As part of its outreach, Schmidt's team has created a user-friendly website and is partnering with health departments across the country to spread the word. The website includes downloadable resources, including television commercials, that public health officials can localize for their own cities.
"And that's what sugar science is all about," Schmidt says. "It's about translating the information that's locked up in the medical journals and sharing it with the public in ways that are understandable."
Health departments from San Francisco to New York City have already agreed to participate in outreach. In a statement, the New York Department of Health called Sugar Science a "wonderful resource" and said it was "something that can be used by researchers, the public health community and those who just want thorough information."
Schmidt is quick to point to the food environment as a driver in the increase of obesity that America has seen in the last generation. "It's not like Americans suddenly lost their willpower," she says. "The only major change in the diet that explains the obesity epidemic is this steep rise in added sugar consumption that started in the 1980s."
That sugar isn't just making us fat, she says, "it's making us sick."
Schmidt insists the team, which includes researchers from UC Davis and Emory University, is not "anti-sugar." Instead, it's really about knowing how much sugar is too much.
But knowing how much sugar you're eating can be challenging. Some key facts on the Sugar Science website are these:
- Added sugar is hiding in 74 percent of packaged foods. (Proposed changes to the nutrition label would change this by including a separate line for added sugars.)
- A common type of sugar can damage your liver -- just like too much alcohol.
- One 12-ounce can of soda a day can increase your risk of dying of heart disease by one-third.
The site also includes tips on concrete steps that people can take to cut down on sugar. The most straightforward way to cut down on sugar is to stop drinking sugar-sweetened drinks, like sodas, sports drinks and energy drinks, the researchers say. More than one-third of added sugar in the diet comes from sugary drinks. They also recommend reading nutrition labels. While there are 61 different names for sugar on ingredients labels, the UCSF team says that "if the chemical name has an 'ose' at the end—as in dextrose, fructose, lactose —- it’s likely to be added sugar."
Seeing Diabetes as the AIDS Crisis of This Generation
Dean Schillinger is also part of the Sugar Science team. He's a primary care doctor at San Francisco General Hospital. He first came to San Francisco in 1990 at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. "At that point, one out of every two patients we admitted was a young man dying of AIDS," he says. At that time, there were no treatments, little any doctor could do.
Today, he says, there are good treatments, and it's rare to admit someone to the hospital dying of AIDS.
Instead, Schillinger says, that same ward, Ward 5A, where young men died of AIDS is now filled with diabetes patients.
"I feel like we are with diabetes where we were in 1990 with the AIDS epidemic," Schillinger said. "The ward is overwhelmed with diabetes –- they're getting their limbs amputated, they're on dialysis. And these are young people. They are suffering the ravages of diabetes in the prime of their life."
But unlike AIDS, where activists pushed hard for action from researchers and governments, there's little activist response for diabetes "because it affects low-income communities disproportionately," Schillinger said. "We're at the point where we need a public health response to it."
The timing of the SugarScience launch is not a coincidence. The UC researchers waited until after the election last week voters in Berkeley and San Francisco were considering soda tax measures. Measure D in Berkeley passed with 75 percent of the vote. Schmidt says that since the university is a public institution, it could not be seen as trying to sway votes with the announcement of the new initiative.
Sugar Science was funded by a grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
