Wendy Carlisle: Hello, I'm Wendy Carlisle.

It's no longer news that Australia, like many of the world's wealthiest nations, is in the grip of an obesity pandemic.

Joe Hockey: I always loved food, and I have always loved food but, you know, it was killing me.

Wendy Carlisle: At his biggest, federal treasurer Joe Hockey tipped the scales at 138 kilos before he gave up trying to control what he put in his mouth and had his stomach stapled.

Obesity is now public enemy number one. It's right up there with tobacco and alcohol. In the UK, USA and even Mexico, governments are responding to the obesity pandemic with sugar and fat taxes. Here in Australia these taxes are not even on the table.

Here's Joe Hockey and Bill Shorten slugging it out on Melbourne radio 3AW late last year:

Bill Shorten: Joe, I've given you a good run. You've quoted The Australian editorial. Let me quote an eminent Liberal called Malcolm Turnbull. He said on the Today Show, 'There is no doubt you put the price up on cigarettes and fewer people smoke.'

Joe Hockey: Yes, that's right.

Bill Shorten: What's wrong with trying to help people live longer?

Joe Hockey: Well, that's exactly…that is so banal. You know what Bill, that is so disingenuous because the fact is three million people have to pay more, right. And if you think that doesn't matter, well, that's your entitlement.

Bill Shorten: Joe, you live in a bubble, mate, because you don't pretend there's a thing called the health system and that tobacco related cancer costs a lot.

Joe Hockey: Well, okay, obesity is a huge issue out there. Why don't you slap a massive tax on food?

Bill Shorten: I don't believe that you can compare eating food to smoking tobacco…conservative argument that somehow tackling cancer is the same as eating food. What planet do you live on, mate? It's just not the same thing.

Justin Smith: Joe Hockey, you would support an extra tax on fatty food, junk food?

Joe Hockey: No, because…

Bill Shorten: Joe, don't raise a straw man and say if you want to do something about tobacco related cancers and putting up the price of cigarettes, don't say it's the same as people eating biscuits. You know, give us a break. Let's not insult the public.

Wendy Carlisle: It's not biscuits that are the problem, it's the added sugars that make them taste so good that is. And what health authorities are telling us loud and clear is that we've got to dramatically cut back on the biscuits, the soft drinks, the fruit juices, and the cakes, and if we don't, in less than two decades obesity will be the new normal in Australia.

And with the obesity comes the heart disease, the diabetes and the cancers. And just how we confront this avoidable tragedy is now in play. Should governments intervene, or is it up to the individual?

When Tony Abbott was health minister in the Howard government he made his philosophy quite clear.

Tony Abbott: In the end, the only person responsible for what goes into my mouth is me.

Wendy Carlisle: The personal responsibility argument is powerful. It has an internal logic, and the food and beverage industry agrees. They don't want government to stand between you and what you're putting in your mouth

Geoff Parker: The industry thinks that soft drinks are a bit of a soft target, and in particular the sugar in soft drinks. And I suppose it's part of this much broader what we see as demonisation of sugar. Soft drinks seem to be in the firing line as some sort of unique contributor to obesity.

Wendy Carlisle: That's Geoff Parker from the Australian Beverages Council who represent the sugary drinks industry. According to their figures, last year we drank 1.3 billion litres of sugary drinks.

Geoff Parker: But as an industry we get back to that main tenant that, you know, soft drinks can form part of a healthy and balanced diet.

Wendy Carlisle: The industry cites research showing we are drinking less sugary drinks, and so while it might be true that we're getting fatter, we can't blame them.

Geoff Parker: The consumption of the full kilojoule or the full sugar varieties of soft drinks are absolutely on the decline and have been declining well over the last decade and indeed over the last 15 years.

Wendy Carlisle: The research the industry cites in support of this is by two of Australia's leading nutritionists. They found that our consumption of sugar had dramatically and substantially declined over the last few decades. In other words, they found an inverse relationship between sugar and obesity which they called the Australian Paradox.

