{"id":114,"date":"2017-11-03T10:33:12","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T10:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/?p=114"},"modified":"2018-10-31T09:46:23","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T09:46:23","slug":"sugar-awareness-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/2017\/11\/03\/sugar-awareness-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Sugar Awareness Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

The lobby group\u00a0Action on Sugar<\/a>\u00a0has been promoting Sugar Awareness Week on their\u00a0@actiononsugar\u00a0<\/a>Twitter feed. One post, below, caught my attention.<\/p>\n

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It is difficult to know how much sugar billions of people across the globe are really consuming. On a country basis you can take production plus imports minus exports, but you don’t know how much sugar has been wasted, or added to or subtracted from stocks. It is even harder on a global basis where cross-border sugar trade flows can be difficult to track.<\/p>\n

Having said that, the UN’s FAO <\/a>estimates\u00a0world sugar consumption in 1987 at 102 million tonnes. That year\u00a0 world population reached 5 billion people, which equates to a per capita sugar consumption of 20.4 kilos . Thirty years later, the world\u2019s population has reached 7.6 billion people and world sugar consumption has topped 180 million tonnes. So using the FAO’s figures that equates to a\u00a0per capita sugar consumption of 24 kilos per person,\u00a0an increase of\u00a018 percent over thirty years.<\/p>\n

Possably\u00a0as a result of the group’s lobbying efforts,\u00a0two of Europe\u2019s leading magazines featured sugar on their covers this week. France\u2019s\u00a0Le Point<\/em>\u00a0promised to tell readers \u201cThe Truth About Sugar\u201d while Germany\u2019s\u00a0Focus<\/em>\u00a0wanted to inform their readers of the difference between \u201cgood\u201d sugars that come in the form of natural products, and \u201cevil\u201d sugars that the\u00a0food industry\u00a0adds<\/em>\u00a0to their processed products.<\/p>\n

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As part of\u00a0Le Point<\/em>\u2019s crusade for the truth the magazine included a graphic that showed that per capita sugar consumption had risen from 16 kilos per person in 1960 to 25.5 kilos in 2016. Unlike the statistics on Action for Sugar’s Twitter feed, these figures are more or less correct. World sugar production in 1960 stood at 55 million tons while world population stood at 3 billion people, which gives a per capita consumption of 18 kilos. As for 2016, the FAO’s figures suggest a\u00a0 per capita number of 24 kilos, but that is close enough.<\/p>\n

What\u00a0Le Point<\/em>\u00a0fails to point out is that if you exclude<\/a>\u00a0the low-income countries of China, India and Pakistan the average global per capita sugar consumption hasn’t changed from what it was in 1960 – 25 kilos per head. Per\u00a0capita sugar consumption in the USA in 1960 was around 55 kilos per head.<\/p>\n

At the recent Platts-Kingsman Conference (no longer anything to do with me) in Miami, the American Sugar Alliance, a pro-sugar lobby group, presented the following graph showing US sugar consumption correlated against US obesity rates.\u00a0 As you can see, obesity rates have been rising while sugar consumption has fallen.<\/p>\n

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If you add in high fructose corn sweeteners, the picture changes somewhat, but not dramatically.<\/p>\n

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In their presentation the ASA highlighted the fact that Americans are consuming 374 more calories per day now than they were 34 years ago. The following graph breaks down where those extra calories are coming from.<\/p>\n

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Going back to Le Point, the magazine published the following graphic in their anti-sugar piece. It purports to show a correlation between world sugar production and obesity. The correlations look impressive, but they would have looked less impressive if they had taken the increase in population into account.<\/p>\n

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All this\u00a0prompted me to revisit one of\u00a0my favourite websites<\/a>\u00a0where I managed to produce the following graphic. It clearly shows how the decline in per capita consumption of\u00a0corn sweeteners in the US has resulted in a reduction in the number of pedestrians killed by motor vehicles. So that at least is good news.<\/p>\n

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It is not clear who first coined the phrase<\/span><\/a>, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” In his book \u201cThe Persuaders – The Hidden Industry that wants to change your mind<\/span><\/a>“, the author James Garvey\u00a0explains that the practice of public relations\u00a0is \u201crarely intended to inform the population about the intricacies of an issue and is more often calculated to circumvent critical thinking.<\/i>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Well said!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The lobby group\u00a0Action on Sugar\u00a0has been promoting Sugar Awareness Week on their\u00a0@actiononsugar\u00a0Twitter feed. One post, below, caught my attention. It is difficult to know how much sugar billions of people across the globe are really consuming. On a country basis you can take production plus imports minus exports, but you don’t know how much sugar … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Sugar Awareness Week”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9fIT3-1Q","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114\/revisions\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commodityconversations.com\/wordpress2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}