Sherbet lemons and liquorice allsorts among classic sweets that could be banned in nanny state blitz on sugar
Kids absolutely love sweets, and they are an amazing part of childhood. I remember going to the sweet shop and buying all sorts of fabulous sweets, where in those days they were stored in glass jars up on shelfs. You would normally ask for a quarter of a pound of sweets, and then you would see the shopkeeper stretch for the right jar, after which he would use a scoop to get a quantity, weigh them in a scale, and put them in a paper bag for you, while all the time you were in a state of delight about the sweets. After that, all morning you would be in a state of rapture sucking on the boiled sweets: Winter Warmers, Rhubarb and Custard, Pineapple Chunks, Barley Sugars, Aniseed Twists, Army and Navy, etc.
Anyway, by the time I was 14 years old virtually all my back teeth had been filled, and it was the same for all my friends, which can't be right. And in my age group today everyone has a mouth full of fillings, but younger people fair better because of the flouride in toothpaste.
Therefore, in my opinion, I don't think it is 'nanny state' at all for the government to impose regulations to limit the amount of sugar in confectionery. The Sun article is just seems to be pro-business, which has never cared about anyone's health anyway, only profits. It's a sensible regulation, and parents like it. They will manage to make sweets taste great, just the same.
I remember when the government made wearing a safety belt in a car mandatory and there were a lot of people complaining, but no one nowadays would feel safe in a car without one, and the same goes for crash helmets.
Duncan Selbie, PHE chief exec, said: “Taking calories, salt and sugar out of food we eat is part of the Government’s child obesity plan and strongly supported by parents.”
The Sun
Shawn Wooler - GET YOUR DIB-DABS OFF
Young people aren't eating fruit because it contains sugar! Incredible how the anti sciences permeate media. From the antivax, anti-gmo, anti-roundup, climate new dealers, anti sugar (this decade, fat last) -- my doctor said that he has 20somethings coming in with gout -- and they break down when he says that can't eat the proteins, where does the crazy stop, do the masses ever look at the actual evidence and leave the progressive post modernist BS behind. -- this all goes far beyond the equality vs egalitarianism society stuff, complete rejection of scientific methods and their ability overtime to transcend bias and ideology of scientists themselves. Mind boggling, in the US Post modernist race theory is taught in public schools so I understand how it propagated but the UK media is so much worse now. As society get increasingly dysfunctional and fails to provide basic services like affordable housing, voters blame banksters and race rather than just fixing the broken systems that create and deliver housing. Meanwhile technocracy does what they want and thinks the population is a bunch of morons only exacerbating the problem.
ReplyDeleteI've just found this interesting article.
DeleteYou're unlikely to harm yourself by eating too much fruit as the fibre in fruit stops excessive sugar from being absorbed.
Is It Possible To Eat Too Much Fruit?
https://time.com/5301984/can-you-eat-too-much-fruit/
Morbidly obese people here complain about sugar causing their diabetes but over eating and lack of sustained, daily physical activity is the problem. When you read writing from a hundred years ago how difficult and expensive sugar and fats were to buy but now we can provide a days nutrition for a developed economy min wage person for 15-30m of earnings. The problem is that the human body is designed for feast and famine so it tries to over eat during times of plenty. So the progressive response is to create artificial scarcity via nanny state to emulate scarcity and starvation conditions for people. Brilliant.
ReplyDeleteProbably all the puddings and cakes didn't help with teath either.
DeleteIf anyone's interested, the best book on obesity, imho, is Stephan's Guyenet's The Hungry Brain. It's about the neuroscience of obesity.
ReplyDeleteYou were in a state of delight because super-tasty rewarding food causes dopamine release in the brain. Our hunter gather ancestors simply didn't have the option of getting a double-fudge caramel lava cake with pudding center served with ice cream. And you can get that with almost no effort on your part, you probably don't even have to exit your vehicle, and it's cheap. It's a super deal that hunter gathers couldn't even imagine ever coming across. The closest thing they had was honey, and you had to walk god knows how far to find it, climb a tree, get a few stings, and then you get your treat. Modern day hunter-gathers are known to gorge themselves when they come across a windfall like that, like chug a quart of honey in one sitting (makes good evolutionary sense, you didn't know if you'd get a meal tomorrow).
Nowadays, we live in one giant windfall. Weight regulation and appetite are biological processes largely determined by genetics. It has very little, if anything, to do with will power or lack of moral character. It's that we live in a toxic food environment with hyper-rewarding food, endless variety, and with genes that evolved in a very different food landscape.
