The study reported:
Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks can damage human metabolism and is fuelling the obesity crisis.
The report debunked:
Yikes. When you see the phrase “scientists have proved,” it’s nearly always an indication that the writer has no idea what he or she is talking about. And superlatives such as “for the first time” should nearly always be avoided.
One of the authors of the study, Kimber Stanhope of the University of California at Davis, weighed in on the Grist message boards. [link] Referencing the Sunday Times, she wrote: “Almost every sentence in the article contained at least one inaccurate statement.” She runs through them one at a time.
Fructose and high-fructose corn syrup aren’t the same. It appears that the writer, Lois Rogers, conflated the two and jumped to all kinds of incorrect conclusions. For example, that the research had anything at all to do with “the obesity epidemic.” It didn’t.
The Big Money piece was in response to this Grist post, since angrily corrected:
…in case anyone from the Times of London is reading this, if you think I will ever link to or quote from one of your articles again, then you’ve been drinking too much of the Kool-Aid that your boss Rupert Murdoch hands out.
Why is The Big Money refuting a food story? Because it’s about money:
As I have noted several times, HFCS presents a big problem. But that problem has to do with economics, not (necessarily) biology: HFCS is cheap and efficient to produce and use as an ingredient in all kinds of products—including products that might not contain sugar at all if HFCS didn’t exist. It is cheap in large part because of farm subsidies. As a result, it is ubiquitous and is making a lot of people fat, diabetic, and prone to heart disease. But if sugar were just as ubiquitous, it might be just as blameworthy for many of our worst public health problems as HFCS has become. We just don’t know yet.
The problem here is that by myopically looking for proof that HFCS is some kind of poison, we’re taking attention away from the real problem—the product’s ubiquity, which is largely a result of massive federal subsidies to corn growers. That should be the main target, at least until scientists prove that HFCS is more than marginally worse for us than sugar is. And that might never happen.
And why I am posting today about a story that made news last week? Because that original Times‘ report is still making the rounds, here tweeted by a techie I follow and admire.