Interviewees:
Ulbe Bosma, senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and a professor of history at Amsterdam’s Free University
Milton Aurelio Uba de Andrade Junior, environment engineer originally from Brazil, but now based in Queensland, Australia
Amy Reichelt, nutritional neuroscientist based in Canada who runs the nutrition consulting company Cognition Nutrition
James Suckling, research fellow at the Centre for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Surrey, UK
Listen and subscribe to Living Planet wherever you get your podcasts: https://pod.link/livingplanet Got a question for us? Email livingplanet@dw.com. And, if you like the show, leave us a rating and review on whichever podcast platform you use – and tell a friend!
Transcript:
It’s the 22nd of June, 1935. And some very important cargo has just arrived in Australia’s far north-east… all the way from Hawaii.
The man escorting this cargo is Reginald Mungomery. He’s a scientist from the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations, an agency dedicated to boosting productivity of sugarcane.
At this time, sugar is a thriving industry in Australia, and the tropical climate in this part of the country is ideal for growing cane.
But there’s a problem. Two native insects - the frenchi beetle and the greyback beetle - have been attacking the crop, causing big losses for farmers.
Mungomery’s job at the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations is to find ways to control these pests… And that’s what he’s hoping his special cargo will do.
You see, in the crates he has with him, there are 102 giant American toads. 51 males and 51 females… captured in Hawaii … sent by boat to Sydney … then put on a train up to the northeastern state of Queensland.
These amphibians, also known as ‘cane toads,’ are native to Central and South America. The toads had already had some success getting rid of pests in sugarcane plantations in Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean, so why not try them in Australia too?
The cane toads are brought to a facility near Cairns to breed.
And breed they do. Just a few months later, in August 1935, 2,400 toads are released in Queensland’s major sugarcane growing districts.
To say that the toads take to their new home is an understatement.
With a favorable climate, and no natural predators, they begin to reproduce, and the population spreads and spreads. Ironically, the toads don’t control the beetles in the cane fields (farmers later resort to pesticides to do that job). But they do start wreaking havoc on Australia’s native wildlife.
That’s because the toads are poisonous and excrete venom, which Australian animals haven’t evolved to deal with. Native predators such as goannas, snakes, skinks, crocodiles and quolls fall victim to the toads’ toxin. The populations of these species dwindle whenever cane toads arrive in a new area.
Fast-forward almost a hundred years, to today. The cane toad is a major invasive species. And, with hindsight, its introduction to Australia is seen as a huge mistake.
It’s difficult to say exactly how many toads there are. More than a billion, according to some estimates.
They now populate much of the country’s north. According to the government, they’re advancing westward at up to 60 kilometers per year.
But this isn’t a story about how giant toads came to Australia. It’s about WHY.
The toads were introduced in the first place to protect sugarcane. And that’s because demand for sugar - around the world - was skyrocketing.
Sugar was being produced on a mass scale and making up a bigger share of our diet.
This rise of sugar accompanied the development of our modern world… impacting our economies … the food we eat … and the environment. The cane toads in Australia are just a small part of this picture.
Today, sugarcane farming causes some 400 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year – about the same as France.
And cane crops grown to meet our desire for sweet stuff now cover an area bigger than the United Kingdom.
So how did we get here and more importantly what needs to change when it comes to humanity’s bitter-sweet relationship with sugar? I’m Neil King, and you’re listening to DW’s environment podcast Living Planet.
Sugar is in so many of the food and drinks we consume - from ketchup to cereal, salad dressing to yoghurt.
It’s hard to even imagine a time when this tasty sweetener wasn’t so widespread. But for most of human history, people hardly ate any sugar. Early humans would have likely only eaten it occasionally in the form of seasonal fruits or honey.
The first sugar granules made from processing the sweet juice of sugarcane are believed to have emerged in India about 2,500 years ago. This sugar-refining technique then spread to other parts of Asia and the Islamic world.
For a long time, sugar was considered a rare and expensive “spice” only used by the very wealthy. It was also seen as a medicine to treat ailments such as stomach ache.
