Refined sugar gets a bad press. For years all consumers seem to have been told is that it rots your teeth and makes you fat, while the EU sugar regime is accused of damaging developing economies. So why does the food industry go on using it, and does sugar have a role to play in the future of healthy food production? Chris Lyddon reports.
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There is plenty of it. “Sugar is a major problem that leads to obesity, diabetes and other serious medical conditions,” Dr Grahame Archard, head of obesity at the Royal College of General Practitioners told a recent conference.
“Sugar is next; once the present campaign on salt is over, we will be looking at a campaign to reduce the amount of sugar people are eating,” Imogen Sharp, head of health improvement and prevention for the Department of Health, told delegates at the same conference.
Dr Julian Cooper, head of food science at British Sugar, can come up with a lot more reasons to use sugar than just a sweet tooth. “Sweetness is the attribute which most people consider to be the only function of the sugar,” he told just-food. “There are many other functional properties which are essential in foods.”
Richard Cottrell, director of the Sugar Bureau, said that sweetness might not even be its most important attribute from the point of view of food processors. “There is a point of view that sugar is not now bought by the food industry for its sweetness,” he told just-food. “It’s bought for its other attributes.”
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By GlobalDataSugar could not be blamed for obesity. “The big story that sugar is particularly implicated in making you fat has never been supported by any direct evidence,” he said.
An important preservative
One vital property is its ability to help preserve certain foods. “Sugar is not just sweet. It’s highly soluble,” said Julian Cooper. “In solution sugar exerts a high osmotic pressure. At high concentrations of sugar the bugs can’t survive. Other ingredients just don’t have that property.”
The soluble nature of sugar makes it ideal for some of its uses. “If sugar didn’t dissolve when you suck on a boiled sweet it would be like sucking on a stone,” he said.
It also helps to improve flavour in a way that is more than just making things sweeter. “When you put it in products part of the sugar breaks down and you get the development of colours and flavours which characterise many food products.” he said.
“If you try to replace sugar you have to add several ingredients to achieve the same properties,” he said. It means putting in a whole range of ingredients to do sugar’s job. This means an increase in labelling and additional warnings. “You need additives (with E-numbers) to perform the same function.
“Sugar has been around for centuries. A lot of the foods we eat were historically developed using sugar. It was readily available, stored easily and above all it was safe. He also pointed out that sugar is naturally white. “Sugar crystallises naturally white. The characteristic brown colours and flavours associated with partially refined sugars are developed during the sugar manufacturing process.
Dr Cooper may be a big fan of sugar, but he doesn’t advocate overdoing it. “A good mix of foods is important in a healthy diet” he said. “Sugar is an important element in a balanced diet. It makes a range of foods palatable and enjoyable.”
The alternatives just don’t do the job. “If you look at the ingredients used to replace the properties of sugar, none of the products deliver exactly the same taste and texture characteristics,” he said. “If your body breaks down components of food you get calories,” he said. “If it can’t break down the components they end up somewhere else, which can have dire consequences. If you use a lot of specific ingredients you have to label your products: ‘Excessive consumption may cause laxation’.
Medium calorie, medium GI
Sugar is not a high calorie food ingredient. “Sugar has a medium caloric value (four calories a gramme compared to nine for fat and seven for alcohol). It also has a medium glycaemic index of 65,” he said.
You can use low calorie ingredients to formulate new products. However if they are not formulated with careful consideration of the many properties of sugar you can in fact arrive at products which have a higher caloric value. Most formulators replace the sweetness and forget the other properties like bulk. Thus a product will have a lower caloric value per serving but a higher caloric value per 100 grammes.
“Nutritionally if you take out sugar you’re increasing the proportions of other things, which quite commonly means fat,” said the Sugar Bureau’s Cottrell. “It’s a lottery whether you end up with a product which is lower in calories per gramme. The technical challenges are quite considerable.”
British Sugar’s business is based on processing beet. Europe’s biggest cane sugar refiner is Tate and Lyle, which also has operations in the US. Even though Tate and Lyle has a big business in sweeteners as well, it doesn’t think sugar is going to go away. “We believe sugar is a very important sweetener, its spokeswoman Ferne Hudson told just-food. She put sugar’s share of the total world sweetener market at 80%. “Sugar will always remain an important sweetener around the world,” she said.
The politics of sugar criticised
The criticism of sugar is not just about its effects on your diet. The system under which the EU sugar market operates has come under sustained attack from non-governmental organisations. Oxfam has accused the EU of dumping sugar and called on it to provide more access to its sugar market for developing countries. “British Sugar are the winners from a very unfair regime,” said Oxfam campaigns director Anna Macdonald, in a press release in December. Earlier in the year Tate and Lyle came in for a similar attack from Adrian Lovett of Oxfam, “The system supported by EU consumers and taxpayers is rewarding big companies like Tate & Lyle at the expense of poor farmers in the developing world.”
The European Commission’s response to this criticism was to publish a proposal for the reform of the sector on 14 July 2004. It involves cutting support prices, abolishing intervention (buying in at set prices to support the market) and reducing production quotas and subsidised exports. The Commission proposed a decoupled (that is supposedly production neutral) payment to farmers to cover 60% of their losses.
Oxfam says the EU’s reforms don’t go far enough, but it has also said that it doesn’t want a completely liberalised market. There are fears that that would work to the advantage of Brazil, rather than help poor countries in Africa and the Caribbean.
The sugar companies are waiting to see how it will come out after what is set to be a long negotiation. Tate and Lyle’s Hudson said her company was not commenting on the reform at all yet. “It’s too early to say,” she said. “The latest from the (EU) agriculture commissioner is that it’s unlikely before 2006.”
John Smith, spokesman for British Sugar, also advised against jumping to early conclusions on the effect of the proposals. “All we’ve got are a series of proposals. They will be debated by 25 agriculture ministers,” he told just-food. “We are really still very much in the early stages of a fairly lengthy process.” How the reforms affected the industry would depend on how what ministers finally agree should be put into effect. “In terms of the European sugar industry as the proposals sit at the moment there will be some producers in Europe who cannot survive,” he said.
Even so, British Sugar did agree that the EU system needs reform. “Our position all along has been that we entirely agree that reform of the EU sugar regime is necessary,” he said. “We believe that as one of the most efficient sugar producers we are well placed to deal with it.”
