Show notes
Hey everyone, and welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? Podcast where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I’m Laura Thomas, I’m an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter.Today I’m sharing part 2 of my conversation with Professor Karen Throsby, author of Sugar Rush. If you’re just joining us then make sure you go back and listen to part 1 of this episode before you jump into this one. We talk about mortified mothers, how removing sugar from the diet is gendered work that falls on women, and how the certainty around the ‘badness’ of sugar belies a lot more doubt and ambiguity coming from the scientific community. So go back and check out part 1 if you haven’t listened already. Today we’re getting into why the so-called ‘war on ob*sity’ has to constantly reinvent itself to stay relevant, and how it fails to meet its own objectives. We also talk about how ultra-processed foods are quickly becoming the new sugar and how that conversation fails to acknowledge the role that convenience foods play in offering immediate care or the privilege in being able to eat for some nebulous future health. And we couldn’t talk about sugar and not talk about Jamie Oliver and the sugar tax.INTROBefore we get to Karen, a super quick reminder that all the work we do here is entirely reader and listener supported and the podcast is my biggest operating cost. I will do everything I can to keep it free and accessible to everyone, and you can help by becoming a paid subscriber - it’s £5/month or £50 for the year (and you can pay that in your local currency wherever you are in the world). Paid subscribers get access to the extended CIHAS universe including our weekly discussion threads, my monthly column Dear Laura and the whole back archive. You also support the people who work on the podcast, and help ensure we can keep the lights on around here. You can sign up at laurathomasphd.co.uk and the link is in your show notes. As always, if you’re experiencing financial hardship, comp subscriptions are available, please email hello@laurathomasphd.co.uk and put the work ‘snacks’ in the subject line and we’ll hook you up. Thank you as always for your support and for making this work possible.Alright team, I know you’re going to love the second installment of this episode so let’s get straight to it - here’s part two of my conversations with professor Karen Throsby. Here’s the transcript in full:MAIN EPISODELaura: Karen, I want to come back to this idea that you articulate so well in the book. You say that “the so-called war on ob*sity has been unable to warrant its core empirical claims” – I'm quoting you now, “and has been a notable failure when measured against its own goals of sustained population level weight loss.”Can you explain how in order to sustain itself, the war on ob*sity had to reinvent itself like Madonna? By casting a new villain…and kind of talk about that arc a little bit? Karen: Yeah. So if we think about, I mean, obviously the sort of attack on fat bodies has, has a very long history, but if we think about its most recent history in, in the form of the war on ob*sity, which dates to around the turn of the millennium as a new kind of intensified attack where dietary fat was seen as the core problem.Sugar has always been seen as a problem. We can even go back to the 1960s and the rise of artificial sweeteners. and their take up in the diet industry. So it's always been there as a problem, but it was really fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. And that's why, when I looked at the newspaper articles, sugar was hardly talked about because the focus was different.And I think what we get is then with that repeated failure, where there has been a base, I mean, there's…in the UK, there's been a leveling off of ob*sity rates, but it doesn't meet the aspirations of the attack on ob*sity. It has been a failure. And I think it runs out of steam because it's not achieving the change.And, and yet you get this kind of constant hectoring and sort of constant renewal. I can't…there's been…I can't remember. It's like 17 policies or something, you know, in the last 20 years. And it's, you know, none of them are successful, have been successful. And then, so we get to about 2012, and one of the things that happened in the UK, of course, was the Olympics, where there was a lot of anti-ob*sity talk.It was seen as a way of refreshing the war on ob*sity, and I think that partly opened the door. Laura: Yeah. I'm sort of smirking, because I was in the States at that point doing my PhD, so I kind of, like, missed a lot of what was going on here, around 2012 in the Olympics. So yeah, it's really interesting that you're, you're not, you noted that, that that kind of anti…Karen: Like a core, a core justification for the, for funding, you know, a mega event like the Olympics was that it would boost sport, which would boost attempts to reduce ob*sity. And so you've got that in the background, you've got the fact that it is losing steam, you know, and so it needs to find another, another enemy, something to pick it back up again. And sugar, I think…because