Geoff Parker: Look, the findings do confirm that term of an Australian Paradox, and that is that there has been a substantial decline in refined sugars and the intake over the same timeframe that obesity has increased. So the implication is that efforts to reduce sugar intake may reduce consumption but may not reduce the prevalence of obesity.

Wendy Carlisle: The paradox is this; while rising obesity in the US, Japan and the UK has been positively correlated with rising sugar consumption, in Australia the exact opposite has happened. Sugar consumption has gone down and obesity has gone up. In other words, sugar might be guilty internationally, but in Australia sugar is innocent.

This research was conducted by Sydney University's Professor Jennie Brand-Miller who devised the low GI diet, and her colleague Dr Alan Barclay from the GI Foundation. When the suggestion was made last year that Australia might consider a sugar tax, Professor Brand Miller was interviewed on ABC radio, and her frustration was plain to hear.

Jennie Brand-Miller: It irritates me, frankly, to see that soft drinks are getting special mention yet again. Soft drinks are clearly a problem in the US. America has a problem, we don't. And there is very, very little support for the idea that Australian children are putting on weight because of soft drink.

Wendy Carlisle: But that's not quite true. There is much support amongst Australia's health professionals for this link.

The government's health advisory body, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the NHMRC, specifically looked at the Australian evidence and found a probable link between sugary drinks and increased weight gain. They also looked at the US research and again found the link between weight gain and sugary drinks in children was probable.

Professor Amanda Lee was chair of the NHMRC's dietary advisory committee when it made its recommendation last year that we ought to limit our sugar intake. She says on the basis of these two strong lines of evidence, sugary drinks were singled out for special mention.

Amanda Lee: We have got the strongest evidence of negative health consequences with consuming sugar-sweetened drinks. And it's not just soft drinks. It's also the advent of energy drinks, of sports drinks, of even things called vitamin waters or play waters. There are all sorts of ways that sugar-sweetened beverages are marketed to us today. So people often think about the soft drinks, but even mineral water, sweetened mineral waters, or fruit juice and fruit juice drinks are increasing in consumption in Australia.

Wendy Carlisle: There's no doubt that the range of sugary sweetened drinks now on offer is extraordinary, but there is no definitive data on how much we actually consume. Industry doesn't report those figures for reasons of commercial in confidence. And surveys commissioned by the beverage industry exclude fruit juices, cordial concentrates and flavoured milk from their datasets. But what we do know is that while sugary drinks are full of calories, drinking them doesn't necessarily curb hunger.

Amanda Lee: Well, that's where we do have evidence around sugar-sweetened beverages being consumed beyond satiety. So they don't affect satiety and that's a source of energy and calories that we don't need in our diet. For example, you get fuller eating an apple than you do if you have the 100mL of fruit juice that comes out of the apple.

Wendy Carlisle: The last time we took the pulse of how many sugary drinks our children consumed was in 2007, and on the day of that survey one in every two children said they had one. That survey also found that girls and boys over the age of 16 are consuming around 25% of their calories from sugars, and it's way too much.

Amanda Lee: The reason why we looked at sugar and made stronger guidance for sugar itself is that within most Australian diets, most of us now are overweight or obese at a population level, most of us don't get enough physical activity, and most of us within our energy requirements as a consequent just do not have room in our diet for any additional foods or drinks with added sugars. Because they add energy, people think energy is a good thing, it is, but it's actually the synonym to calories, it adds calories and does not add nutrition. And if there's one thing Australians do not need, it's more energy and calories in our diet.

Wendy Carlisle: Professor Amanda Lee has publicly criticised the Australian Paradox paper. The evidence that we're eating substantially less sugar over the last 30 years is poor she says, and she's worried it confuses the public about sugar's role in our weight gain, and she believes it plays into the hands of the food and beverage industry.

Amanda Lee: It has been a very influential paper. It's marketed very well and the use of the concept 'Australian Paradox' I think has been one of the reasons for its interest.

Wendy Carlisle: The Australian Paradox has been mentioned in parliament, twice, and it's had extensive coverage in the national media (here) Its finding that we are drinking less soft drinks features prominently on website of the Australian Beverages Council .

