In time for Valentine’s Day truffles and dark chocolate Easter bunnies, US health researchers are becoming increasingly vocal in expressing serious concerns about our sugar-laden diets. They’re proposing new policies – such as taxing sweeteners or limiting sales of sugary items to children during school hours – which they believe is just as necessary as banning smoking in public places.
Linked to obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes, sugar and sweeteners are being compared to tobacco and alcohol because they, too, are seen as damaging and addictive. There are also camps that believe that consuming sweeteners has a hand in developing chronic diseases the likes of heart disease and certain common cancers.
The global consumption of sugar and sweeteners has tripled during the past 50 years. This includes beet and cane sugar, as well as ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup. Have you ever tried to eliminate sugar from your diet? It’s not easy. It’s in more products — in whatever shape or form – than you’d expect.
Child obesity expert Dr. Robert Lustig, who is seeing severe liver damage among morbidly obese children whose diets include ample sugar-laden items, asserts that major shifts in policy are necessary because sugar ”meets all the criteria for societal intervention that alcohol and tobacco meet.” Lustig, whose meaty The Bitter Truth YouTube video is nearing 2 million views, runs the obesity clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, Benioff Children’s Hospital. He is causing enough of a stir to spur skeptics to regularly chime in.
The professor at the UCSF School of Medicine partnered with fellow experts Drs. Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis to author “Public Health: The toxic truth about sugar,” featured in a recent issue of Nature, an international scientific journal. Schmidt shares how the group began to collaborate on the topic.
The idea of imposing taxes on food deemed unhealthy isn’t new. France is taxing soft drinks while products with saturated fat are slapped with a tax in Denmark and Hungary.
Companies that rely on sales of sugar and sweeteners, such as high-fructose corn syrup and sugar alternatives, can’t be happy about this chatter. They stand to lose some profits and customers if regulators continue to demonize their products, along with other suspects salt and fat.
More than a dozen of them, in fact, are counting on us to stay the course no matter what the experts say and consume products containing sugar. The list of suppliers includes some big sugar daddies: Tate & Lyle Ingredients Americas, Archer-Daniels-Midland, Cargill, Danisco A/S, Corn Products International, Imperial Sugar, American Crystal Sugar, U. S. Sugar Corporation, Nippon Beet Sugar Manufacturing, The Amalgamated Sugar Company, The Western Sugar Cooperative, Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, The NutraSweet Company, and Cumberland Packing Corp.
Based on the recent mass reminiscing of Twinkies when Hostess Brands filed for its second bankruptcy earlier this year, my guess is that it will take more hard-core researchers and advocates, Let’s Move program head and First Lady Michelle Obama herself, and perhaps your Mom to move mountains in an effort to entice us to trade in our sweet treats for a diet of just plant-based foods.
I started looking for ways to cut out sugar in my diet many months ago, out of necessity (pesky triglycerides), and you’re right, it’s harder than many people might think. One of the biggest surprises and irritations is how much sugar is in MOST health-targeted cereals and protein/health bars. I’m not at all averse to using the term “appalling” in describing my feelings about it. I would encourage grocery shoppers to have a look at the sugar content of “healthy” selections of cereals. It’s shocking and .
I was equally surprised to see how relatively *little* sugar is in Kix (lower than many, many healthy options), which I rationalized eating for quite a while before I caved and went to 0g sugar shredded wheat. I completely skip flavored oatmeals now and just add my own honey (one of, if not *the* healthiest sugar options) and cinnamon straight to the plain stuff.
When sugar even infiltrates our healthy choices, the situation is bad. And it’s not just sugar you can see, but the stuff that *turns into sugar* once your body gets hold of it. I used to eat a lot of white breads (not prepackaged shelf rubbish, but quality stuff like fresh-baked French, sourdough, rosemary, etc.) and white rice and had to even cut down on those. It really does feel like the world’s against you, but the only thing you can do is accept it and — like a company trying to survive — make cuts. I’m not perfect; I still go on self-sabotaging Smarties binges, but at least I’m doing more now than I used to, and my awareness allows me to make better choices.
You’ve made some big changes! Swimming upstream like this takes a ton of effort. I love hearing about your journey.
One of the side effects of sugar in everything is that we forget what other things taste like. I’m a sugar hound, I fully admit it, but when I do try to go sucrose-free I like the way things taste naturally. That apple with the perfect combination of crunch, tart, and sweet. Oatmeal with a touch of honey, cinnamon and vanilla (all “real” tastes, not the pre-sweetened and artificially flavored kinds) and bitter greens (kale, spinach) just taste so much better. But I always have to cut the sugar before I can really taste them.
Ah, I hear ya and I agree!
Loved reading your piece, as I sipped my very sugary hot cocoa! This would be a great feature for our next Words of Wellness blog posting – would you mind if I used it?