Monthly Archives: May 2014

Australian Health Survey: the facts about sugar intake

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Following the publication of the latest national dietary survey it is clear that sugar intake has fallen since 1995. But mere facts are unlikely shake the resolve of the non-nutritionists driving the lucrative sugar scare.

The trend in sugar consumption in Australia has been a contentious issue in recent years, especially as nutritionists and lay people have sought dietary explanations for the obesity epidemic. On one side of the argument is the view that the intake of sugar, or perhaps fructose, has increased in recent decades and that this has been the driving force behind the epidemic. This argument emerged in the United States where sugar intakes are undoubtedly high.

In the Australian context it has been argued that sugar intake hasn’t increased at all and is actually in steady decline. Proponents of this argument include Dr Alan Barclay and Professor Jennie Brand-Miller who published an assessment of trends in intakes of sugars and obesity rates in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States between 1980 and 2003. In this paper the authors identified an ‘Australian Paradox’ – increased rates of obesity despite an apparent fall in sugar intake.

The recent publication of new data from the Australian Health Survey (AHS) has provided some clarity on this issue.

Sugar data from the Australian Health Survey

The AHS was conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which also conducted Australia’s last national dietary survey of adults and children in 1995, so now we have insights into how the diet of Australians has changed over the intervening period of approximately 16 years. Here are some of the top-line results relating to sugar.

• Intake of total sugars has fallen in men, women and children.
• The percentage of dietary energy from total sugars has also fallen.
• Carbohydrate intake has fallen, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of energy. Total energy intake has also fallen.

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ABC finally concedes that Catalyst was biased

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More than six months after it broadcast two misleading Catalyst programs about diet, medication and heart disease the ABC has admitted there were problems with impartiality and has undertaken corrective action. But there is still something fishy about this.

In October last year ABC television’s science program Catalyst ran two controversial programs purporting to expose myths about diet, medication and cardiovascular disease. In the first program Catalyst presenter Dr Maryanne Demasi challenged the role of dietary saturated fat in affecting risk for coronary heart disease and in the second she questioned the efficacy of statin medication. Essentially, the Catalyst program argued that the world’s leading nutrition organisations and cardiovascular researchers had got it wrong over the last four decades.

Heart Foundation outraged

In an interview on the ABC radio program PM, Maryanne Demasi even stated that the Heart Foundation was ‘certainly supportive’ of the Catalyst program’s evidence. In fact, the Heart Foundation was livid, took offence and submitted a formal complaint. They weren’t alone – the ABC received a total of 146 complaints. To their credit, journalists within the ABC, such as health reporter Dr Norman Swan and Media Watch front man Paul Barry, challenged the accuracy of the programs and the standard of the journalism on display, respectively. For more of detail see my two posts on the Catalyst programs here and here.

Results of independent review

Yesterday, the results of a review of the Catalyst programs by the ABC’s Audience and Consumer Affairs Unit were made public and included findings that standards of impartiality had been breached. Here are some excerpts from the review:

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Omega 6: good or bad for health? Part 1

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Omega 6 in vegetable oils stands accused of causing ill health by increasing the risk for cancer, macular degeneration, Parkinson’s disease, inflammation and heart disease. Sounds bad, but is any of it true?

What is omega 6?

All fats – animal or vegetable – are made up of building blocks called fatty acids which generally fall into three main groups called saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. There are two classes of polyunsaturated fatty acids – omega 6 and omega 3. The omega 3 in vegetable oils is called α-linolenic acid and the omega 6 is linoleic acid. The concern about omega 6 relates to linoleic acid which is the most common polyunsaturated fatty acid in the diet.

Do omega 6 fats cause cancer?

In the early 1980s it was thought that fat intake may affect the risk for cancer of the breast and bowel. This hypothesis was based on very basic evidence i.e. different cancer incidence in countries with differing fat intakes, but worth investigating nevertheless.

Several prospective cohort studies were commenced around this time. Data from seven of these studies were pooled in the definitive breast cancer study by Hunter and colleagues. Breast cancer risk was not associated with intake of total fat, animal fat, vegetable fat or polyunsaturated fat. Another pooled analysis of cohort studies published five years later confirmed that polyunsaturated fat was not associated with breast cancer. So omega 6 was off the hook.

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