at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, we've got austerity measures being consolidated through the Welfare Reform Act in 2012, all of those welfare cuts in place. So then the idea of sugar, and the kind of an austerity worked really well together, the idea that individuals should make small economies to get by to manage their own consumption, that you shouldn't over consume because it costs the state, it costs other people money. And so those narratives came together perfectly and sugar just became this, this model enemy for the moment.And then what we see then is the rise of interest in the sugar tax. which was announced in 2016, which is the peak in the newspaper coverage, and then was launched in 2018. So in a, in a sense, the history of the social life of sugar during this moment is an arc that sort of covers the rise to the sugar tax and then its implementation.But all of the expectation that had been laid on fat is then laid onto sugar as the problem. If only we can solve this problem. And so again, as I said before, it creates this erasure of the absolute complexity of food and eating. The idea that food is only ever swallowing and metabolising, it's, you know, it's so social, it forms so many social functions around love, care, comfort, you know, all of those things that it’s just completely inadequate.And then what we've got now is a tailing off. And actually it tailed off during the pandemic, there was a little peak at the beginning, if you can remember when Boris Johnson launched an anti-obesity policy, when he came out of hospital, he was blaming his own body size on the fact that he'd been very unwell. And so we saw a little peak then, but it's basically dropped off now.So in sort of 10 years, we've had a sort of complete focus on sugar and then this tailing off of interest in it. And I think now what's coming in instead is ultra processed food is now filling that gap, but it's folded sugar into it because obviously ultra processed food is, as almost all, I mean, has always got sugar in it. And so it's picked up the sugar as it's gone. So it's, all of that is still there, but it's now being talked about in terms of ultra processed food.[SMALL PREVIEW OF FIRST UPF ARTICLE]Laura: I imagine that what you, you might say about kind of almost this like third phase of the, the ‘war on ob*sity’ in terms of who or what is responsible, because there almost has to be this singular entity that we can point at.And at the same time, I think it's so interesting that ultra processed food has just kind of subsumed every kind of nutritional villain that we could have. Fat, sugar, sweeteners, and just the complexity within the concept of ultra processed food in terms of just from a lay perspective, right? To try and wrap your head around what is and isn't.I mean, I have a PhD in nutrition and I struggled to get through the NOVA documentation on ultra processed food. And to bring it back to the sort of gendered aspect of this for a second, something that I noted that…so Carlos Monteiro is the guy, right, that developed the NOVA classification. I'm not sure if you've read much around this.I don't know if this is a book that's in the works for the future, but one of the things he said is that ultra processed food is the undoing, basically of the family meal. I mean, there's…there's a lot that we could unpack there in terms of, like, the sort of putting a family meal on a pedestal and how that even has sort of classed and, you know, all kinds of connotations.But, I mean, as a mother of a small child, to my thinking, actually, ultra processed food saves our family meals, right? Like, it makes it feasible to get something on the table while you have, you know, a child kind of hanging around your legs begging you to play with them. All of the, kind of, the rhetoric from Carlos Monteiro and the men of science, it kind of, it misses the piece of labour, around labour, which we've talked about, but it also misses this piece of just how we're all just struggling to survive in late stage capitalism, and how none of us in our lives have the conditions available to us where, you know, we have affordable childcare or family close by because we're living in these like hyper isolated, splintered, you know, individual houses, and we have no community and I think there's this a piece that gets missed out of this conversation about the bigger, broader social structures that we're living within, which I suppose, you know, speaks to the thesis of your book.So yeah, I was just tying it back to some of my observations around ultra processed food, so it's really interesting that you've gone there and I'm curious to hear what additional thoughts you have about that?Karen: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the, the alarm that goes off for me when I hear this talk about ultraprocessed food is very similar to my alarm around the way the sugar, that sugar is talked about. It's carrying a lot of weight that it's, it's being now framed as again, the problem. But now it's a very different kind of problem to sugar. So we know that sugar is in a lot of foods. If you go to a supermarket, it's, you know, there's a considerable