WHO has our best interests at heart

THE United States is developing a habit of clashing with the United Nations. First it was Iraq.

Now America's giant sugar industry is threatening to bring the UN World Health Organisation to its knees over a new report on health.

The powerful Sugar Association has reacted furiously to WHO suggestions that sugar should account for no more than 10 per cent of a healthy diet, and demanded that Congress end its $406 million funding of the organisation unless the "dubious" report is scrapped.

"If necessary," the association said in a letter to the WHO's director, "we will encourage new laws to require future WHO funding to be provided only if the organisation accepts that all reports must be supported by the preponderance of science."

According to the WHO, its report is in line with virtually all accepted science. Sugar is the main cause of diabetes; it is a significant contributor to heart disease and pancreatic cancer; it is responsible for a massive increase in obesity, and a general deterioration in our teeth; and it is responsible for numerous psychological disorders.

The industry's response is not surprising, and it provides us with a glimpse of the manner in which the giant food industry has been bullying regulators, corrupting science and jeopardising our health for years.

Whether the WHO holds its ground or capitulates depends on what follows its big meeting next month. But there can only really be one of two outcomes.

Either it backs down and accepts that a quarter of our food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar, or it must prepare for battle - a scenario that is hard to imagine, not least because the WHO is permanently under siege from corporate front groups.

There is the International Life Sciences Institute, for instance, which was founded by the Heinz Foundation, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, General Foods, Kraft and Procter and Gamble. It was led until 1991 by the vice-president of Coca-Cola, and describes itself as an "independent body".

The American Dietetic Association has also defended sugar and fast foods in "Nutrition Fact Sheets" - underwritten by McDonald's, among others, and co-authored by a scientific advisor to the Canadian SugarInstitute.

For years now the food and associated industries have been systematically buying up the regulatory establishment.

Today, nearly all scientific research is funded by big business, and when scientists dare to question their interests they can lose grants or their jobs.

The effect is that the man in the white coat is no longer on our side. We've reached a point where science itself is a mere commodity, available in any form or conclusion to the highest bidder.

So who, then, can we trust? Not the big institutions, certainly.

The WHO may be a fat bureaucracy, and far from immune to lobbying. But, for once, it appears to have acted responsibly. And that may well be its downfall.

. Zac Goldsmith is editor of The Ecologist

Copyright 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.