Amanda Lee: Once a paper is published, of course people that stand to benefit from the results of the paper will use it to maximise their particular agenda. So this paper did suit the interests of the food industry and it's not surprising that they have used it in the way they have. We saw the same with Big Tobacco when any research came out that supported their bottom line, and I think we are seeing the same issues at play here.

Wendy Carlisle: Increasingly public health authorities are putting the food and drink industry in the same category as tobacco and alcohol. Last year the World Health Organisation's director-general Margaret Chan caused a sensation with this speech

Margaret Chan: Efforts to prevent non-communicable diseases goes against business interests, and these are powerful economic operators. In my view, this is one of the biggest challenges facing health promotion. It is not just Big Tobacco anymore. Public health must also contend with Big Food, Big Soda, and Big Alcohol. Research has demonstrated these tactics well. They include front groups, lobbies, promises of self-regulation, lawsuits, and industry-funded research that confuses the evidence and keeps the public in doubt.

Wendy Carlisle: When the Australian Paradox paper began was published in 2011 it attracted the attention of a leading economist who was battling with his own weight.

Rory Robertson: I'm Rory Robertson, an economist and a former fatty.

Wendy Carlisle: Rory Robertson is a former Reserve Bank economist now with Westpac. In his spare time he's been complaining long and loud to both Sydney University and the authors about what he says is the flawed analysis in the Australian Paradox paper.

Rory Robertson: So I think this paper is a menace to public health. Beyond that I think it's an academic disgrace.

Wendy Carlisle: They're strong allegations to make. But Rory Robertson won't let up.

Rory Robertson: The central claim in the Australian Paradox paper, the main finding of the Australian Paradox paper is the claim that there has been a consistent and substantial decline in the consumption of added sugar over the 30 years between 1980 and 2010. And that struck me as nonsense.

Wendy Carlisle: Background Briefing approached Professor Jennie Brand-Miller to talk about her research into sugar.

Jennie Brand-Miller: Australia is actually bucking the trend with respect to added sugars. There is good evidence that we are not increasing our intake. Different sources of evidence suggest that it's declining and that it has been in the process of a long decline for quite a long period of time.

Wendy Carlisle: Jennie Brand-Miller says Australians doesn't have a problem with sugar.

Jennie Brand-Miller: American children truly do have a problem but we don't in Australia have to absorb their problem. That's my message, that yes, sugar is a problem, added sugar is a problem in some countries, but I think Australia is unique.

Wendy Carlisle: The Australian Paradox paper makes the counterintuitive observation that Australia's obesity crisis might be linked to the fact that we're eating less sugar.

Jennie Brand-Miller: So that's why we made this comment about the fact that declining sugar intakes may have contributed. But we were being a bit facetious too, we were really trying to...all those people that start their papers with this sentence, they say that the obesity epidemic in America has coincided with increasing intakes of added sugar in soft drink. That's how they start, over and over again, so we really wanted to say the opposite, that if you have declining sugar intakes, well, did that contribute to the increase in obesity and overweight?

Wendy Carlisle: When Rory Robertson read Professor Brand-Miller's research he didn't think it rang true.

Rory Robertson: Most Australians who have been around for…who are older than 40 have seen the evolution of sugary soft drink consumption in Australia in their everyday lives. In 1980 I was in year 10, and a sugary soft drink was in a 250-millilitre container, it was sort of the size of a cricket ball, you could throw it if you were stupid enough. Over time that standard container morphed to a 375-millilitre can, which is a 50% increase in the size of the standard can. And more recently you can buy 600-millilitre plastic bottles of sugary soft drink and lots of people drink those.

In the week before Australia Day I was in Alice Springs and visited Hermannsburg as well, and lots of young Australians there were walking around with one-and-a-half or three-litre bottles of sugary soft drinks from where they got their immediate sort of liquid needs to get them through the very hot days.

Wendy Carlisle: His first encounter with the Australian Paradox began soon after it was published.

