In 2016, Simón Barquera started receiving ominous texts from unknown numbers. It was happening to his colleagues as well. Texts saying their wives were cheating on them.
Their daughters were in accidents. Others simply contained links to funeral services. Their phones were infected with spyware.
Barquera and his colleagues weren't taking on organized crime in Mexico. They weren't digging up dirt on some oligarch. They were advocating for a national tax on soda aimed at reducing sugar consumption.
The spyware was tied to the Mexican government. But years later, we don't have any more definitive details. What we do know is this: The sugar and soda industry was furious about proposed taxes like this one, and had coordinated a massive global effort to defeat them.
And this is just one story in a long list of corporate strong-arming and deceit, including straight up bribery. For over 50 years, the sugar and soda industries have aggressively lobbied the American government and distorted science to keep the public hooked on sweetened foods and beverages. And the target of their latest operation?
It's schools. To fully appreciate the enormous lengths the industry has gone and will continue to go to hold onto their vast empire, we need to start in the 1960s with a trove of confidential documents. They’re letters between executives, they’re internal scientific studies.
This is Laura Schmidt, a health policy expert at UC San Francisco. Schmidt has a pretty unique insight on the sugar industry, past and present, because she runs an archive that collects all the behind the scenes corporate communications for industries that affect public health. Back in the 1950s and '60s, people were already starting to worry about sugar's role in heart disease.
Scientists such as John Yudkin published books like <i> Pure, White and Deadly</i> at a time when Americans were becoming more health conscious and concerned with one of the leading causes of death: heart disease. So the Sugar Association got wind of this and they started to worry. “Oh my gosh, that might cut into our profit margins.
” And so they started to think about, well, what else in the diet can we point the finger at for heart disease? And so the Sugar Association's research wing approached a team of scientists at Harvard. And the Sugar Research Foundation, which was part of the Sugar Association, said, “Hey, guys, why don't we pay you to publish in the most prestigious outlet— journal outlet—in the field of medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, publish a two-part review paper that points to all of the reasons that saturated fat and cholesterol might cause heart disease.
” We used about 200 or 300 documents from the archive to piece together the story of how this all went down. Ultimately, we ran the numbers and these guys got paid about $49,000 to do this literature review, which wound up being published in the New England Journal of Medicine. And if you grew up sometime in the '80s or '90s, there's a good chance papers like this influenced your daily life.
I grew up eating margarine, which tastes terrible compared to butter, because you don't, you know, "you don't want cholesterol, you don't want saturated fat, that'll cause heart attacks. " And so many of us wound up really eating more sugar and less saturated fat because of these kinds of dietary recommendations. And an important point of clarification: It's not that every study linking saturated fat to heart disease is wrong, it's that the sugar industry wanted to emphasize these alternate causes as a distraction.
It's to say, let's focus on this other thing that may matter and may matter more. Why cut back on your soda habit when butter is the real enemy? If this seems like a horrific one-time abuse of science, well, the sugar industry never really stopped.
A few years later, the same trade group successfully manipulated the dental profession on how to prevent cavities in a way that didn't torpedo sales. The original cache of documents on the sugar industry was found by my colleague Cristin Kearns. And she was at a conference for a dental association and was shocked by how much the dental community wasn't talking about sugar.
And it's like the most obvious thing, everyone knows sugar causes cavities, right? And so why are dentists not recommending the kids consume less sugar? And the more she got into it and looked into it and asked questions, the more she realized that it was because the sugar industry had a stranglehold on the dental profession.
And so they sort of accept from the get-go that sugar causes cavities. And then they're thinking about, well, how can we keep kids eating sugar while preventing cavities? And so they've looked into all sorts of crazy stuff.
We know from the documents they were pushing at the NIH an agenda around trying to find a vaccine that would prevent cavities. It's not just the Sugar Association. Lobby groups for the soda industry, for corn farmers who make high fructose corn syrup, they've all been using their power to keep their profits as high as possible.
Coca-Cola isn't just selling Coke everywhere in the world. It's lobbying governments everywhere in the world. You wanted me to print you out some documents.
I have a wonderful one from Coca-Cola, which they— it's called the policy radar screen. And it's basically a document that Coke International was using to show all the public policies they needed to lobby against. And in the outer corner of the graph, it's like, how much it's likely to happen and—on the one side—and then it's how bad is it for business?
And on the far corner is soda taxes. That is the scariest thing to these guys. I mean, they were putting spyware on the cell phones of my colleagues at the NIH in Mexico, the nutrition scientists who were helping support—advise on the tax, because they were so freaked out that a nation state would pass a tax.