Lack of exercise is certainly an issue, but that doesn't explain it all. In pre-industrial cultures, the elderly become less active, but don't get fat. Weight typically peaks in middle age and then declines as muscle loss starts occurring. It's a stark contrast to people on the SAD (standard american diet). If your brain is properly regulating your appetite, if you become less active, you should desire less food. But we seem to be able to override that now, with the exaggerated dopamine release associated with modern foods. They're in fact designed to do that.
Yes, I was thinking about that, Joe. All the animals eat raw food, and we did once too. Boy, it must have been boring. Now we can put together all sorts of spices with fats and sugar, then bake it, and wow, what a delight. America apple pie with cinnamon and Clove. Or Apple crumble. And what about cheesecake? Gee!
Delete" do the masses ever look at the actual evidence"
ReplyDeleteMost are Liberal Art trained which doesnt train for that...
Yep, the right mixture of sugar, salt and fat really sets ablaze the reward centers of our brains.. I'm not a cheesecake fan myself, but apple pie and apple crumble are tasty. And oh man, bread pudding with caramel sauce is probably my all time favorite. I try to only have it once a year on my birthday, or maybe vacation if I come across it. Just from a cooking technology pov, our ancestors couldn't have made any of that. They had roasting on a fire, maybe boiling (after pottery was invented??) and that was about it. No poaching, broasting, frying, deep-frying, sauteeing, double-boilering, pressure cooking, microwaving, freezing, steaming, or other methods. No granulated sugar isolated from the parent foods or industrially modified vegetable oils either.
ReplyDeleteIt's kinda like chewing coca leaves is fine, but when you concentrate it down to cocaine, the reward centers of the brain go wild. It's probably not too far off to say that something similar is going on with modern food and the obesity epidemic.
Pre-industrial cultures often get a very large percentage of the daily calories from just a few foods. They often have extensive knowledge of edible plants and animals around them, but relatively few make up the majority of calories. One pacific island (I forget which) gets like 60 or 70% of their calories from a sweet-potato-like root vegetable.. Now I imagine that if 60% or more of your food was just sweet potatoes, you probably wouldn't be driven to overeat it. "Aw man, sweet potatoes again... Well I *am* hungry so I guess I'll have one", but you'd be unlikely to keep shoveling them in. Today I can get pizza with crust, sauce, cheese, and 3 or 4 toppings. Extraordinarily extravagant compared to pre-industrial food. Get tired of pizza? No worries, tomorrow I can have a double bacon cheeseburger and an ice cream sundae with caramel sauce for desert. Maybe a nice curry the day after, endless variety.
There are some theories that we accelerated the evolution of getting our large brains because of cooking. It sort of pre-digested the food allowing us to more efficiently get calories from the food. Sounds plausible to me.
Now about any sort of regulation to help control this? I really don't know, that's a very tough question. I think somehow you gotta start in childhood, less junk-food, no sugary cereal for breakfast, and daily soda is pretty much inexcusable. Probably ban advertising of junk food to kids might be a start. Healthy school lunches are probably important, no candy or soda machines in the school, I dunno. Bring back cooking classes in school, so people at least know how to cook healthy food themselves, try to discourage pre-packaged frankenfoods...
The overfeeding studies are particularly interesting. They take a group of people, measure their energy expenditure, and then overfeed them by the same amount of excess calories. After a period of a few weeks or whatever the study is, the amount of weight gained among the participants will vary by up to a factor of 8 or 9. So try to explain that as a function of will power! It's mostly biological processes beyond conscious control.
ReplyDeleteSo we can say that obesity is a disregulation of the body's energy homeostasis system. The body does seem to be slightly primed to overeating (likely for evolutionary reasons like Ryan said, eat for the hunger to come), but it's not an open ended system. It has negative feedback mechanisms against too much weight loss or weight gain. But the system breaks down in modern populations.
When I was a boy, I put sugar in my tea and two tablespoons of sugar on my cerial. The cerial was already sweet enough. No wonder all my back teeth have fillings in. All the kids were like it, but I think it was always unacceptable. They say young people don't get it now because of the flouride.
DeleteFluoride probably helps and also kids get dental sealants now too. I think that helps a lot. I had sealants when I was a kid. Zero fillings well into adulthood. I figured I had to be doing something right with my oral hygiene, but then when I was 27 I needed 7 or 8 fillings. I was shocked, I actually went to a 2nd dentist figuring the first dentist was trying to rip me off, but the 2nd said the same thing. I figure it must be due to the sealants wearing off.
ReplyDeleteCrikey! I would have thought you were safe at 27. I bought a water flosser the other day.
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