The debate of Australia's sugar consumption is heating up.
Having successfully wagered Doomsday forecaster Steve Keen a
walk to Mt Kosciuszko over Australian house prices not crashing during
the GFC, he's punting $40,000 that Big Sugar's favourite academic paper
is wrong.
For hounding Peter Costello over being Australia's biggest
taxing Treasurer, Robertson once was described favourably by Ross
Gittins as “that pesky Mr Robertson” delving deep into the statistics to
prove his case against Costello's protestations.
Robertson is proving at least as pesky in his passion for questioning Australia's fondness of sugar.
Taxation or sugar consumption, it's all a matter of
understanding what statistics are credible to an economist, albeit one
with a personal belief that sugar is a sweet poison.
What makes a sucrose fixation a business story is the size of
the Australian sugar and sugar-dependent packaged food and drink
industries and their fight to keep advertising regulations and health
warnings at bay, never mind the health industry and the costs of our
obesity and diabetes epidemics.
Robertson is putting $40,000 of his own money up for grabs in
a wager aimed at settling his fight with what must be Big Sugar's
favourite academic paper. In the process, the argument has been
escalated into questions about the academic standards of the University
of Sydney in general and of the Nutrients e-journal in particular.
Sweet paradox
The Australian Paradox study by Sydney University's Professor
Jennie Brand-Miller, author of the Low GI Diet book, and Dr Alan
Barclay, the Australian Diabetes Council's head of research, claimed
that Australians' sugar consumption had fallen by 23 per cent over the
past three decades while obesity has soared.
Big Sugar has been quick to claim that the study therefore clears sugar of being a cause.
Robertson argues that the Australian Paradox paper is flawed
with key statistics proving either unreliable or, when they didn't
support the authors' thesis, ignored, as previously reported here.
Challenge
Having failed to win any concessions from Brand-Miller and
Barclay or the Nutrients journal that published the paper, Robertson
took the fight to the university:
“On 7 June 2012 in a letter to University of Sydney
Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence, I challenged the University's scores of
fine scientists - indeed, any scientist, nutritionist, medical doctor,
economist, journalist or enthusiastic observer anywhere - to prove that
my critique of Australian Paradox is mistaken.
“I wrote: “To be clear, I will reward the first successful
researcher with $20,000 (cash), if anyone is able show beyond dispute
that the available (valid) information really "…indicates a consistent
and substantial decline in total refined or added sugar consumption by
Australians over the past 30 years”, as concluded in Australian Paradox.
Moreover, I will pay a further $20,000 to the charity of choice at the
University of Sydney's low-GI school, and publish a genuine public
apology in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and The Australian
Financial Review. “
So far, there's no sign of anyone trying to win the money.
Returning fire
Professor Brand-Miller and Dr Barclay accuse Robertson of
factual errors and “misinterpretation of the distinctions between total
sugars vs refined sugars, sugar availability vs apparent consumption,
sugar-sweetened and diet soft drinks, and other nutrition information.
The terminology, strengths and limitations of various nutrition data are
readily understood by individuals trained in nutrition.”
Yet in their rebuttal of Robertson's attack, Brand-Miller and
Barclay failed to make much of a case on the central issue of the
reliability of sugar consumption statistics and were simply wrong in
their “hunch” that led them to ignore another set of statistics that ran
counter to the Australian Paradox finding.
In the third key area of dispute, the interpretation of nutrition surveys, each side seems capable of reading data differently.
ABS factor
The lynchpin of the Australian Paradox case rests on the use
of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) statistics
which showed a fall in apparent sugar consumption, but Robertson delved
further to find that FAO was relying on an Australian Bureau of
Statistics survey that had been discontinued a dozen years ago because
the ABS thought it was unreliable.
So if it's not good enough for the ABS, it questionable that
it could be good enough for academic nutritionists to use in a matter
with important public health implications.
In the second key area of dispute, Robertson says the
Australian Paradox did not mention that the only timely official (ABARE)
information on Australia-wide "sugar availability" (production less
exports) also suggested the trend over the past 22 years had been up,
not down.
“The trend in domestic “sugar availability” per capita has
been up, from near the bottom of a 40-60kg range to the top of that
range in 2009-10,” he wrote.
Ethanol mix-up
After BusinessDay published the original story in
March, Brand-Miller sent me a reply to Robertson's argument. That reply
put the “sugar availability” discrepancy substantially down to sugar
being used to make fuel ethanol:
“Sugar availability takes no account of food wastage, use in
animal food, beer and alcohol fermentation, or in non-food industrial
use, and we cannot assume that a steady portion is lost in this way.
Globally, raw sugar is an important ingredient for ethanol production.
In Australia, ABARE data show that ethanol production as a biofuel for
transport rose from 42 million litres to 209 million litres (almost
four-fold) from 2005 to 2009.”
A footnote added that the increase in ethanol production
would require about 14 kg of sugar per capita per year if 100 per cent
raw sugar was used to make it. “Although there are no firm figures for
how much raw sugar is presently being used for ethanol production,
supplies of C-molasses alone are not adequate, and the absolute amounts
are likely to be increasing,” wrote the academics.
There's a good reason why there are “no firm figures” - sugar
is not used for ethanol production in Australia, as the most cursory of
Google searches on Australian biofuels would show.
Fuel ethanol here is produced from red sorghum and waste products from sugar and starch production.
I told the Professor I thought she was wrong, she checked and
admitted that was the case. Having failed on two of the three key
issues with the jury out on the third, I didn't bother about the reply.
In the Nutrients e-journal, Brand-Miller and Barclay published their reply to Robertson under the title, Australian Paradox Revisited with the ethanol bit deleted.
(It's only complicating already complicated matters to point
the common knowledge Australian per capita beer consumption has been
falling for years, so I won't.)
I passed on the ethanol exchange to Robertson and he did bother about the reply, including it in his update on the controversy.
It looks like the Robertson/Keen debate and bet over house
prices was a much more straight-forward and measurable battle - but not
as potentially rewarding.
Michael Pascoe is a BusinessDay contributing editor.
