Debating the Nutritional Value of Sugar. An Evaluation of the Websites of U.S. Sugar and British Sugar in Connection to the WHO Guidelines for Sugars

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Seminar: Texts in Context, language: English, abstract: Text analysis can help to examine diverse texts types for varying purposes. This paper will focus on the characteristics of company websites, as a special kind of hypertext. In order to do so, I chose the specific context of the debate about sugar and health between the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the global sugar industry in the years after 2003. Varying newspaper and journal articles point out that Big Sugar tried to damage the WHO global strategy on diet, health and physical activity, including sugars intake. Some of these articles, as well as the 2015 WHO guideline, will be presented at the start to build a foundation for the following analysis of the web presence of U.S. Sugar and British Sugar. The objective of this paper is to present the characteristics of hypertexts in regard to the seven standards of textuality by Beaugrande & Dressler and to apply these to the company websites of U.S. Sugar and British Sugar in view of the before mentioned debate.