This episode continues our conversation on the topic of children and food.  A few months ago we heard from Dr. Lindo Bacon about how the things we’ve learned about obesity might not actually be the whole story.  Then we talked with Ellyn Satter about the approach she devised called Division of Responsibility, which holds the parent/caregiver responsible for the what, when, and where of eating and the child responsible for whether and how much.   We followed that with a conversation with Dr. Michael Goran, a world-renowned expert on the impact of sugar on our bodies, and specifically on children’s bodies – and co-author of the book SugarProof.  While the research seems to indicate that consuming large amounts of sugar isn’t necessarily the best thing for us, when I dug into the original papers that form the backbone of SugarProof I found that the results didn’t always seem to be quite as large as the book indicated.   In this episode we take another look at sugar – this time from the perspective of sociologist Dr. Karen Throsby.  Dr. Thorsby received her BA in English Language and Literature from Lincoln College, Oxford, and a MSc in Gender and later a Ph.D from the London School of Economics.  She is currently  an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, and is writing a book entitled Sugar Rush: Science, Obesity, and the Social Life of Sugar.  For the book, she is analyzing over 500 UK newspaper articles about sugar, as well as policy documents, scientific publications, popular science articles, self-help literature, and documentaries.  She wants to understand what happens when we demonize sugar as ‘public enemy number one,’ and along with it the fat body.  She doesn’t aim to determine the ‘truth’ about sugar or offer prescriptions about what people should eat, but instead think about how this debate relates to how scientific knowledge is produced, validated, and appropriated, panics about health and body size, the role of generation, gender, race, and class, and the lived inequalities associated with food.   Jump to highlights: (02:10) Introducing Dr. Throsby (03:22) One of your big focuses is on the idea of sugar being addictive.  Can you tell us why you start there?  What does it mean to be addicted to something, and can we be addicted to sugar? (09:46) We have to be really careful with any attempt to define addiction because some people and certain groups of people are seen as more liable to be seduced by sugar than others (12:18) The neuroscientific model of addiction recognizes that addiction is more than a failure of will and morals but also factors in biological vulnerability which can affect some people more than others (15:10) The idea that you could stop consuming sugar if you wanted to is part of the problem in the way that sugar is being figured because it ignores the social context within which consumption occurs (21:18) The reason the book is called Sugar Rush is obviously it's a play on the idea of having a lot of sugar, but also about the rush to blame sugar (22:04) Sugar is often referred to as empty calories but actually, it's a category of food that is absolutely laden with meaning that I think is really important   Other episodes mentioned in this episode:

• 145: How to Sugarproof your kids with Dr. Michael Goran

  Links:

• Subscribe to the show
• Record the intro to Your Parenting Mojo :)

  Resource Links:

• Sugarproof: The Hidden Dangers of Sugar That Are Putting Your Child's Health at Risk and What You Can Do

