Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

What Does the Bitter Battle Between Big Sugar and Big Corn Mean for Consumers? A multibillion-dollar lawsuit between the two major sweetener industries has finally been settled.

(Photo: Flickr)

The companies that sweeten our foods fight bitterly, if the years-long legal spat between big corn and big sugar is anything to judge by. Ever since the corn refiners tried to rebrand high-fructose corn syrup as “corn sugar” in 2010, the two industries have been warring over names, marketing, public health, and medical research. Now, thanks to a settlement announced late last week, the multibillion-dollar legal battle has come to an abrupt end before a jury can rule on the false-advertising claims made by the sugar industry.

In a joint statement, the two sides said they would “continue their commitments to practices that encourage safe and healthful use of their products, including moderation in the consumption of table sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners.” (The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.) So what, if anything, does the battle of what can be called “sugar” mean for consumers? The long and short of it is not much—both sweeteners, which are for all intents and purposes chemically the same, can have negative health effects if consumed in high quantities. After all, when public health groups talk about the ills of soda, they enumerate the amount of sweetener found in beverages like Coca-Cola in terms of teaspoons of sugar; meanwhile, American Coke is made with high-fructose corn syrup.

Some medical research has linked high-fructose corn syrup with the rise in obesity rates seen over recent decades. But the most relevant fact to glean from the research, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2004, is the sheer volume of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume. Between 1970 and 1990, consumption spiked by more than 1,000 percent. During the same period, packaged-food companies looking to follow the fat-free diet trend of the day turned to added sugar—derived from both beet or cane and high-fructose corn syrup—to make up for the lost flavor. Many nutrition and public health experts point to this shift from fat to sugar as the moment when the frequency of obesity and a host of diet-related diseases began to rise.

It was a booming market for those in the sweetener industry too. Documents made public in the lawsuit revealed that beyond competing for sales, big corn and big sugar spent millions to sway public opinion. Between 2008 and 2014 alone, the corn refiners devoted $30 million to public relations. Apart from campaigns like the “corn sugar” ads that sparked the battle, which played up how “natural” high-fructose corn syrup was, both sides were involved in the kind of subterfuge at the root of the recent Coca-Cola controversy: funding favorable medical research, paying huge amounts of money to influential people in nutrition and public health debates, and trying to create a popular understanding that one type of sweetener was perfectly healthy while the other would kill you.

So if you avoid high-fructose corn syrup but consume sugar with abandon, the sugar manufacturers thank you. If you stay away from sugary office snacks but can’t kick the Diet Coke habit, you have a fan in the corn refiners.

From a public health standpoint, none of this pitched battle really matters. Eating too much of either sugar or high-fructose corn syrup is probably a bad idea.