Comment by amist
9 years ago
What about the fat industry? Didn't they have enough money to pay for scientists to shift the blame to sugar?
9 years ago
What about the fat industry? Didn't they have enough money to pay for scientists to shift the blame to sugar?
Is there a "fat industry"? Sugar production is very industrialized, just a few companies with a strong lobby.
Fat is much more diverse. Sure, there are a few giant soybean oil producers, but it's not their only product, and individual companies don't dominate their market.
The pork industry for one.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon_mania and http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-06/bacon-why-...
There are definitely meat and dairy industries.
But they are happy to remove the fat and sell you fat-free and/or low-fat versions of their products - just see American supermarket shelves (not nearly as much of that here in German, although even here the low-fat versions are more numerous and more prominently placed). This is hard with sugar-free sugar... :)
Which is why the average American store shelf is full of painfully lean pork and nonfat Greek yogurt (Seriously, WTF?).
Fat based foods are pricier vs sugar based. Given limited household budget for food, margins tend to be lower on Fat based products.
And you can eat a lot more sugar based food vs fat based food on per food weight basis.
I believe there isn't a fat industry, can you imagine manufacturing fat? Paid for by the Fat for America Industry.
What? Where do you think soybean, corn, Canola/rapeseed, peanut, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, olive, coconut, and palm oils come from?
Animal fats are rather expensive in comparison, but I can also buy pork lard, beef suet, and butter rather easily.
The problem there might just be fragmentation. Growers of cane and beets (and sorghum, too, I guess) have basically just one major homogenized end product: refined sucrose. There are a few related products, like molasses, brown sugar, and confectioners' sugar, and the stuff like bagasse, that tends not to be seen by consumers, but refined sucrose is the moneymaker. Corn growers can also side with the sugar lobby thanks to corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup.
There's definitely an industry ($800M/year?), but it isn't one that has a great common marketing association around, to collect dues and pitch catchy slogans that play well on television and radio.
The soy and Canola/rapeseed growers might come together to promote B20 biodiesel, though, while simultaneously bashing palm oil plantations. I can't currently imagine anyone trying to convince me to eat more fats and oils in my diet, at the expense of sugars. Low-carb is still largely seen as an irresponsible, unhealthy, fad diet in the mainstream.
They're not as powerful as the sugar lobby, but they did manage to get out recommendations that unfairly demonized saturated fats and promoted unsaturated fats.
I guess the closest is the National Association of Margarine Manufacturers (http://www.iheartbutterytaste.com/).
There actually are fat factories I know of one in New Jersie, whether it's an industry I don't know.
The dairy industry is backing all these sugar bad, and implicit or explicit fat good. In particular discrediting valid research warning on saturated fats. Against the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, and even NHS.
Guess they were busy destroying the reputation of lard.
Probably not without the corn subsidies that make sugar so cheap.