SUGAR COATED / DOCUMENTARY

Is sugar the new tobacco? How did the food industry get us to stop asking the question: is sugar toxic? It all starts with a secret PR campaign dating back to the 1970s. For forty years, Big Sugar deflected all threats to its multi-billion dollar empire, while sweetening the world’s food supply. As obesity, diabetes, and heart disease rates skyrocket, doctors are now treating the first generation of children suffering from fatty liver disease. The sugar industry is once again under siege. They dodged the bullet once. Can they do it again? Today, industry is deploying its old tactics and pulling out the old adage “we just eat too damn much.” This time consumers aren’t buying it. The critics have gotten smarter, bolder, and madder and science is catching up. Pediatric endocrinologist, Dr. Robert Lustig thinks we’ve all been ‘frucked’ by industry. He’s evangelical, blaming sugar for a waiting room filled with obese kids with fatty livers. His flock of five million online followers grows daily. In the court of public opinion, he’s part of a leading group of experts who are putting sugar on trial. Pulling back the curtain on the sugar-coated tactics of an industry once again under attack, this documentary will give you a chilling feeling of deja vu. Today the industry is back sweetening the message. But this time, history comes knocking. When the doors closed at the Great Western Sugar Company in Colorado in 1976, someone forgot to sweep the floor. Gathering dust in the archives were 1500 pages of internal documents exposing how the Sugar Industry used Tobacco-style tactics to dismiss troubling health claims against their products. Denver dentist turned postdoctoral scholar at the UCSF School of Medicine, Cristin Kearns, knew she’d stumbled on something big: the industry’s secret playbook. Her mentor, Stan Glantz, the superstar professor from San Francisco who brought down Big Tobacco warns, it’s going to get dirty. While industry and science duke it out, are we sitting on a dietary time bomb?

How did the food industry get us to stop asking the question: is sugar toxic? It starts with a secret PR campaign dating back to the 1970s. For 40 years, Big Sugar deflected all threats to its multi-billion-dollar empire while sweetening the world’s food supply. As obesity, diabetes, and heart disease rates skyrocket, doctors are treating the first generation of children with fatty liver disease. The sugar industry is again under siege. They dodged the bullet once. Will they do it again?

It seems impossible to believe that people need convincing that an excess of sugar causes obesity and diabetes. But like Big Tobacco, Big Sugar has succeeded in manipulating information so the public stays in the dark.

In fact, that’s part of the problem with Michèle Hozer’s documentary. Our collective sugar addiction, and the industry that promotes it, is too much like tobacco addiction (indeed, many scientists pretending sugar is harmless worked for cigarette sellers), and the narrative in Sugar Coated is a lot like that of Merchants Of Doubt, the doc about climate-change deniers.

Hozer has all the right talking heads, including authors Gary Taubes (Why We Get Fat) and Robert Lustig (Fat Chance) and researcher Cristin Kearns, who got her mitts on files proving Big Sugar was waging an all-out campaign to dupe the public. The information is essential, and the story of how the sugar industry managed to get the Heart & Stroke Foundation into its back pocket instructive.

But though the subject itself is new, the story isn’t.

Fortunately, Hozer includes spectacular footage of food factories and bakeries churning out treats that look so yummy, you become aware of how easily we’re seduced. It’s a smart, cinematic way of making the point.