New York - The damage and death that cigarettes cause are well
known. “We produce a product that causes disease,” Andre Calantzopoulos,
the CEO of Philip Morris International, told the BBC last
month in announcing an alternative cigarette the company says should be less
harmful.
As the popularity of smoking has plummeted in the US, health
advocates have turned to another adversary, which they say has taken tobacco's
place: the food industry. Comparisons between the two show up with regularity,
especially when it comes to marketing to children. The same arguments
public health experts aimed at Joe Camel are now being wielded against
food companies that use cartoons, video games, and other targeted marketing to
reach the same demographic of loyal customers-to-be.
But the connection between junk food and cigarettes runs a lot deeper,
as Gary Taubes details in a revelatory chapter of his book The Case
Against Sugar, set to be released on December 27.
Taubes—the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why
We Get Fat, and the recipient of three Science in Society Journalism
awards from the National Association of Science Writers and a Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research—argues that sugar
is the main driver of the chronic diseases plaguing Western civilization in the
21st century, including (but not limited to) diabetes, heart disease, and
obesity.
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“If this were a criminal case,” he writes in the author’s note,
“The Case Against Sugar would be the argument for the prosecution.” That
argument is convincing, if sometimes long-winded.
But wedged between chapters on the long history of humans’ insatiable
lust for sugar (fun fact: New Guinean creation myths from 10 000 years ago
involve “the sexual congress of the first man and a stalk of sugarcane”) and
the economic resilience of sweets is a little-known story: the alliance between
the sugar and tobacco industries.
Natural
sugar
Tobacco itself has a natural sugar content, which curing alters. While
flue-curing increases the sugar content, making the tobacco more palatable
for smokers, it also results in lower content of nicotine, an addictive
stimulant. By early in the 20th century, the industry had found a way
to make its product both more enjoyable to smoke and higher in nicotine. Air-curing
Burley tobacco creates relatively high levels of easily absorbed nicotine;
sugar-soaking, which follows, enhances flavor.
Soon, “sugar-sauced” Burley tobacco was being blended into R.J.
Reynolds’s Camels, and other manufacturers followed suit, Taubes
writes. By 1929, more than 50 million pounds of sugar a year were being
used to “candy up” the tobacco in more than 120 billion
American cigarettes.
“It is well recognized that sugar and other sweeteners have the ability
to mask bitter and other undesirable flavors,” Courtney Gaine, president of the
Sugar Association, which represents the industry, said in an e-mail. “While we
have not read Mr. Taubes’ book,” she added, “the 60+ year old report referenced
does not reflect The Sugar Association current activities or science
priorities.”
TMA, which represents the tobacco industry, said it didn’t have
expertise in the area.
Genius
For this chapter, Taubes relies largely on Tobacco and Sugar, a 1950
report by the Sugar Research Foundation, the industry trade group at the time,
that openly celebrated the union.
“Were it not for sugar,” said Wightman Garner, a former US Department of
Agriculture tobacco official quoted in the report, “the American blended
cigarette and with it the tobacco industry of the United States would not have
achieved such tremendous development as it did in the first half of this
century.” Later in the report, the author refers to the development as
“this most promising field of sugar utilisation.” The combination, the report
says, was a “stroke of genius.”
Recent industry-funded research has found that the added sugar doesn't
increase the toxicity of the cigarettes, but other studies confirm that it
does make cigarettes taste better, getting people to smoke more of
them.
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Even though sugar remains a component of modern-day cigarettes, few
people realise it. “It’s virtually unknown,” Taubes said in an interview, noting that
the topic was discussed in Sugar Blues, an anti-sugar classic from
1975, and Golden Holocaust, which railed against cigarettes in 2012.
Taubes considered omitting it from his book, because it wasn’t central to his
case about sugar in the diet.
Ultimately, he figured, “How can I not tell this story in this book?”