Sugar

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John Oliver: Lets talk about Halloween. As of tonight you have just four days to find your inappropriately sexy costume. Whether its inappropriately sexy Barney the dinosaur or a sexy candy corn or as playboys website recently featured, and I swear to you this is true, a sexy John Oliver costume. That’s right. That is an actual photo of a human woman dressed up to look like a sexy me,. And the worst thing is there’s more than one photo. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more confused as I am right now. Although I'm pretty sure I'm not as confused as Louis C. K is about his sexy doppelganger, that’s also real. Now at this point lets agree sexy Halloween costumes have simply gone too far but it doesn’t matter because we all know what Halloween is really about candy, sweet sugar treats. This Halloween, Americans will spend 2.2 billion dollars on candy. Although to be fair that does include Necco wafers which could be better classified as coagulated dust. But is it really fair to describe sugar as a treat considering we eat it all year round?

Narrator: Today the average American consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar a day, three times what we need. That’s equal to 75 lbs. of sugar a year for every man, woman and child in the United States.

John Oliver: Holy Shit. 75 lbs. of sugar that’s like eating Michael Cera weight in sugar every single year. And look whilst that’s a little less than it was in the late nineties its still pretty incredible. So lets talk about sugar, everyone loves it and it turns out that because we are genetically programmed to.

Narrator: Eric Stice a neuroscientist at the Oregon Research Institute is using functional MRI scanners to learn how our brains respond to sweetness. “Sugar activates our brain in a special way that is very reminiscent of drugs like cocaine.

John Oliver: Sugar activates our brains like cocaine. And I have to say Scarface would have been a very different movie if it ended with Al Pacino sitting in a chair sugared out of his mind off baked goods saying say hello to my little Debbie, say hello. With sugar being so vicerally appealing to us its frankly no wonder that food manufacturers put it in everything. And I do mean everything.

Narrator: About 35 percent of the sugars that Americans consume come from beverages. But were also talking about salad dressings and ketchups and you know breads and cereals and crackers and the list goes on and on even to beef and turkey jerky.

John Oliver: We have no idea how prevalent sugar is in almost everything that we eat, look at clamato juice the original tomato cocktail with clam. One serving has 11 grams of sugar in it. So they clearly thought lets improve the taste by adding sugar instead of thinking lets improve the taste by removing the clam. And none of this would be a problem were it not for the fact that as we all know exo-sugar is probably not good for us. Both the World Health Organization and the American Heart Association have warned against eating to much of it. And some studies suggest that too much sugar can literally mess with the brain.

Narrator: This rat is perfectly healthy. Put him in a vat of water and he find his way to safety every time. Now look at this guy what he has been eating is the equivalent of a North American diet complete with all the fats and sugars we regularly consume. He doesn’t know where to go. His brain has been damaged.

John Oliver: Now I don’t think that rat is unable to find the island. I think that rat is saying f**k that island there’s no sugar on that island and I want sugar, I want sugar! That’s a Pixar movie waiting to happen by the way. But the sweetener industry is not going to take the findings of a wet confused rat lying down. There an immensely powerful 5 billion dollar industry who fought for decades to project their products health benefits. The sugar association used to claim their product was a diet aide, with ads positioning it as cure for the fats time of day, with a woman saying, if sugar can fill that hollow feeling I’m all for it. Because yes nothing says I don’t feel hollow inside like a woman sitting all alone eating from a bag of sugar. Now the sugar association has gotten a little more sophisticated since then, here is there current president.

Narrator: As it relates to obesity there has been plenty of science that exonerates sugar. That clarifies sugar is not, does not contribute to obesity or diabetes.

John Oliver: Really? Sugar doesn’t contribute to obesity? I'm not saying it’s the only culprit but its definitely one of the key suspects. Asking what causes obesity is a bit like asking who killed a first grade class’s hamster. Sure they all killed it in a way but I think we all know one of them killed it the most. I’m talking to you Kevin, you killed that hamster and you drove your father away there I said it. I said it Kevin. I said it. Although to be fair, take it back, to be fair there are some scientists who dismiss the links between sugar and obesity for instance, this guy.

Narrator: We take a complex situation like obesity and we say well if gee if we just cut down sugar, sweet and beverages or added sugars in general that would solve obesity and I think that is a very slippery slope and almost certainly wrong.