Ulbe Bosma: In Europe, indeed sugar was just something that was consumed by princes, by aristocrats and perhaps by a few wealthy people in the cities. The rest of the people, they knew about sweetness, but it was honey or grapes or what was ever was available. The most common people hardly knew sugar until the late 18th century.
Ulbe Bosma is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and a professor of history at Amsterdam’s Free University. He’s also author of the book: “The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health and Environment over 2,000 Years.”
We’re going to pick this up again in the 15th century, because that’s when things really begin to change. Portuguese colonizers start to cultivate sugarcane on a large scale for making refined sugar - first on the Atlantic island of Madeira. And then they introduce it to Brazil, where the tropical conditions are ideal for growing the crop. Plantations popped up in European colonies across the Caribbean, from Cuba to Barbados, Jamaica to Puerto Rico. Swathes of rainforest are cleared to make way for sugarcane monoculture. The labor required to farm these massive plantations comes from the transatlantic slave trade, which sees around 12.5 million people shipped from Africa to the Americas. Nearly two-thirds of these people end up working on sugar plantations.
While all this is happening, across the ocean - in Europe - the price of sugar is going down and consumption is shooting up. This sweet product, once only accessible to the rich upper classes, is beginning to enter the lives of common people. And it’s becoming enormously popular.
Ulbe: Sugar entered households over the course of the 18th century, in coffee and tea and pastries and marmalade. But it was still very modest, a few kilos per year per person.
At this point, sugar is being produced from sugarcane in warm, tropical climates. Thriving plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean are helping to feed a sugar frenzy gripping Western Europe.
Ulbe: And then comes the 19th century and we have the era of industrialization, many people leave the countryside, go into the cities where they don't have their own yards, so they become more and more dependent upon industrialized, industrially manufactured foods. .. We see an industrialization of many things in our lives, but also of sugar and packaged food - because sugar gives texture, it gives sweetness. It even preserves food.
A discovery in Germany drives consumption up even further. A Prussian chemist called Franz Achard develops an industrial method to extract sugar from a root vegetable: the sugar beet, which can be grown in colder, more temperate climates in the northern hemisphere. He opens the first beet sugar factory in 1801, spurring a surge in sugar production in Europe.
Ulbe: … that allows sugar to enter the market in mass volumes and at the same time prices go down rapidly. That means that more and more sugar becomes available to more and more layers of the population in greater quantities. It was the most traded commodity in the 19th century, so it performed the role of what oil is in the 20th century.
The result, Ulbe says, was that over last 150 years, sugar consumption jumped from just a few teaspoons a week to more than half a kilo in many countries. People became more accustomed to eating sweet things. In fact, sugar was seen as an important part of a healthy diet – a reliable source of energy.
Soda fountains emerged in the US, and soft drinks Coca Cola and Pepsi came on the market.
Ulbe: In the 1920s that the sodas, the ice creams, the luxuries become available. And after the Second World War, of course, incomes rise further and further and all kinds of delicacies like chocolate and cookies and ice creams become available almost daily basis for the for the large parts of the population, if not for everyone in Europe and the United States.
Then came the growth of supermarkets and food advertising. And consumption of sugar continued to rise.
Ulbe: So whereas in the 19th century, sugar is still kind of a household item that comes in coffee and tea and then marmalade and pickles, and those kinds of things… in the course of the 20th century it's going into our industrial food which ends up on our kitchen shelves. We go to the supermarket and many things in supermarket are very sweet and sugary and that of course also applies to the beverages. Most beverages contain about 10% sugar in volume and in weight. And then from the 1950s onwards we see a steady increase. And then at the end of the 20th century, the 1980s, 1990s, we see a kind of stabilization of sugar intake at a very, very high level.
Ulbe says the average American consumes more than 45 kilograms of sugar a year – over 120 grams a day. That’s more than citizens in any other country. In Germany, it’s around 33 kilos a year, similar to Australia, and Brazil. In India, it’s significantly lower – around 20 kilos per person. In China, 11 to 12 kilos. And in Nigeria, about 8 kilograms.
Around the time sugar-heavy foods began to play a bigger role in the Western diet, health problems also started to emerge. Tooth decay became more common, so did weight gain.
But it was only around the 1950s and 60s that excessive sugar consumption and its link to obesity began to cause alarm in the medical community. We’ll come back to that a bit later in the episode.