proportion of the foods will have added sugar.But there's a real difference there between, say, observing that, where you could, for example, purchase lower sugar items and so on. But to say that, I mean, what is it, 60 to 80 percent of, of food that we eat – this is the figure that we get, I mean again, who is we? – is ultra processed food and we shouldn't eat it. What, what do they expect people to eat?Are they seriously suggesting that people take out 60 to 80 percent of their habitual diet?Laura: Well, I have an answer to that actually, Karen. So Gyorgy Scrinis, who I know you reference a lot in your book, he thinks that we should all… well, he had two recommendations from one podcast I listened to. One was that we should all, there should be lots of markets everywhere that people can just pick up food, fresh food, right?And secondly, he also thinks we should all be able to go into our garden and pick a salad. Karen: Right. I mean, it's a lovely fantasy. It's a lovely fantasy. Promised on the labour of women, again.Laura: I would love to have a garden, first of all, that I could be able to do that. Karen: Lots of people don't have those gardens. They don't have farmer's markets.It's a lovely fantasy. It's probably not a bad idea, but realistically, people can't do that for all kinds of complicated reasons. And I think what gets lost there is, I think, the idea of health in the present. So, for example, we know that, when I talk about the, we, you know, the, we are eating this, what's often meant there is they are eating this, right?We know that a lot of the people, the, the big figures in the anti UPF field are not and yeah, they're not eating it. So they are eating it and there is this complete lack of understanding around, for example, if you have no money, if you really have no money, if you're very poor, if you're poor in every way, which many, many people are in this country, to feed your child a processed meal that is highly palatable, calorific, that you know they'll finish and not be hungry, is an act of care in the present, that your kid's not going to be hungry. They'll be able to concentrate at school, get a good night's sleep, those things. Whereas those…that act is not credited. So if you were to cook food from scratch or buy an unfamiliar food, for example, and give it to a child. Now I've never raised a child, but from what I kind of understand, children are incredibly conservative and it takes many, many goes at a new food before they will eat it. So if you have no money and you give your child an apple that they won't eat, you can't give them anything else. And so the cost of experimentation is very, very high for people with nothing to fall back on. And so there's lots of reasons. And then we talk about time poverty. It's better to, you know, sit down and grab something that is processed rather than not having the time to cook anything. And so lots of those reasons why people might eat this food. And until you address, I think, the inequalities that are absolutely central to food choice, it makes no sense to actually dictate food choice unless you are prepared to entrench those very same inequalities.Laura: Yeah, thank you for that. I think you articulated it so beautifully with that example around the opportunity cost of feeding a child or, you know, exposing them..we would use the language of ‘exposure’ in nutritional science in terms of, you need 15 to 20 exposures before a child will accept a food and even that's horseshit, right?We know that it can take a lot more than that and, and, and even then, you know, the…say they do eat the green beans or the broccoli or whatever it is, that's unlikely to fill them up and stave off hunger for, for that child. So, yeah, I think framing it as an act of care is such a beautiful way to, to put it because, you know, the, the alternative that's being peddled by these, UPF sort of evangelists is that that you're doing something harmful for your child and setting up that binary is so problematic because again, you're just flattening down so much nuance there.Karen: Yeah, exactly that. This idea that food is either good or bad and sugar is…is bad. And if you say it's good, then you must work for the sugar industry. And if you make, if you make a set of claims, as I have, a kind of critical claim where I, I refuse the idea that it's either good or bad, I've never said that it's good or bad, I just get accused of working for Coca Cola.You know, which I'm not, by the way.Laura: Yeah, no, you're, you're an academic and what you're doing is complicating a lot of these things that, that seem….are, I suppose, where the, the rhetoric around them is so, um, binarised and flattened and yeah, just, just, uh, you're, you're asking questions, which I think we need to do a lot more of.Speaking of questions, there is one, one more thing, little topic that I'd like to – I say, little topic, it's not a little topic at all, but one of the things that you, or one of the threads that felt really important in your book that I feel often gets obscured from any conversations about sugar is the really troubling history…
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