Sugar Association President and CEO Courtney Gaine wasted no time in getting right to the point of several issues when she spoke at the American Sugarbeet Growers Association annual meeting in early February.
Attendees had to know there was going to be some tough talk and little to no sugarcoating of issues facing sugar producers when she said, “I looked at what I talked about last year and the title was ‘The Obsession With Sugar Reduction.’ And I wish I could say that this year that’s not the theme, but that’s not true.
“It’s only gotten worse.”
Gaine then laid out the challenges and what the Sugar Association, along with the help of others, is doing to meet those challenges by using sound science.
“What I plan to talk to you all about today is our goal, a simple goal, but we don’t want to lose focus on what we do at the Sugar Association,” she said. “And that is our mission every day. And whether it’s going to take 20, 30, 50 or 100 years, it’s just to make sugar recognized as a positive part of a balanced diet which aids in the enjoyment of a wide range of foods.”
While Gaine covered a myriad of topics, we chose to focus on three (mostly due to the limited space in the magazine) and those are: the current mood/thinking of consumers toward sugar, the U.S. government’s latest sugar initiatives and how the Sugar Association is going on the offense to not only correct some incorrect perceptions of sugar but the programs the association has recently rolled out spread the good word.
How Do Consumers Feel Right Now?
“We rely a lot on consumer data,” Gaine said. “We use consumer data to inform our moves, particularly when it comes to engagement with the outside community.” She pointed out some of the consumer data is from in-house research but also other research studies.
“Most consumers are trying to moderate their sugar intake (Figure 1),” she said. “So you can see there’s a solid 78 percent either moderately or severely trying to limit their sugar intake, which is not surprising. For the last 15 years, that’s been pretty much a primary nutrition message that the public has been receiving.
“What’s interesting is when you ask them how they’re moderating their sugar intake, half of them are eating foods that are less sweet, a third are consuming smaller portions and only 14 percent are choosing to moderate their sugar intake by replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners. One thing that’s noticeably different in the past few years is that sugar used to be on the top (Figure 2) of those things that consumers were looking to avoid. And you can see now we’ve got alcohol and high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes are higher than sugar. This is a noticeable difference. Sugar is now down to No. 6.”
Gaine added, “This is important … I feel, and maybe you all do as well, that consumers have kind of moved on from sugar being public health enemy No. 1. Most people are trying to moderate their intake. They’ve tried their zero sugar diet. Their lives didn’t improve. So consumers are kind of past that. They have a different, more holistic view of diet. Yet, what I’m about to talk about is the government is not past sugar being public enemy No. 1.”
Government Initiatives
Gaine focused on a couple of statements as she talked about the directives and proposed rules coming from agencies and the government. First is one from the World Health Organization (WHO). WHO’s May 2023 guidance advises against the use of non-sugar sweeteners to control weight, citing potential health risks including an increased risk of Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and early death in adults.
“This idea that consumers do not want artificial is kind of the theme of where consumers are right now when it comes to artificial sweeteners and other sugar substitutes,” Gaine said.
Then she added, “This advice has been entirely ignored by the U.S. government.”
The second statement Gaine referred to comes from FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, who said in April 2023, “We’re working hard to make sure that consumers have readily available information about added sugars when making food choices and hope and expect these actions will also encourage industry to reformulate.”
Gaine said, “This quote of his really kind of sums up what the Food and Drug Administration is up to. They want to make added sugars more visible to consumers. If you remember back to 2016, we had the new Nutrition Facts Label, which for the first time put added sugars on the label. So added sugars are quite visible to consumers. But as Califf says, he doesn’t turn the package around. So he has other ideas. So it’s not just about added sugars information; the second half of what he said is that by forcing manufacturers to put added sugars on a package, the hope is that they’ll take added sugars out of the package.
“But when you take sugar out of food, there’s not just one ingredient that goes in. A lot of times, you’re going to have additional sweeteners and bulking agents and browning agents, etc. So it’s not so simple as you just pull some sugar out and food is the same. And this is a simple concept that is not understood by the people who make the rules when you have to put other ingredients in.”
She then showed a slide of a peanut butter jar nutrition label side-by-side a jar of reduced sugar peanut butter (Figure 3). She pointed out, “It went from 3 grams of added sugar to 2 grams of added sugars, but you added 20 calories.” You can also see the saturated fat also goes up.
She continued, “So at the end of the day, what’s the purpose of reducing the added sugar? So the idea that you’re going to get sugar substitutes and foods with potentially more calories is not being discussed as we talk about all this reformulation and the policies on the table.”
Gaine also spent a fair amount of time on front of package labeling, the Biden-Harris Administration National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition and Health meeting in 2022 and all the ramifications that could have on sugar and other foods.
Gaine talked about what should be included in a person’s daily food intake, i.e., vegetables, whole grains, etc. Then she said, “But what should be limited is really interesting. So they’ve proposed that anything with more than 2.5 grams of sugar could not be called healthy. So that’s pretty low. But the other weird thing is that you can have as many calories in a food and as many artificial sweeteners, but still be healthy. So you can have 800 calories and a ton of aspartame, but as long as you don’t have more than 2.5 grams of sugar, it’s healthy. Now these criteria are really strict so about 95 percent of the foods that exist in a grocery store wouldn’t even qualify.”
“Fun Stuff”
Toward the end of her ASGA presentation, Gaine said, “I just want to talk about the fun stuff.” That included the initiatives the Sugar Association is taking to correct false perceptions about sugar and how it can be part of a balanced diet.
“It’s very important for us to maintain a positive, proactive, educational course while we’re hit with bullets because if we’re not talking about sugar to the public, nobody is,” she said. “We have two tracks that we’re turning to to try and stay on message and educate people because we know that if you educate consumers, all of the noise that they hear is a little less scary. So the two tracks that we’re trying to answer is, ‘Where does sugar come from?’ and ‘How much can I have?’”
With regards to getting the message out about where sugar comes from she said, “Because we know that when you connect sugar to its origin, for a consumer, they’re more confident that it can fit into a balanced diet.”
She added, “There are a lot of iterations (Figure 4), but it’s very simple and it’s just for people to be like, ‘I didn’t know that,’ because when we started this, only a third of people knew sugar came from a plant.”
As for the question “How much sugar can I eat?” Gaine said, “More and more people want that information. They don’t want to hear, ‘I can’t have sugar.’ They don’t know about the dietary guidelines. The actual guidelines are 10 percent, which is equal to 12 teaspoons or 50 grams [per day].
“When you ask consumers (Figure 5), 75 percent of them believe it’s less than 40 grams per day. So that seems like a huge education opportunity when most people think it’s 80 percent of what the actual recommendation is and when they learn the recommendation, 71 percent are more confident sugar can be a part of a balanced diet.”
Finally, she said, “Balance is a better way to talk about sugar in the diet than moderation. People see moderation as kind of a bad word, so when they learn about the 10 percent guideline, they’re more confident.”