For now, let’s just say, there are growing concerns about what gorging on sugar means for our health. But what about the impact of sugar on the environment?
Sugar crops have left a mark on the places they’ve been farmed – from Thailand to Brazil… India to Australia…where cane toads continue to take a toll.
Large-scale sugarcane monoculture, in many cases cultivated over centuries, dramatically reshaped these landscapes… leading to deforestation, biodiversity loss, pollution, soil degradation and erosion.
In the 1500s, when the Portuguese brought sugarcane in Brazil, vast swathes of Atlantic Forest along the coast were cleared to make way for the crop.
Milton Aurelio Uba de Andrade Junior:…the whole time the Brazil was part of the Portuguese Empire, those roughly 3 centuries, there was more money made out of sugar cane in Brazil than the gold trade and… than all the other agriculture activities.
Milton Aurelio Uba de Andrade Junior is an environment engineer originally from Brazil, but now based in Queensland, Australia. He says it’s hard to describe what was lost at that time, because there was no list of threatened species 500 years ago, and no environmental impact assessments.
Milton: Of course one of the major impacts from the sugar cane farms is the amount of land it uses. So nowadays, it's between 9 to 10 million hectares of sugar cane crops in Brazil, that's the area it uses. And putting into perspective, that's the same size as the Portugal, the entire country's area, in Brazil, it’s insane isn't it? It’s sugar cane farms. … So it's about 15% of the agricultural land in Brazil is sugar cane.
Brazil is the world’s biggest sugar producer, followed by India, the EU, Thailand, China and the United States.
Most of the sugar in our food - some 80% - comes from sugarcane. The rest comes from sugar beet.
And sugarcane is also the largest global food commodity in terms of volume – ahead of corn, rice and wheat.
Today, this crop covers around 27 million hectares – as I said at the start, that’s bigger than the UK, (or the size of the US state of Colorado). The area planted has nearly doubled since 1960. And in that period, the amount of sugarcane harvested has quadrupled to around 2 billion metric tons a year.
The crop is currently farmed in more than 100 countries. But even in places where sugarcane is no longer grown, like Hawaii, Ulbe says its legacy is still being felt.
Ulbe: Particularly the sugar cane exhausts the soil. So within a few years time the soil is exhausted unless you apply a lot of fertilizer, you have to leave that area and try to find the new area. So what is left if these sugar plantations leave? They leave a kind of dry, sturdy grass. It was easily burnt and some people may remember the wildfires in in Hawaii.
Hawaii has been for many decades a very important sugar producer. But these sugar plantations were abandoned by the end of the 20th, early 21st century. So what was left was this sturdy dry grasses. So when these wildfires started, they rapidly overrun these islands. So here we can really see what kind of ecological consequences cane sugar production has. Also in Cuba, which is also very important sugar producer for almost 200 years. It was an island which was covered by wonderful tropical rainforest. And at the end of the 1940s it was suffering from droughts and irrigation systems had to be constructed to supply agriculture with sufficient water… That would have been unthinkable in the early 19th century. So it has tremendous environmental consequences.
Both sugarcane and sugar beet are thirsty, land intensive crops. Farming sugarcane emits around 400 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year, mainly from the practice of pre-harvest cane burning, synthetic fertilizers and fossil-powered machinery.
The practice of burning cane brings down costs, because it gets rid of the crop’s top leaves, leaving ripe sugarcane ready to be harvested. But it’s also a significant source of pollution for the sector.
Ulbe: And cane burning sets whole regions under a thick layer of smoke. In Brazil, that has been prohibited by the Lula government in the early 21st century, but it's still done, for example, in Thailand, which population suffers from huge cane burnings and that causes all kinds of respirational problems. And this is not a good way, of course to deal with nature.
Pre-harvest cane burning continues in other countries, in Thailand, as Ulbe said, but also in India and the US. Residents living near the cane fields in Florida’s Everglades have launched campaigns to try to get American farmers to switch to greener practices. A study by researchers at Florida State University in 2022 found that fine particulate matter in smoke from cane burning in the area contributed to up to six deaths a year.