Rory Robertson: One Saturday I happened to be in the Blue Mountains showing my wife and two young sons the Three Sisters, and we were having a break and having some breakfast and I was reading The Australian newspaper. And there was close to a full-page profile of two University of Sydney nutritionists who were campaigning against the National Health and Medical Research Council's proposed toughening of dietary advice against sugar. And it struck me as very strange that nutritionists, apparently influential nutritionists, were campaigning against the toughening of official dietary advice against sugar. So I thought that was a bit strange.

And in the paper it quoted one of the scientists saying that Australians were eating less and less sugar and yet we are getting fatter, and so all that struck me as nonsense. I'm an economist, I have been looking at data and charts my whole professional career, but in particular I had had some contact with the Australian Bureau of Statistics' apparent consumption of foodstuffs data and I knew that data was no longer published, so I thought that was quite interesting. So that night when I got home I actually went to my computer, I went to Google and I punched in 'University of Sydney, Professor Jennie Brand-Miller, sugar', go, and I found the Australian Paradox paper.

Wendy Carlisle: As an economist, Rory Robertson knew that counting sugar consumption was a fraught task.

Rory Robertson: The trouble was, and I think most Australians understand this, that when the ABS started counting sugar consumption in the 1930s it was a fairly simple matter of counting the number of bags of sugar sold by grocery stores to individuals who took those bags of sugar home and put them in their cups of tea or make them into cakes. Much of the sugar used to be sold in bags. Over the past 80 years the problem of measuring sugar consumption has become much more complicated because increasingly the sugar is not sold in bags, the sugar that we consume is sold already embedded in many, many thousands of processed food and drink items. And so the problem for the ABS is that the problem morphed over time from counting bags of sugar to counting grains of sugar already embedded in many, many thousands of processed food items. So it became a giant exercise in counting that the ABS gave up as too difficult given the available resources.

Wendy Carlisle: And here was the problem; the researchers were getting their sugar data from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, the FAO, who in turn had been getting their information from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the ABS.

In 1999 the ABS ceased collecting that sugar consumption data. So the question was, what then did the FAO do? Where would they get Australia's sugar consumption information from?

Rory Robertson: Anyway, the FAO, which had basically been downloading ABS data…the ABS data existed for 60 years and for a couple of decades the FAO was taking that data and putting it into its global spreadsheets: Australian sugar data, what does the ABS say, 45, there it is, whack.

Then the ABS discontinued it as an unreliable series, so there is no more data. So when the FAO went to update next year, what was the number they put in this spreadsheets the first year after which the ABS wasn't spoon-feeding them the update? Well, they should have put 'not available' because it's not available. What the FAO did was write down last year's number. And then a year later it wrote down last year's number again.

So there is this remarkable flat line in the Australian Paradox paper. The chart of apparent consumption of sugar in Australia is a wobbly line that then runs flat. There is this extraordinary and remarkable flat line which has never been discussed, and what we know for sure is that flat lines are rare in nature, flat lines therefore are rare in scientific observations of nature. Scientific observations of animals, humans and plants don't happen to be flat lines. If you see a flat line, that is a red flag that something is wrong.

And so my observation is instead of declaring a paradox, the University of Sydney's food scientists should have written to the data providers and said, 'How come you've got a flat line in your dataset?' Because when I rang the FAO in Rome and tried to track down someone who knew something about the dataset and ultimately had some correspondence, the statistician said, 'Yes Rory, that's right, we took the ABS data for the period before 1988 and 1999, and after that we have an algorithm which is basically the last available official number, go.' So it's a flat line.

Wendy Carlisle: The ABS has also told Background Briefing it could no longer rely on that data because they didn't have the resources to properly count how much sugar we were eating because sugar was now embedded in our food and drink.

Background Briefing asked Professor Jennie Brand-Miller what lines of evidence she relied on.

Jennie Brand-Miller: That's come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics . It's come from their gathering of data, which includes information from sugar producers in Australia, it includes information from importers, exporters. It adds a factor for waste of food. It's not a precise measure, but what it tells us about is trend, and that's how I used it in the Australian Paradox paper. It was an indication of trends, and it was steadily down.

