Sugar Association disputes sucrose ties to obesity

In a letter published in the August 21 issue of the journal The Lancet, Dr. Charles Baker, Vice President Scientific Affairs for the Sugar Association, outlined his rebuttal to a viewpoint published in The Lancet in March, 2004 that obesity is linked to increased sweetener consumption.

The disputed viewpoint suggested that the obesity epidemic has been caused largely by the increase in sugar consumption over the past decades, however Dr. Baker points out that " ... deliveries of sucrose for U.S. food and beverage use have declined steadily since 1970, as obesity has increased."

In the author's own words, there is no body of reproducible data supporting the viewpoint that sucrose is a causative factor in chronic diseases, yet he makes a huge leap by lumping all sugars together as a factor in the current obesity epidemic. He repeats this underlying flaw again in his rebuttal.

Dr. Baker showed graphically, from US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service data that the sucrose (sugar from sugar cane and sugar beets) segment of US caloric sweetener deliveries dropped from 85% in 1970 to 43% in 2002, with further declines projected for 2003 and 2004.

In his argument, Dr. Baker pointed out that by categorizing all free sugars as the same, as the viewpoint author did, the importance of the individual physiological responses to various sugars is ignored.

"We have little hope of successfully reversing the worldwide epidemic of obesity as long as all free sugars continue to be regarded as identical and simplistically related causally to adverse health outcomes such as excess weight," explained Dr. Baker.