Ulbe: And hundreds of thousands of people are suffering every year from severe respirational problems because of the cane burning. But that's all because part of trying to produce sugar in in largest possible quantities against the lowest possible price. And this is the result. And it becomes a kind of industrial process. It's mining rather than agriculture.
Researchers in Brazil, where cane burning is being phased out, found that doing away with the practice almost halved the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from farming sugarcane. Milton says using what’s known as green harvesting instead, where the cane is extracted by machine, also improves air quality and the soil.
Milton: This shift away from pre harvest burning has avoided a lot of environmental impacts and the most obvious one is air quality. So in the region where the burning was happening and there was a lot of smoke and ashes through the air and particulate matter, that are very harmful for human health but also harmful for the environment. So since there's no burning anymore, these harmful effects are not happening anymore.
He says the emissions have also dropped, because sugarcane biomass that’s not being burned in harvesting can be used to generate energy for sugar mills.
Milton: So instead of just having that burning outside without any benefits, they're burning inside the plants to generate electricity, so that improves the environmental performance of the process as a whole…. And then also the burning also caused soil erosion and impacts on soil that is not happening anymore.
And then there’s water use. According to the Water Footprint Network, which calculates the amount of water it takes to produce products, one kilogram of refined sugar from sugar beets requires around 920 liters of water. To get one kilo of refined sugar from sugarcane, you’re looking at around 1,780 liters of water.
Ulbe: Sugar needs a lot of water, so that leads to dehydration and dehydration is a big problem in the huge sugar belt in the in West India and one of the largest sugar producing regions in the world.
It’s important to note that most sugarcane crops are rain-fed – that’s why they’re typically grown in the tropics. A little over a quarter of cane’s water needs are met with irrigation. In some countries, that’s heaped stress on water supply, especially during droughts, which are expected to become more frequent with climate change. Milton says Brazil’s sugar farmers mainly rely on rain.
Milton: So the growers, the farmers, they plan their operations in line with the rainy season, and that happens mainly mostly in the southeast part of Brazil, which is the region that grows sugar cane the most. They've got a very defined rainy season and the farmers plan their operations in line that season, so they usually don't require irrigation on their farms.
Meanwhile, runoff of nitrogen and other fertilizers from sugarcane farms has also affected eco-systems – including the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s coast, and in Florida, the biggest producer of sugarcane in the US. Here’s Ulbe:
Ulbe: We have the Everglades there that is the environmental protective area, but the Everglades are seriously polluted by the fertilizers and the pesticides that are applied to the cane fields in Florida.
Studies have also found that the draining of the Everglades wetlands to grow crops there has led to millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions being released into the atmosphere every year due to peat oxidation and loss.
Ulbe: So really it's not sustainable… this way of sugar production. And it is worth this crisis because of the low sugar prices. So the maximum of efficiencies is applied to the whole system.
But steps are being taken in some countries to make sugar more sustainable. In Brazil, many farmers rotate their cane with other crops, like peanuts or soy, to improve soil biodiversity and reduce the need for fertilizers.
There are also certification bodies that seek to ensure sugar is produced in an ecologically responsible manner. For example, there’s Bonsucro, which was founded in 2008 by the World WildLife Fund, and other organizations like the ProTerra Foundation, Fairtrade and Organic. But sugarcane that complies with these standards only makes up around 8% of total global production.
PepsiCo, one of the biggest buyers of sugar in the world, says it sources 100% of its sugar from certified sustainable sources. Another major buyer, Kellogg’s, is aiming to source all of its sugar sustainably by 2030, as is Swiss company Nestle. Coca Cola has set a target for 100% sustainable cane sugar by 2025.
Ulbe stresses, though, that sustainably produced sugar is still very much in the minority.
Ulbe: Big sugar companies like Tate and Lyle in the in the United Kingdom or ZuedZucker in Germany, they do they have their fair trades brands which are ecologically responsible and also socially responsible, but these brands are only a minute part of the entire production of sugar. And since sugar prices are low, they do not allow for ecologically responsible production. Let’s say that's a clear fact. So the bulk of the sugar is produced under environmentally bad conditions.
