Sugar, the new tobacco
It’s a deadly health risk – but the food and beverage industry fends off regulation.

There’s an industry selling a product that is bad for one’s health.
A generation ago that industry was tobacco and its product was cigarettes.
Today it is the food and beverage industry and its product is sugar - sugar that is being added to food and drink.
After 20 years working in tobacco control, Jane Martin, executive manager of the Obesity Policy Coalition, a policy think tank of the Cancer Council Victoria, has taken up the battle against sugar-laden food and drinks.
She charges that the food industry has borrowed the corporate playbook of the tobacco industry to fend off regulation.
“The sugar industry has been very similar to the tobacco industry in how they work,” she says.
“They fund their own research studies and criticise research they see as harmful. They focus on personal responsibility, saying it’s up to parents and the individual.”
But the parallels don’t stop there.
“The tobacco industry pushed self-regulation over legislation. And now we have self-regulation around marketing to children of junk food and drinks, which is exactly what the tobacco industry got away with.”