Wendy Carlisle: You'd also be aware that one of the reasons that your paper has been criticised is because you used that ABS data and they discontinued that dataset because they couldn't count sugar anymore, they felt it was unreliable, which is why they gave it up in '99.

Jennie Brand-Miller: Yes, I'll just correct you there. My paper has not been criticised by any scientist. It was reviewed by the normal process, it had three reviewers, we addressed their concerns, and the paper was published. And not a single scientist has written to the journal to say they have a problem with the paper.

Wendy Carlisle: Okay, well, I'm raising it with you as a journalist that that ABS dataset was discontinued by the ABS because they couldn't rely on it any longer. They simply couldn't count sugar in food anymore. I mean, they've told me that themselves.

Jennie Brand-Miller: All right, well, let's just look at the other data that's available. So we actually used the FAO, Food and Agricultural Organisation, World Health Organisation's data, all right, and their data up until 1998 came from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. When they couldn't get the data beyond 1998 they used other sources, and our assumption was that they used sources like the International Sugar Organisation, so that they were finding the information from other sources. That was our assumption.

Wendy Carlisle: Professor Jennie Brand-Miller.

Another key finding in the Australian Paradox paper is that over the last 20 years Australians have reduced their consumption of sugary drinks. Rory Robertson had his doubts about that too.

Rory Robertson: The idea that there has been a consistent and substantial decline in sugar consumed via sugary soft drinks doesn't ring true, and in fact when you look at the data the scientists presented in their paper, they show a chart of sugary soft drink sales in Australia between 1994 and 2006, and that chart shows a rise in sugary soft drink sales from 35 litres per person per year in 1994 to 45 litres per person per year in 2006. So from 1994 to 2006 there was a 30% increase in sales of sugary soft drinks in Australia in the author's own published chart. And in the paper they describe that as a 10% decline, which is nonsense obviously, it's a 30% increase.

Wendy Carlisle: So Background Briefing put this to Professor Brand-Miller. How could she say that Australians were drinking less sugary drinks when the graph in her paper shows we're drinking more?

Jennie Brand-Miller: I'm saying that the amount of sugar that went into those soft drinks declined by 10%.

Wendy Carlisle: All right, but you don't say that in this paper. You say, 'The food industry data show that per capita sales of sugar-sweetened beverages have decreased by 10%.'

Jennie Brand-Miller: Sales of low-calorie sweeteners doubled from 1994 to 2006 while nutritively sweetened beverages decreased by 10%. I would double-check that for you...

Wendy Carlisle: That's talking specifically about sales.

Jennie Brand-Miller: I'll double-check it for you.

Wendy Carlisle: All right, okay, thank you.

Jennie Brand-Miller: It might be that a key word came out, which is normally...a key word has come out, okay?

Wendy Carlisle: Okay, so you're saying a key word is missing from this paper?

Jennie Brand-Miller: It's possible that this should be, 'While nutritively sweetened beverages…10% sweetened beverages decreased by 10%.' So I'll double-check it.

Wendy Carlisle: You can read the email correspondence with Professor Jennie Brand-Miller on the Background Briefing website. Background Briefing also sought comment from co-author Dr Alan Barclay about the apparent error in the paper. He declined to be interviewed but in an email said: 'Your claim is most certainly wrong.'

In a later email, Dr Barclay appeared to contradict one of the key findings in the Australian Paradox paper, the finding that sugary soft drink sales have declined by 10%: 'The 10% decline could not possibly refer to per capita sales of nutritively sweetened soft drinks.'

Again, all this correspondence is on our website. Background Briefing asked the authors if they were going to correct the paper. They didn't respond.

Rory Robertson says this is just one of many errors he has discovered.

