Wed, Feb-05-14, 03:07
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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The sugar-slashers are on the warpath
Quote:
From The Telegraph
London, UK
5 February, 2014
The sugar-slashers are on the warpath
First fat, then salt – now the sweet stuff is being targeted for removal from the British diet
The jaunty slogan on the metallic green tin is meant to convey the carefree essence of childhood: “Don’t Grow Up. 7 Up.” When viewed through the lens of recent headlines, however, the phrase acquires a more sinister interpretation. According to an American study published this week, three cans of carbonated drinks contain enough calories to triple a person’s risk of developing heart disease. The suggestion is that if you spend your childhood knocking back gallons of sugary liquid, you may not get the opportunity to grow up at all.
The World Health Organisation was, coincidentally, ploughing a similar furrow yesterday. Its new World Cancer Report notes that half of cancers could be prevented via lifestyle changes – singling out alcohol, obesity and sugar as aggravating factors. Whichever way you cut it, health officials are beginning to fall out of love with the sweet stuff.
So why has our affair with sugar suddenly turned bitter? Well, partly because we needed a new target. We’ve had the war on tobacco, and on fat. Salt is another recent adversary, with a group called the Consensus Action on Salt and Health, or CASH, spearheading a British campaign to lower salt in foods. The strategy is to isolate an unhealthy product and bash it relentlessly. And for the past half-century, it’s been brilliantly successful. When it came to salt, the pressure forced food manufacturers to sign up to reduce the amount in products such as bread and crisps. As a result, we consume around 15 per cent less than a decade ago.
With salt slain, it was time to move on. And so, last month, some of the people behind CASH decided to set up Action on Sugar, with some ambitious, well-meaning aims: to cut the amount of refined added sugar to the point that it constitutes no more than 5 per cent of a product’s calories; to persuade food firms to recognise added sugar as a health problem; to see children recognised as a “vulnerable group” whose developing bodies can be particularly harmed by sugar; to improve labelling; and, if all else fails, to push for a sugar tax.
Action on Sugar is chaired, as was CASH, by Graham MacGregor, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Queen Mary, University of London. But it is the name of its science director, Aseem Malhotra, that might be more familiar: he wrote a controversial article in the British Medical Journal last year, arguing that saturated fat had been unfairly demonised as a cause of heart disease. Although widely aired, this view was not wholly endorsed by the British Heart Foundation: it insisted that people with the highest cholesterol were still at the greatest risk of a heart attack.
And that – in a sugar-coated nutshell – is the problem with campaigns like this. Quantifying lifestyle factors is not always straightforward. Take the fizzy drinks survey. It did find a correlation between estimated added sugar intake and cardiovascular disease. But the groups being compared were at opposite extremes of the consumption spectrum: either heavy or light consumers. As pointed out by David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, “the increased hazard for moderately different groups is not that great”. Cutting down on added sugar would have substantial benefits for overall public health – but the average person might not benefit that much.
These are complex nutritional messages to digest, and any anti-sugar lobby needs to be careful. Food and beverage firms will seize on the smallest uncertainty and inconsistency in the scientific evidence to preserve the profitable, teeth-rotting status quo. Campaigners will only be trusted if they play it absolutely straight.
That uncertainty also gives weak-willed consumers an excuse to keep high-sugar foods in the shopping basket – especially when it can hide behind a shocking multitude of euphemisms, such as fructose, glucose, sucrose, corn syrup, molasses and maple syrup. Remember, nature is on the side of the sugar-pushers: it is cheap to produce, seductive to the palate – which has been honed through evolution to seek out energy-rich foods – and extremely hard to replace without consumers noticing. Artificial sweeteners, in any case, may not be a risk-free alternative: there is evidence that they do not always trigger the body’s satiety circuits. (In his BMJ piece, Dr Malhotra usefully revealed that low-fat yoghurts were packed with sugars.)
The campaigners’ central message is sound: it is virtually certain that deriving more than 10 per cent of your calorie intake from added sugars increases the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease – as well as self-loathing. But it’s only one of many facets of our lifestyle that we should be reflecting on. Plus, there’s a cheering, bittersweet irony: added sugar is only killing us because we are not dying of something else first.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/d...he-warpath.html |
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