The bitter truth about sugar

[ms_maree]

It's addictive, potentially harmful and absolutely everywhere. But is sugar really a poison that should be kept out of vulnerable hands?

Recently an American doctor called Robert Lustig has been calling for laws that restrict sugar as if it were alcohol or tobacco. Like many people, I suspect, my initial reaction upon hearing this was: give me a

Comments

[lustmordred]

I watched the movie Food, Inc. last year and it scared the crap out of me. The thing is, that stuff is literally in everything and sometimes named things that the average person can hardly pronounce, let alone understand. It's close to impossible to cut sugar out of your diet even if you wanted to. It's in the strangest things. And I've read that it causes the same symptoms as addiction withdrawals if you manage to do it anyway, which will get a lot of people to fall back into eating it again.

[amyura]

The solution is to be privileged enough to be able to make it one of your family's top priorities, and then actually follow through. You can have sugar-free all-natural bread.....if you have the time to bake it yourself. You can have truly sustainably raised meat and eggs.....if you have time to find the local farmers and the space to store pounds and pounds of frozen meat. Who has the time to do that?

my fitness pal!

[jazzypom]

To be honest, I just cut out sodas (and even fruit juice) completely out of my diet. I don't drink sodas at all, and have fruit juice as a treat.

[latin_lunatic]

Raise the price of soda? Make sweet shops close? Wouldn't better education be best overall?

[entropius]

+1

I got through public school without ever once learning what it was that my kidneys or liver did. Health education was limited to "don't smoke or fuck".

Teach people how their bodies work, and teach them to cook, in school.

[icanseenow]

Healthy food is still more expensive that the quick fix. It's not that all poor people are too stupid to know that vegetables are healthier than a pizza, but the pizza gives you the energy and the fat and the sugar your body craves for a lot less money.

As long as a government subsidizes meat, milk, chocolate,corn syrup etc etc to such an extreme point I cannot take their "eat more fresh veg and fruit" mantra seriously at all.

[ms_maree]

Education helps a lot. But I think we're all under the delusion there is a level of choice in what we eat. Now, taking away the economic circumstance (which is another big factor) even people who can afford to buy other food, people who know what sugar does to them have diets high in sugar. People don't want to be obese, people don't want to get Type 2 Diabetes, people don't want to get pancreatic cancer or dementia. But sugar is addictive. It's as addictive as smoking. Addiction takes choice out fo the equation.

So then we left with another option, and that's regulation. And...well, that's probably not going to happen.

[sitakhet]

Well the love of sweets is kinda innate in humans, breast milk is sweet and since that is the first thing most babies eat (well, "eat,") biology doesn't want us to reject good nutrients because they taste like burning acid :P

[sitakhet]

Wow tl;dr at myself.

[latin_lunatic]

I actually tasted one tylenol that was sugar coated and I had to spit it out. I still however agree about the coating (or at least coating in general since as a diabetic I don't really want sugar coating). I have one medicine that I have to cut in half so when I drink that I have a glass of water in my hand and I down the glass as soon as that pill goes in my mouth to try to minimize the taste.

[teacoat]

Ugh, I was with this until someone tried to call obesity a disease. :/

[icanseenow]

Yeah, just because it can be the result of a disease or the side effect doesnt make it a disease in itself.