But the sugar industry is not stopping at skewed science and aggressive lobbying. It's not enough to ensure lifelong consumers of their products. To these marketing executives, the most important population is children because we develop brand loyalty as children.
That's why they wanted cartoon characters on cigarette boxes. They wanted the marketing image to get in that kid's head, because when that kid turned 21 or reached the age limit, they would buy that product because they would recall it from their childhood. Which brings us to sugar's latest battle: school lunches.
Cafeterias have become a cash cow and marketing blitz for big food and sugar alike. These days, kids can pick up Pop-Tarts and Lunchables in their school cafeteria. Even Domino's is serving America’s schoolchildren.
Through trade groups like the Sugar Association, many parts of the food industry are trying to fight rules that would encourage kids to make healthier choices. And in the meantime, companies are tweaking their formulas to keep marketing to kids, while doing the bare minimum to hit nutritional guidelines. So Pop-Tarts, for instance, made with whole wheat instead of just the normal kind of white flour, the ones that you buy at the grocery store.
You might have things like Nutri-Grain bars. The newest thing, of course, being Lunchables. This is Marcus Weaver-Hightower, professor and author of the book <i>Unpacking School Lunch</i>.
So certainly, the industry is kind of looking for those kinds of ways of speaking to kids and, supposedly educating kids about the health benefits of their particular products. If you're curious how our school lunches got like this, there's one big culprit: budget cuts. Schools don't have enough money for fresh food, or enough money to pay for workers who can cook fresh food.
And that leaves a gap that only big food companies can fill. Cue cheap, ultra-processed food laden with sugar and sodium fillers. They are in some ways being told through their placement in schools that these are okay foods to eat, right?
Because we've got adults, trusted adults who are sort of providing these foods and suggesting these foods. And of course, they're trying to build brand loyalty, right? They want people to be consumers for life.
So if you can start kids early on Pop-Tarts and Lunchables, they will be loyal customers for decades to come. they will be loyal customers for decades to come. Our societal dependance on sugar is not the result of poor willpower.
If you hear people talk about a sweet tooth, that's a real thing. That means your palate has just been adjusted upwards, upwards, upwards, to demand a higher level of sweetness in order to taste that sweetness. In other words, we're hooked on a food additive that is highly correlated to diabetes and heart disease.
And in schools, we're making sure kids get hooked young. This all makes the recent actions of the USDA, This all makes the recent actions of the USDA, which runs the federal school lunch program, especially important. For the first time, they've limited how much sugar can be added to specific foods like breakfast cereals and yogurts in schools, as well as how many calories can come from added sugar in general, starting in 2027.
Naturally, the Sugar Association is doing whatever it can to pick fights and leverage the “science” to confuse the public. Their latest warning is that the USDA’s new sugar restrictions could limit access to nutrient-dense foods and increase the use of harmful artificial sweeteners. In a similar battle over nutrition regulations related to women, infants and children, the president of the Sugar Association said limits on sugar contradict scientific evidence that show sweetened foods are not just fine, but possibly healthy.
I'm not sure what studies they're citing, but I'm fairly confident they probably funded a good deal of them. Just in case, I followed up with Laura Schmidt to ask her about these claims. Here's what she wrote: There is robust evidence that added sugar in dairy and grain products, such as in sweetened yogurt, promote cardio metabolic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
This is settled science. While the experts we spoke to said the USDA’s actions are an important first step, they also acknowledge that there's a lot more work to be done. The amount of money that we spend on school lunches is atrociously low.
The bulk of what we spend on school lunches goes to labor costs, and the actual food that goes on the tray is, you know, around a dollar. So we've got to find ways to increase the amount of money that cafeterias have to work with if they're going to be able to do these kinds of innovative, healthy things that we are hoping that they do for kids. Some school districts are branching out by serving students fresh, local, scratch-cooked meals, something they're able to implement through grants from state governments, nonprofits, and the USDA.
If we think about a relatively midsize school district like Burlington, Vermont, the nutrition director there has done so much with farm-to-school. Kids, you know, are eating fresh baked bread at school rather than, you know, packaged, Kids, you know, are eating fresh baked bread at school rather than, you know, packaged, you know, highly processed breads, vegetables that they've never encountered. In addition to the USDA's new guidelines, Marcus and other experts we spoke to also think implementing universal free school meals can help cafeterias get the funds they need to serve healthier food.
Let's not confuse ourselves about who are the beneficiaries of these programs. It's not just the low-income families. It's the companies that get the subsidy.
And we have within our power to change that dynamic. It doesn't have to be large, ultra-processed food companies. It could be any part of the food system, any suppliers.
And people really underestimate the power of this kind of public policy decision. If we were to take those dollars and subsidize a different part of the food industry, we might see a very different food industry evolve.
