Sugar Coated

The documentary begins with fifteen hundred pages of documents that Cristin Kearns, a dentist, found at a closed sugar factory. The papers show a public relations campaign the sugar industry set up in the seventies to disperse health concerns. From there the film goes backwards and forwards: it also describes how, in the sixties, scientists at Harvard were paid to shift the blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat. Michèle Hozer's film describes the industry's methods of influencing scientific debate on the basis of documents. Its second strand is Robert Lustig's argument: that sugar, and fructose in particular, should be counted as toxic for what it does to the liver. That argument is contested within nutrition science and is not universally accepted; the film tends to present it as settled rather than as an argument.