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so...   Jenny  00:09 Do you get tired of hearing the same old intros to podcast episodes? I don't really but Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well so you can decide whether and how to use this new information.   Jenny  00:42 I listened because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation.   Jenny  01:06 Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/RecordTheIntro. I can't wait to hear yours.   Jen Lumanlan  01:32 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. Today we're continuing our series of episodes looking at the intersection of parenting and food. Recently we heard from Dr. Michael Goran who's co author of the new book Sugarproof: The Hidden Dangers of Sugar That Are Putting Your Child's Health at Risk and What You Can Do, where we discuss the research and what that says about the impact that sugar has on our bodies and our children's bodies. But when I was looking around to see who is looking at issues related to sugar that are beyond just what those are there that are happening in the body and really lifting their head up and looking at the broader social and cultural issues, I found the work of today's guest Dr. Karen Throsby.   Jen Lumanlan  02:10 Dr. Throsby is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Leeds in England. She obtained a bachelor's degree from Lincoln College, Oxford and completed a master's and PhD from the gender Institute London School of Economics. Her research explores the intersections of gender technology, the body and health and explores how bodily transformations happen and what this says about the wider social context they live in. She's currently working on a book called Sugar Rush: Science, Obesity and the Social Life of Sugar, which begins from the question, what are the social meanings and practices of sugar in the context of a war on obesity.   Jen Lumanlan  02:44 She focuses less on the truths about the dietary debates on sugar, but instead uses it to think about how scientific knowledge is produced, validated and used. Our panics around health and body size and the politics of food and its lived inequalities. Welcome Dr. Throsby.   Dr. Throsby  03:00 Thank you very much for having me.   Jen Lumanlan  03:02 We were just having a little chat before we started and I was saying that whenever we get a sociologist on the show, I always feel completely out of my depth. I acknowledge that I very much approach these questions from a psychologist perspective and I've invited Dr. Throsby to push back when I'm asking these questions in a way that's really different from the way that she sees them.   Jen Lumanlan  03:22 One of the the major threads that run through your work is this idea of addiction and sugar being addictive. I guess I'm curious why do you start there? Then we can sort of talk about what does it mean to be addicted to somethin and can we be addicted to sugar? I know there's 100 directions we can go from there but let's start with that as an overarching concept.   Dr. Throsby  03:44 Sure. I think just to take a little step back from that is to think about the project that I've done, the research that I've done, which is a study of primarily newspaper coverage of sugar from about 2013 up to the present, which is when you start to get an increased interest in sugar as sort of the dietary enemy of the day. Then I looked at self help books, diet books, public health campaigns, anything I could find within that time period. What I'm interested in is how sugar is talked about and how it's kind of represented, and what kind of role it's playing. What function is sugar playing as an enemy, or as a sort of a slice of pleasure, and so on. This is how I came across these constant references to sugar as addictive. It's used in a very unquestioning way, particularly in newspaper coverage which cites it as a kind of known truth. Sugar is addictive.   Dr. Throsby  04:52 In a sense, that therefore is what I'm interested in. Therefore what? If we are claiming that It is addictive, what does that mean? For me, there's a number of questions that come out of that. I think, firstly, what does it mean to say that something is addictive? When you look at the scientific literature, there is very little agreement about what constitutes addiction and at the moment, we're kind of moving towards a sort of neuroscientific interpretation of it but there's no consensus around that really either.   Dr. Throsby  05:25 It changes sort of. It sort of evolves how we think about it - about addiction - and what counts as a potential site of addiction. It's not just substances now. There's a kind of expansion of what we consider to food, to online environments, to Twitter to all those things. For me, I'm interested in it because it's given a great amount of certainty, that we all know what it means to say that sugar is addictive, when in fact, if you sort of scratch below the surface, there's very little certainty there.   Dr. Throsby  06:00 My question then is, so what is it doing? What is that claim doing when a journalist says, but it is addictive? Or an anti sugar activist says it. what is being done? For me, I think it does two key things. Both of them not well, in my view.   Dr. Throsby  06:22 The first one is that it suggests that if we can pin it down as addictive, we then know what to do about it. Oh, we should just treat it like drugs, for example.   Jen Lumanlan  06:35 Which we know what to do with, right? We can fix that problem.   Dr. Throsby  06:39 As if there is no problem with drugs and addiction. We don't really know what it means. It doesn't give us a solution, necessarily. It also, and I think this is its primary function is to create a sense of urgency. Rhetorically, it functions, the claim that it's addictive functions as this urgent claim that something must be done, and what that does then it authorizes a series of interventions that don't need to be proven in order to be enacted because it's urgent. It's an urgent problem.   Dr. Throsby  07:23 It creates, in this case, sugar, which is usually the problem that's being addressed is fatness, which also we don't really understand very well either. It creates this sense of urgency that pulls against the need to stop and think about what are we actually doing socially when we intervene in these practices - with eating practices in this case?   Jen Lumanlan  07:50 Thank you for setting the scene on that. I want to go into a number of those areas. Your first contention that we don't really know what addiction is, and also the idea that how we think about addiction is really changed over time. Digging through the references in some of your papers, I wasn't familiar with this suite of literature but, seeing how from the 1930s where addiction is really seen as this moral flaw in people moving towards this nearer psychological model which potentially ignores the social context of it -somebody is not addicted in isolation - can you trace that for us and how does that link to sugar?   