Watch: Gary Taubes Reveals the Sugar Industry’s Secrets

Mother Jones multimedia producer Brett Brownell and senior editor Michael Mechanic paid a visit to the home of science journalist and best-selling author Gary Taubes to talk about his new article “Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies.” In the piece, Taubes and coauthor Cristen Kearns Couzens use a trove of internal documents to show how the sugar industry set out to counter scientific evidence suggesting that their product may play a role in deadly chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. The documents also reveal how the industry influenced agencies such as the FDA and the USDA—whose advisory panels included industry-friendly scientists, and whose conclusions about the safety of sugar leaned heavily on industry-funded studies. Click on the screen prompts in the video to view key documents and read the piece, which is featured in our November/December print issue. (A quick footnote: One question in the video about sugar consumption references the USDA’s speculative new figures, while the chart you’ll see shows the older “availability” figures, hence the difference.)