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Is It Time to Treat Sugar Like Smoking?

Listlad

BANNED
Messages
3,971
Type of diabetes
Prediabetes
Treatment type
Diet only
So says the BBC article today:

“Over the past decade, smoking has become marginalised and stigmatised.

From the smoking ban in 2007 to the introduction of plain packaging a decade later, everything has been done to discourage people from taking up the habit.

And there are signs sugar is heading the same way.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-48499195
 
Bluetit1802 said:
We can only hope so.
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Hmmm. I agree in one sense, but I believe that taking away or attempting to stifle freedom of choice is the thin end of the wedge. Today it’s sugar. Next week it’s meat.

I’m a fan of education over legislation.
 
I'm a fan of getting to root cause and legislating against Big Food's influence wrt Committees involved in setting guidelines and the abolition of Food Industry led research unless all results are published whatever the outcomes. I think too that Big Pharma needs to keep it's neb out with regard to publication of data and that only gold standard, unmassaged data is published.
At the same time educating populations on the vagaries of trash foods and its effects long term.
Allow people an informed choice.
 
Cannot prove veracity but..



Number of individuals that received payment in one way or another by Coca Cola.
 
Rokaab said:
No, leave my hypo treatments alone
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Have no fear @Rokaab, Bundaberg Sugar are starting the cane crushing season later this month through the three sugar mills in the region. More than one million tonnes of cane is expected to be cut and crushed.

Plenty of sugar from raw to white, plenty of molasses for Bundaberg Rum Distillery, and plenty left for stock feed etc.
 
Whilst the smoking ban and packaging laws helped keep cigarettes from the sight of kids whilst on the shelf, does anyone think it truly got people to stop or from forming the habit?

I wouldn't say truly so (beyond the some who will have) or else the market would have burnt up and the brands and varieties would be almost disappearing from sale completely. No market, no sales, no product.

Habits like this can be partly environment based, picked up from those we spend time with.

It's been effective at sweeping the problem under the carpet. It's still there, it's just not obviously visible now.
 
I think the main problem is lots of ‘healthy food’ is expensive. For example if you are a single mother of two on a low income, I can see why you would buy pizza and chips for a meal. This probably costs £2. On the other hand if they were to prepare a meal with meat, veg etc (whether frozen or fresh) it would be more expensive and sometimes people just don’t have the money.

On another note, I don’t really think the sugar tax on fizzy drinks had much of an impact. There is little price difference between diet and normal drinks and I found that a lot of the diet drinks went up in price too... which sort of defeated the point. I do appreciate that a lot of drinks companies did change their recipe to reduce the sugar, so that’s a positive thing. However you can still buy own brand energy drinks for about 40p..... Oh, and don’t get me started on fruit juices - they are full of sugar but don’t seem to be subject to the tax (although I wouldn’t want them to as they are a favourite hypo treat).
 
Legislation without education is fighting a losing battle. Remember when seat belts were made mandatory? Remember the adverts and the programmes showing the effects on crash test dummies? Remember the news bulletins highlighting death and injury figures and the personal stories of those affected? Same thing with drunk driving. Educate people, it's not hard.
 
Guzzler said:
Educate people, it's not hard.
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Sadly though, it is very hard when there are immensely well-funded organisations with the intention of obfuscating the truth in favour of profit.
 
Jim Lahey said:
Sadly though, it is very hard when there are immensely well-funded organisations with the intention of obfuscating the truth in favour of profit.
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Aye, this is a problem that is perhaps bigger than fighting Big Tobacco but the push back against Big Sugar does have a dream team of players and a growing audience (a captive audience?).
 
Guzzler said:
Aye, this is a problem that is perhaps bigger than fighting Big Tobacco but the push back against Big Sugar does have a dream team of players and a growing audience (a captive audience?).
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Indeed. Some days I’m optimistic, and others, not so much. All it ever seems to take is an expertly timed Guardian article in order to turn the tides and undo all the good work. Sometimes it feels like one step forwards and one step back. Anyone eating a real foods diet will have experienced all the blowback from friends and family every time they see an egg on your plate after reading some poppycock written by the likes of Sarah Wholegrain Boseley
 
Sugar?

Consider the number of new T2s who come to the forum and say "I've given up sugar on cereals and in my tea/coffee." only to be told that sugar is trivial compared to the amount of carbohydrates in the diet, and that carbohydrates turn to sugar in the body.

So banning sugar is just an easy knee jerk political move which picks something easy to ban through legislation but doesn't tackle the real issue.

How good is "no added sugar" white bread for you?

Mr. Picky also says that banning sugar is a smokescreen anyway because of the amount of sugar in fresh natural produce. Ban fruit? Ban honey?

The real issue is the reliance of the population of the whole world on cheap bulk carbohydrates for survival.

Wheat, rice, potatoes are staple crops which provide cheap mass produced energy, and allow the support of a massive population which is continually growing.

I can see that a cheap source of fat and protein would be needed to reduce the reliance on carbohydrates but this would also have to be available to subsistence level farmers in 3rd world countries.

So taxing added sugar is just a political way of claiming that a problem is solved when it isn't.
 
Agreed. Nina Teicholz is getting some serious stick since the video of the debate with Katz was released. And of course we know of the travails of Noakes and Fettke. This is gonna take some time...
 
But we're not surviving are we? Caveat, the majority of T2s are not surviving well.
 
Guzzler said:
But we're not surviving are we? Caveat, the majority of T2s are not surviving well.
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The population of the world is surviving.
That is not the same as living well.
Much of the world relies on the USA wheat harvest.
Allegedly one factor in the fall of the Soviet Union was the inability of the wheat crop to feed the population which required them to buy Western wheat.

In survival terms anything which allows a member of the population to survive to sexual maturity and breed is a massive factor. Anything which kills off mainly people who are beyond breeding age is trivial in evolutionary terms.

Without the modern food industry millions if not billions of people would starve to death each winter, more if there had been a poor summer.

Arguably there would be less diabetes (although as stated above diabetes is usually not something which prevents successful breeding) but the death of billions is a very high price to pay to improve the general diet of an ageing population.
 
Except that it is not exclusive to the aged. More and more children are being diagnosed with full blown T2, the youngest I have heard mention of was two and a half years old. Children in their teens being diagnosed with fatty liver is now well documented and there is a movement afoot to lower the recommended age for those obese children wrt bariatric surgery.
 
So perhaps it needs to cut deeper than that and beyond just sugar alone?
 
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