30: The Inconvenient Truth about Sugar with Dr. Karen Throsby (Part 1)

Hey everyone! Happy New Year and welcome back to the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, where we talk about food, bodies, and identity, especially through the lens of parenting. I’m Laura Thomas, I’m an anti-diet registered nutritionist and I also write the Can I Have Another Snack newsletter.I am really excited to share this week’s conversation; it is the perfect antidote to the January diet culture hellscape that we’re all living through. My guest today is gender studies professor and author Dr. Karen Throsby, whose book Sugar Rush (affiliate link) was an absolute highlight for me in 2023. I have been recommending it to everyone. Karen’s thesis in the book is essentially how the public health and popular science discourse around sugar obscures the social and structural inequality responsible for health disparities and by doing so, actively embeds it further into the fabric of society. I’ve split this conversation into two parts - so you’ll get the second half of the conversation in two weeks. But today we talk about how the conversation around sugar being bad for you is framed with so much certainty, whereas the science holds a lot more doubt and ambiguity. We talk about how nostalgic fantasies of a past where nobody ate sugar and everyone climbed trees all day long erases the unpaid labour of women, and how even modern day efforts to eliminate sugar are dependent on unequal distribution of household labour and are framed as work that is pleasurable, or else women get scapegoated as bad mothers. So much great stuff in this episode and like I said, I’ll share part two soon, where we get into the rhetoric around ultra-processed food, how the so-called war on ‘obes*ty’ fails to live up to it’s own aims and loads more. Before we get to Karen just a quick reminder that the entire CIHAS universe is reader and listener supported, meaning I literally can’t do this work without your support. If you like what we do here and want to help keep the lights on then you can upgrade your account to become a paying subscriber - it’s £5/month or £50/year. Not only do you support the time and labour that goes into producing the newsletter and podcast, but you get access to our weekly community discussion thread Snacky Bits. You can comment on posts, and you get access to my monthly Dear Laura column and the full archive. You’ll also see a bit more bonus content on free essays that’s just for paid subscribers in the coming months, so make sure you’re signed up to get in on that action. Head to laurathomas.substack.com or check out the show notes for that link. Follow Laura on Instagram here.Subscribe to Laura’s newsletter here.Enrol in the Raising Embodied Eaters course here.Here’s the transcript in full:MAIN EPISODELaura: Karen, I'd love if you could begin by sharing a bit about you and the work that you do.Karen: Yes, thank you. So I'm a sociologist, I'm a professor of gender studies at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. And throughout my 20 plus years of career, I've been looking at issues of gender, bodies, technology and health.So I've done work on reproductive technology, on surgical weight management, I've done work on endurance sports and what you do to a body when you engage in endurance sports socially, what does that mean? And then most recently, I've been working on what I've been calling the social life of sugar. How can we think about sugar in a moment when sugar is being attacked as a kind of health demon, the constant in my career has been this idea about bodies and how we try and change bodies or how bodies change and then most recently in relation to food and particularly sugar,Laura: Tell us a little bit more about that because, you know, you kind of say this almost quite flippantly. “Oh yeah, I’ve been doing sugar”, but that's like a whole like undertaking in terms of research and then the book that came out of that. So, could you maybe tell us a little bit about the research that you did that went into, you know, studying the social life of sugar and, and maybe a little bit about the process of writing the book as well?Karen: Yes, of course. So, it started from observation, which is where a lot of research comes from – of noticing just a lot of sugar talk in the media, for example. And so, I decided to look at it more formally. So, I actually did a, I started with newspapers and I looked at newspaper coverage from 2000. So I ended up looking to 2020 when I searched for newspaper articles in nine UK newspapers. So across the political spectrum and broadsheet, tabloids as well, looking for articles of quite substantive articles like sort of 500 words or more with the word sugar in the title.And then I filtered those. So I took out all of the irrelevant things. So there's lots of mentions of Alan Sugar, uh, for example, lots of sugar metaphors, like a ‘spoonful of sugar’ that you get in business reporting. And I took all those out. And then I kind of looked at the patter...