John Oliver: That is Dr. James Rippe who like clamato juice, turns out to contain quite a lot of hidden sugar himself. He’s on the payroll of the corn refiners association the corn-syrup people. And at one point he was receiving a $41,000 a month retainer from them. That’s half a million dollars a year. For that much money you’d expect much grander claims than it doesn’t link to obesity. He should be saying that my research finds that corn syrup makes you and immortal sex god with x-ray vision. And I'm not saying that corporate money distorts science but when researchers looked at two sets of weight gain studies. One group with conflicts of interests like funding from soda companies and one group that was independent. The vast majority of independent studies found direct links between, sugar, sweets and soft drinks and weight gain and obesity. And the vast majority that weren’t independent found the exact opposite of that. Particularly suspicious was a research paper titled “I'm so delicious” attributed to a Dr. Pepper. But look regardless of whether sugar is terrible for you or the answer to all of life’s problems. Shouldn’t you at least get to know when its being added to your food? And to their credit, the FDA is trying to take this on.

Narrator: This week the FDA is reviewing new nutritional labeling standards. And that may force food makers to not just list total sugar content but how much sugar they’re adding to their products.

John Oliver: Yes the FDA is trying to get an added sugar category onto their food labels, which is fine. As long as it doesn’t distract them from forcing honeycomb cereals to reveal what in gods name their old mascot was. What the f**k was that. It looked like some kind of tumbleweeds made of murkins. But look being forced to reveal how much sugar you are adding to people’s food might seem pretty mild. But there is no way the food manufacturing industry is going to let that happen. The FDA is being swarmed with letters from every conceivable product from the National Yogurt Association to the National Pizza Institute to multiple representatives of the Cranberry Industry. Now cranberries are I think we can all agree natures most disgusting berry. Cranberries taste like cherries who hate you. Cranberries taste like what a raspberry drinks before its colonoscopy. And the industry knows it, the head of the Oceanspray Company wrote to the FDA saying cranberries are naturally low in sugar, giving them a distinctly tart, astringent, even unpalatable taste. Yes that’s the head of Oceanspray describing its defining ingredient as unpalatable. Its no wonder they want certain cranberry products to be exempted from the proposed added sugars declaration. Which is tantamount to begging please don’t make us tell everyone how much sugar we dump on our garbage bulk berry. But the most revealing plea came from the American Beverage Association, who wrote that if there is to be an added sugar label it must be measured in grams and not teaspoons. Because teaspoons are and I quote “well teaspoons may carry an unfair negative connotation that undermines the factual nature of nutrition information”. Which is ridiculous.

What negative connotation does a f*****g teaspoon have. Unless your thinking of an annoying dude at a diner who’s always trying to balance one on his nose or the fact that they used to free base heroin. But neither of those things is the teaspoons fault. The only reason the beverage people want sugar to be measured in grams instead of teaspoons is that people understand what a teaspoon is, no one understands the metric system. Which is why this proposed FDA food label is completely missing the point, because if they really want us to understand how much sugar is in our food they need to find a measurement we can immediately grasp. That is why tonight we are proposing in the spirit of Halloween the product manufacturers express their sugar content in the form of candy. Specifically, circus peanuts, the most disgusting of all the candies. They taste like an elephant ejaculated into a packet of splenda and there is more than 5 grams of sugar in each one of these horrifying things. So what we’re saying to companies is this, keep loading your products up with as much sugar as you’d like on the one condition that on the front of the product you display how much sugar it contains in the form of circus peanuts. So for instance, 64oz of clamato juice has 88g of sugar or 16 peanuts worth. A can of Campbell’s tomato soup, 5 ½ peanuts, a package of 20 circus peanuts, obviously 20 circus peanuts that goes without saying. But we as consumers must demand manufactures adopt this measurement so please tweet at them using this hash tag, #showusyourpeanuts. And ask your favorite manufacturer, ask them, you ask them to whip out their peanuts and present them to you. And if they say to you we don’t want to that’s embarrassing nobody wants to see our peanuts they’re orange and misshapen and bumpy. You tell them again show us your peanuts, do it food makers. Expose your peanuts to the world because if you our going to shove your peanuts in our mouths, the very least you can do is tell us what we’re swallowing.