The global sugar manufacturing industry was valued at around $78 billion US dollars in 2023. And some 175 million tons of sugar was consumed globally.
According to the OECD, demand is only expected to go up.
In its latest forecast, it predicts consumption will continue growing by around 1.1% per year over the next decade, climbing to 193 million tons by 2032.
It points out that health concerns are leading to a moderate decline in sugar intake in high-income countries. But at the same time, expanding population, income growth and urbanization is expected to drive up consumption in Africa and Asia.
Ulbe says that, given these projections, there’s an environmental argument for reducing sugar in diets.
Ulbe: we can say that only 2-4% of the arable land in in the world is covered by cane or by beet, but usually they are quite good lands. They are really lands that have sufficient water - that's only applying to 20% of world's arable land where sugar can be grown. Now suppose that Chinese and other people in the world, in Africa would consume as much sugar as the Europeans do. It would mean that about six or 7% of the world's best land would be covered by sugar cane. So this is also a really a serious problem we are facing. So we hope that we can have a situation in which the sugar intake is generally reduced because if everyone in the world consumes 40 kilograms of sugar per year. That's not sustainable, I think. … that's not enough to avoid a disaster. So we really need to go back to let's say 20 kilograms of sugar per year…that might perhaps save the world. But if the whole world ends up consuming 35 kilograms of sugar per person per year. That's not sustainable.
We did without sugar for most of human history. But now, around 180 million tons of sugar are produced per year. And much of this is added to the everyday foods we buy from the supermarket. These products aren’t even always things we would think of as sweet.
SFX crescendo of voices saying these food types: (Cereals, muesli bars, ketchup, pasta sauce, cake, cookies, chocolate, candy, apple juice, jam, soft drink, yoghurt, salad dressing, pastry, ice cream, biscuits, muffins, pancakes, iced tea, barbecue sauce, sports drinks, baked beans…)
The companies behind sugary foods spend a huge amount on advertising to try and keep our sweet tooth going strong. According to a 2022 survey of representatives of the American sugar and confectionary products industry, the sector spent around 551 million US dollars on advertising that year.
Sugar is embedded in our lives. It played a crucial role in the rise of industrial development, global trade, and shaped the history and culture of many countries. It gives us the energy our bodies need to function. Plus, it tastes great! We humans find it hard to resist, and that’s no accident…
Amy Reichelt: Our brain basically is hardwired to like these foods… Sugar and other tasty foods, particularly high fat, high sugar foods activate the brain's reward system, and the brain's reward system is absolutely fundamental to how we humans are able to survive.
Doctor Amy Reichelt is a nutritional neuroscientist based in Canada who runs the nutrition consulting company Cognition Nutrition. She says every time we eat sugary foods, we experience an increase in dopamine, which helps enforce behaviors we need to survive as a species.
Amy: This includes things like socializing, sex and also eating healthy, but you know, high energy foods because as our ancestors, as hunter gatherers, having a good source of energy was fundamental to the ability of the species to survive, because these things aren't as freely available in nature as we might think…. But what's happened in our modern society is that because these foods are now so abundant, so we've got so many pre-packaged foods that are marketed to us like chocolate bars, candies, ice creams and everything else in between, it's almost as if our brain is now overwhelmed with the very presence of these foods that historically in the past were very scarce…
The result, Amy says, is that our brain is adapting to the overabundance of sugar, and that’s leading to a diminished feeling of reward. And that can drive overconsumption.
Amy: …then what's happening downstream is that you just want to eat more and more of them to get the same reward. So you're becoming more tolerant to the rewarding capacity of these, what were delicious foods. And this driving of over consumption is causing us to consume excessive amounts of calories. And may also shift then our food preferences towards these palatable, yet less nutritious foods…
Amy says high sugar consumption has been shown to impact the parts of the brain we use for decision making, impulse control and memory.
But besides what’s going on in our heads, another key point here is that eating too much sugar is also strongly associated with weight gain.