Dr. Throsby  08:37 I think one of the quite important things is that in those changes that have happened, say, from a very moral judgment about personal failings through to this very kind of biologized vision where it's kind of written into the body in a way that we can't be responsible for. That, actually, we never leave those earlier models behind and actually, we can see with addiction, drug addiction say, or alcoholism, or a presumed addiction to sugar, there is a massive amount of blame attached and kind of moral judgment attached to individuals. I'm certainly not saying that, but things that are kind of recognizable or known as addiction, I'm not saying they don't exist. I'm not saying people are not under the sphere of alcohol or drugs in terrible traumatic ways, but we never leave these other judgments behind and we do judge people who are addicted to all kinds of things, although in different ways to different kinds of substances.   Dr. Throsby  09:46 There are kind of acceptable addictions: to exercise, for example, is much more acceptable than cocaine. I think there's that shift, but also I think, for me, it tells us that we have to be really careful with any attempt to define. Not that definitions don't have functions. We have to kind of have provisional definitions for lots of things but we have to be really careful with those and ask who is being excluded. Who is being brought into the center of vision, who then becomes the focus of intervention. I think where sugar is concerned, this becomes really important, because some people and certain groups of people are seen as more liable to be seduced by sugar than others.   Dr. Throsby  10:41 It's incredibly classed, and it's incredibly gendered. I think as soon as we start thinking about those models, we need to think about who are they speaking about? Who is considered vulnerable in those kinds of definitions and in those models? Who becomes the target of intervention, and surveillance, when we're deciding what counts as addiction?   Jen Lumanlan  11:11 Thinking about the neuropsychological view of addiction, then, it seems like if it's something that's inside ourselves that we can't help, then the most appropriate way to deal with that is to deal with supply. If you can cut off the supply, then the person won't have to deal with their brains inability to cope with whatever is happening. I think we've seen that play out in the story of drug addiction we're now also seeing that related to sugar and thinking about Dr. Goran's book, where we're talking about reducing the quantity of sugar that we're taking in, and things like soda taxes, and those kinds of mechanisms - companies voluntarily reducing the amount of sugar and salt in their foods. We're seeing this play out already. What implications does that have if what we're saying is that a neuro psychological view of addiction is not necessarily the right way of looking at it, because it's ignoring all these cultural and social factors?   Dr. Throsby  12:21 There are many appealing aspects to this kind of neuro scientific approach to it in that by saying it's actually not a matter of willpower, for example. If you're saying it's about how the brain is structured and operating, that it's kind of beyond your control in some way. It's not just a failure of will. It's not a moral failure, in that sense. It has a lot of appeal, I think and I think in many ways, it's been mobilized as an attempt to try and shift blame away from individual failings, to think about the broader structures that might expose people to particular drugs or foods or whatever, but I think the analogy between drugs like cocaine, and oriental tobacco, and sugar starts to break down in these terms because you can't abstain from food.   Dr. Throsby  13:25 Some people are in a position to control what is in their food to some extent. You could. I know a lot of people do completely remove added sugar, for example, but they're still eating sugar. You can't abstain in the same way. You can certainly reduce but we don't think about wouldn't it be great if people had slightly less cocaine. We think about them as they need to stop having cocaine because you can't have a little bit. A lot of people feel the same about tobacco for example, you have to stop and so on. Alcoholics, obviously, are told  you must not have any. I think this is where the analogy breaks down.   Dr. Throsby  14:13 In the UK, when Action On Sugar, which is an anti sugar organization in the UK, they launched in 2014 and they launched with the taglines that sugar is the new tobacco, which was a direct invocation of addiction of addictive properties, plus health harms from then consuming, but even Professor Graham McGregor, who's the Chair of Action On Sugar, sort of later on in the newspaper commentaries said "Yep, we know it's not really like tobacco." It's different but but we said it for emphasis. It circles back to the effect of it. The social effect of saying that it's addictive is flagging up a great big warning.   Dr. Throsby  15:10 At the same time, still actually, even through the neuroscientific model, shifting responsibility back onto the individual. It's your responsibility as an individual then to, to know the dangers of sugar, and to find ways to restrict your consumption and to make the right choices. And so even though it seems to lift the responsibility, like almost all environmental arguments about sugar, about soda taxes and everything, in the end, it always comes back to individual choices that you could stop it if you wanted to which, for me is part of the problem of the way that sugar is being figured.   Jen Lumanlan  15:55 Why is that part of the problem?   Dr. Throsby  15:58 It ignores the social context within which consumption occurs. If we look, for example, at people living in poverty, with very little choice over how to eat, when to eat, what to eat, because of lack of money, lack of time, they're often working multiple jobs, might not be able to afford to have a fridge, might not be able to afford to put the oven on. There's over a million children eating out of food banks in the UK.   Dr. Throsby  16:35 By making it a matter of individual choice, and by focusing on sugar - I think this for me is another problem of talking so explicitly about sugar - is that it closes down the other conversations that I think we need to be having, which are about inequality, and poverty. And so you often hear people say, you know, okay, people who are poor, are more likely to be fat, and more likely to have higher sugar consumption. Yes. And that's fairly well documented, but a government policy response to that is usually, "Ah, so we must target the poor people with our anti sugar, anti fat interventions, rather than saying, how can we make people less poor?" I think, by focusing so exclusively on sugar as the problem to be solved, it actually stops the conversation...