” (Taubes and Crisitn paragraph 4).
The Sugar Association was also able to show that its rivals and products that could threaten their profits, such as artificial sweeteners, were harmful, which boosted sugar’s reputation. The sugar industry spent approximately $600,000 to do research studies on the negative harmful effects of cyclamate sweeteners. By doing this, they upped sugar’s reputation and were able to sell more of it. Although later proven that artificial sweeteners did not affect humans, research came out that stated that cyclamates caused cancer in rodents and that saccharin also created bad results in animals (Taubes and Crisitn paragraph 10).
The authors also said that the sugar industry was able to establish the safety of sugar well, something that is they discussed in the last paragraph of the article by stating, “In short, rather than do definitive research to learn the truth about its product, good or bad, the association stuck to a PR scheme designed to “establish with the broadest possible audience—virtually everyone is a consumer—the safety of sugar as a food” (Taubes and Crisitn paragraph 12). The authors also went on to say that the suagr industry took advanatge of credible witnessed by getting professional people on board, such as dentists, to support the safety of sugar, the company doing this by spending about $60,000 each year on research and PR.
I feel that the authors were succesful in proving their main point that the Sugar Association members and other member of the sugar industry were able to make sugar look healthy by creating doubt surrounding studies citing sugar as harmful. By including much evidence and techniques, I feel that the authors were able to convince readers of their argument.