Amy: And with rising rates of obesity and overweight worldwide this is becoming important globally because obesity and overweight are linked to not only increases in cardiovascular disease and other cancers and shortening of the lifespan, diabetes for example, as well. That this is then causing a crisis globally in terms of health
Adult obesity has nearly than tripled since 1975, while obesity in children has increased almost five-fold. According to the World Health Organization, around 43% of adults are overweight, and 16% are obese. In 2015, the UN health agency issued recommendations aimed to curb sugar intake. It advised that people should consume no more than 50 grams per day of free sugars – that’s about 12 teaspoons. So this applies to sugars like fructose, sucrose and glucose that are added to food and drinks, as well as sugars in honey, syrups and fruit juices. The WHO said these sugars should ideally make up no more than 10% of one’s total energy intake.
But consumption in many western countries is way above that. The average American, for example, eats more than double that amount.
A large proportion of the added sugars in our diets come from drinks. A can of soft drink can contain around 10 teaspoons of sugar. 1 tablespoon of ketchup? That’s another teaspoon of sugar right there. Ulbe says it’s clear something has to change.
Ulbe: If we talk about the health consequences - at this stage, 40%, 42% of the population of the United States is obese, which means having a body mass index of more than 30. There's really obesity is there in a pandemic and that leads to diabetes type 2, you know everything about the Covid pandemic, but there's another pandemic which is slowly killing many people here in this world at this stage. So I think sugar production needs to be reduced anyway. I mean, there cannot be any person who can be against reducing the average sugar intake in this world, particularly in the middle income and wealthy countries.
But… Eating less sugar isn’t so straightforward, given that it’s in so many products. And as humans, we’re drawn to sweet, calorie-rich foods. But what about sugar substitutes? Could artificial sweeteners help us out here? Offering a way to remove sugar without losing the taste?
James Suckling: My name is James Suckling, I'm a research fellow at the Centre for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Surrey in the UK and I've been working as part of the SWEET project, looking at the environmental impact of high intensity sweeteners or non-nutritive sweeteners and trying to understand the ramifications of replacing added sugar with those sort of products in food and drink.
During the fittingly-titled EU-funded SWEET project, James looked at several sugar substitutes, or non-nutritive sweeteners, including stevia, sucralose, aspartame and neotame.
The pros of these sugar substitutes are that they’re zero-calorie and come without the risk of tooth decay. And because they’re super super sweet, they can be used in tiny quantities.
If you’ve had sugar-free soft drinks, then chances are you’ve had aspartame, an artificial sweetener that’s about 200 times as sweet as sugar. Then there’s neotame, which is 8,000 to 16,000 times as sweet.
James: So it's incredibly sweet, which means you need milligrams to replace the amount of sugar.
According to James’ research, the fact that these sweeteners are so intense means they have a much lower environmental impact than regular sugar. So aspartame, for example, produces up to 89% fewer/less greenhouse gas emissions than regular sugar. Stevia, a natural sweetener that comes from a plant, produces as little as 10% of the emissions of sugar. While neotame produces 99% less CO2.
James: We didn't just focus on global warming potential, yes, it's important. But we also looked at other impacts that may occur, so for example, ozone depletion, eutrophication, which is in effect a measure of run off of nutrients from farmland. So nitrates and phosphates. And water consumption, all those metrics and more. And yeah, so on a sweetness basis, they tend to be lower environmental impact than sugar, which I think was a really interesting finding.
So in theory, replacing added sugars in our food and drinks with these sweeteners could significantly reduce the land use, water consumption and emissions associated with growing sugar beets and sugarcane.
Where alternative sweeteners can make sense, James says, is in drinks. Incidentally, most of the added sugars in our diets tend to come from soft drinks, fruit drinks and other sweetened beverages.
James: If you replace sugar in a drink, so like a fizzy drink, the environmental impact tends to reduce for that drink. Because in effect you're replacing a big bulk of sugar with a much smaller amount of sweetener.
But it turns out sugar isn’t so easy to replace in solid foods, because of the different roles sugar plays - in food structure, mouthfeel, preservation, providing sweetness and as a ‘bulking’ agent. It’s tricky to find a suitable substitute that can serve all those functions, whether in a baked good, dairy product or sauce, James says.
James: And that's where it gets interesting because it's very hard to make broad sweeping statements about foods because it's so different depending on the formulation…From an environmental perspective, the kind of results we're seeing makes me feel sort of reasonably confident that you could make the change for added sugar for sweetener plus these other ingredients without incurring undue environmental issues.