Rory Robertson: Well, this sort of illustrates the problems of competence in the paper because they seem to have got themselves tangled up in issues of absolute levels of sugary soft drink consumption and market shares of sugary soft drink consumption. One of their charts highlights the fact that there has been a big increase in diet drink sales in Australia. So, in the particular sense I'm referring to, they say that diet soft drink sales doubled from the '94 to 2006 period, doubled from 15 to 30, and sugary soft drink sales declined by 10%. What they meant to say was that sugary soft drinks sales increased by 30% but the market share of sugary soft drinks dropped by 10 percentage points.

Wendy Carlisle: That's two entirely different things.

Rory Robertson: Well, one is relevant to the issue of whether sugar consumption went up or down and one is a furphy.

Wendy Carlisle: For two years Rory Robertson has been a thorn in the side of administrators at Sydney University. He is a man obsessed.

Rory Robertson: I have written to the authors, I have written to the university, I've written to the journal and I've explained to each of them that their quality control process is broken. The university has written back to me and said, 'It's peer-reviewed, get lost.'

Wendy Carlisle: But finally late last year Sydney University announced an inquiry under its Research Code of Conduct into the Australian Paradox paper. An external investigator has been appointed. If the investigator finds there is a case to answer, the inquiry will proceed. Until then, the university will not comment.

Rory Robertson also wants the university to examine whether there has been any conflict of interest between the GI Foundation (which employs Dr Barclay and to which Professor Brand-Miller is a director) and the food industry.

Rory Robertson: What is their relationship to the sugar industry? And so that's where it gets quite interesting because the University of Sydney does have a business relationship with the sugar industry. The University of Sydney has a glycaemic index business that exists in part to charge food companies up to $6,000 a pop to stamp particular brands of sugar and sugary foods as healthy. They put a low GI stamp on it. At one point a few years ago the University of Sydney's glycaemic index business partnered with CSR I think, the sugar industry, to produce a new brand of sugar, this low GI sugar. (also see coverage here) So there is a business relationship between the University of Sydney and the sugar industry. And the sugar industry doesn't cuddle up to universities to improve the competence and integrity of scientific information available from that university.

Wendy Carlisle: Background Briefing is not alleging that the GI Foundation, which licences foods under its low GI symbol program, influenced the findings of the Australian Paradox paper. But financial documents lodged with the corporate regulator ASIC show that the GI Foundation has since 2009 received over $2 million in license fees from food companies, some of whom add sugars to their foods. (GIF 2010 AR here, GIF 2011 AR here, GIF 2012 AR here, GIF 2013 AR here)

Dr Alan Barclay is its chief scientific officer, and in that capacity he has received consultancy fees. He has also spoken at Coca-Cola sponsored seminars. A former managing director of Coca Cola Australia is a director on the GI Foundation. None of these competing interests were disclosed to readers when the Australian Paradox paper was published.

One of the most graphic public health campaigns last year was the Rethink Sugary Drinks campaign, sponsored by the Cancer Council, Diabetes Australia and the Heart Foundation. The TV ads asked viewers; are you drinking yourself fat? The vision was ghastly. It showed a young man guzzling a soft drink that was a fatty sludge. It didn't look refreshing at all.

Greg Johnson is the CEO of Diabetes Australia.

Greg Johnson: Absolutely having an impact, yes. As I said, this is not a campaign in isolation. It's no secret that major elements of the Rethink Sugary Drinks campaign were developed in New York City with the New York City campaigns around over-consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, and in fact with a range of other measures in New York City they have seen measurable improvements in a range of things in New York City. So this campaign was not just developed here, it's like many things, we look at good campaigns and initiatives from around the world that are happening to better understand the issues related to the over-consumption of our sugar-sweetened beverages.

Wendy Carlisle: The message behind Rethink Sugary Drinks is that these drinks are not healthy at all.

Greg Johnson: I think the real point is that our children don't need to get added sugar in sugar-sweetened beverages at all, they simply don't need that. Sugar-sweetened beverages are not part of a normal healthy balanced diet.

Wendy Carlisle: Well, the beverage industry says they can be.