But he says a lot of research still needs to be done. Whether these sweeteners are more widely adopted also depends on the acceptance of consumers, and what they perceive as “natural” or “artificial.”
Artificial sweeteners are generally considered safe in limited amounts. But more research is also needed to determine the health effects of consuming them over a longer period. The WHO has said it does not recommend non-sugar sweeteners as a way to lose weight or reduce the risk of noncommunicable diseases in the long term.
Ultimately, James cautions, the discussion around sugar substitutes shouldn’t distract from the overall goal of a healthy diet.
James: The debate around sweeteners versus sugar, it's an interesting one, but it shouldn't be to the expense of looking at our diets in a more general sense anyway. And actually are we eating healthily, full stop? There's a lot coming in about ultra processed foods and a lot of questions around the foods in which added sugar and the sweeteners that may replace them tend to be more processed. So there are bigger conversations going on here and we shouldn't lose sight of those aspects as well.
Ulbe believes artificial sweeteners are not the answer to dealing with the abundance of sugar in food. And that people could instead benefit from trying to reduce sweetness in their diet.
Ulbe: As an historian, I can see that we got used to more and more sugar and to more and more sweetness. So if we replace one type of sweetness sucrose, by the artificial non caloric sweetness, I don't think that is the solution to the problem. I think we have to work towards a diet that's less sweet and that will be really the structural, fundamental solution to our health problems.
Some governments have implemented measures to steer consumers towards healthier diets. For example, requiring sugary drinks to have warning labels or curbing advertising for high-sugar products.
Dozens of countries, including the UK, South Africa, Norway, France and Spain, have introduced some form of sugar tax.
And early evidence suggests it’s having an impact. Two years after a sugar tax was implemented in Mexico in 2014, the purchase of sugar-sweetened drinks dropped by 7.6%. In Chile, restrictions on advertising and label requirements for high-sugar products implemented in 2016 led to purchases of sugar-sweetened drinks dropping almost 25% in the first 18 months.
On the industry side, some companies have taken steps to cut down on sugar in their products. For example by introducing smaller package sizes, or sugar-free alternatives that rely on zero-calorie sweeteners instead.
But sugar taxes and attempts to bring down consumption have unsurprisingly hit some resistance from sugar producers. Ulbe says the huge amounts of money invested in marketing campaigns and lobbying has won the industry comparisons with another commodity.
The American Beverage Association has spent millions to shut down efforts to introduce soda taxes in US states. It’s said such measures would hurt businesses and cost jobs.
The US Sugar Association, meanwhile, has said the World Health Organization’s recommendation that free sugars make up no more than 10% of daily calories is misleading and not based on strong evidence. It warned linking a sugar limit to reduced disease risk could have an economic impact in developing countries.
Sugar cane growing and processing employ more than 100 million people around the world. In India, the sugar cane sector provides rural livelihoods for around 50 million people. In Brazil almost 800,000 people work in the sector.
A drop in sugar consumption, driven by sugar taxes, other measures and general health concerns, would likely have significant consequences for the sugar industry, as well as sugar crop farmers.
The largest impacts on cane production would likely be felt in Brazil, China, India and Thailand, and on beet farmers in countries such as Germany and the US.
Ulbe says sugar farmers might be better off growing other food crops altogether.
Ultimately, he says a big shift is needed in order to tackle the obesity crisis that’s been centuries in the making. He wants to see a new food system - for the sake of our health, and the environment.
Ulbe: This is not a matter of individual choice… My point of view is that this is an historical phenomenon how our food system has been shaped over the over the past 150 years. Of course, people were used to sweetness. Lactose is already sweet. Milk is already sweet. So we drink it from the first day of our life, so to speak. But that's a different kind of sugar. It's not as sweet as sugar is sugar is sucrose is sweeter than nature, one could say. Now how did it end in up in our food system?...
…We cannot isolate sugar and the questions of obesity and environment from seriously addressing the entirety of our food system. And that's I think a very important conclusion we need to draw. That does not mean that I'm against sugar or that sugar should disappear from our diets…I think it will stay, but I hope in less alarming quantities.
Outro