Greg Johnson: They aren't and they don't need to be. You know, this is part of the problem, that we've normalised this, and industry tries to do this all the time, to simply say that these products are part of some healthy balanced diet. That's just part of the marketing and promotion of sugar-sweetened beverages and added sugar and sugar additives to foods over the past 20 or 30 years to the point where we've normalised this. And the industry runs this line all the time, that that's part of a normal healthy diet. Well, it's not. You only have to go back a few decades when these products didn't exist and they are not part of a normal balanced diet for our children. We simply don't have to be consuming sugar sweetened beverages.

Wendy Carlisle: Rethink Sugary Drinks is part of a concerted health campaign to raise public awareness, and also to pressure governments into intervening in the marketing and sale of these products, much like they already have with tobacco and alcohol.

Professor Rob Moodie is one of Australia's leaders in public health. He's just received an Australia Day honour for this work, and he says personal responsibility only goes so far in dealing with the obesity pandemic.

Rob Moodie: I mean, it's interesting when talk about personal responsibility they are not wrong. They're just half right. Because what we do, we know this from virtually all behaviours, what we do is related to what our peers do, it's related to things like accessibility, to pricing, to promotion, it's related to our culture, if you like. And we know this is changeable. We've seen if you take two opposites, say you take tobacco and road trauma in Australian the last 30 years, and we've have seen profound shifts in behaviour towards more positive behaviours. If you look at diet and exercise to a certain extent, we have seen profound shifts in the other way, and to a certain extent with binge drinking as well. So our behaviours are really changeable.

But it's not just about personal responsibility. Ask any mother of young children and they'll tell you how difficult it is in what we call an obesogenic environment. You walk into the environment, it tells you a lot. You have constant reinforcing, highly appealing ads getting your kids to eat junk food and drink junk drinks, then that's what they want. If you have enormously powerful fast food industries that again appeal in a way that is inevitably going to change behaviour for the worse, if you have iconic brands that just want you to tip nine teaspoons of sugar down your kids' throats every time they have a can of it, that's a problem, and they help dominate culture.

Wendy Carlisle: Professor Rob Moodie thinks Australia needs to consider sugar and fat taxes. But Professor Jennie Brand-Miller thinks that's a bad idea.

Jennie Brand-Miller: I have a hunch that maybe we might drive teenagers to think that soft drinks are worse than alcohol and that they might make a choice at a party between the alcohol and the soft drink.

Wendy Carlisle: You really think that?

Jennie Brand-Miller: Yes, I really think that, because they are hearing so much more about the demonisation of sugar and soft drinks than they are hearing about alcohol. In fact they are more likely to hear that alcohol reduces cardiovascular disease than they are to hear that alcohol causes so much harm.

Wendy Carlisle: If there's one thing that everybody agrees with, it's that if we let the obesity pandemic run its course, we'll all pay. Professor Rob Moodie:

Rob Moodie: It will continue and both in terms of overweight and obesity but the sequelae of that around diabetes, around cardiovascular disease, it means that our children will be far less fit than they would have otherwise have been. It means major strains on our already overstretched healthcare systems, it means major loss of opportunity costs of money that we could have invested in other areas are actually having to invest in our healthcare system to manage the problems that would have otherwise been avoidable.

Wendy Carlisle: In the United States we hear that that this generation of children in the United States are going to have shorter life expectancies than their parents because of the obesity crisis. Is something like that looming in Australia if this isn't dealt with?

Rob Moodie: Yes, we made that prediction in the National Health Preventative Task Force report of the National Health Preventative Strategies, and the work done by D'Arcy Holman in Western Australia indicated that we had a similar problem in Australia, that you in a sense would have less life expectancy than otherwise we would predict. Life expectancies increased year on year by virtue of a lot of good preventative health and a lot of good medical interventions. I think we are putting that at risk in Australia. And I think that when we look back on how we managed the obesity crisis in Australia, as Kelly Brownell at Yale says, the thing we will most rue and regret is the appeasement of the food industry.

Wendy Carlisle: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Anna Whitfeld, technical production by Louis Mitchell, the executive producer is Chris Bullock, and I'm Wendy Carlisle.