Sugar should be “controlled substance”, say experts.
The Independent 2 February 2012.
According to a team of leading public health expert’s, sugar is so harmful it should be controlled in the same way as tobacco and alcohol and they believe that sugar is more than just empty calories that make people fat. They argue that high calorie sweetened food is indirectly responsible for 35 million annual deaths worldwide due to conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Worldwide consumption of sugar has tripled in the last 50 years fuelling a global obesity epidemic. The main culprit is aid to be fructose, a sugar molecule commonly added to processed food in sweetening agents such as high fructose corn syrup. There is increasing evidence that excess fructose has harmful effects on the body. The levels consumed in the west are said to alter metabolism raise your blood pressure, disrupt hormone signalling and cause significant damage to the liver. These hazards are similar to that of drinking too much alcohol.
Speaking about their article in the journal Nature, Professor Lustig said,” as long as the public thinks that sugar is just empty calories; we have no chance in solving this. There are good calories and bad calories, just as there are good fats and bad fats….But sugar is toxic beyond its calories.” The experts propose adding taxes to processed foods that contain any form of added sugar. These would include carbonated drinks, sugar sweetened beverages such as juice and chocolate milk, sugared cereals.
Other strategies included controlling access with measures such as age limits for the purchase of sugary drinks, and tightening controls on vending machines and snack bars in schools and workplaces.
However scientists stressed that to achieve a social shift away from high sugar consumption, the public had to be better informed about the science behind sugar.
Gerry Gajadharsingh writes:
Remember sugar does not just mean the white or the brown stuff. All carbohydrates, fruit, vegetables and starches (rice, potato, bread, pasta etc) are broken down in the body into the simple carbohydrate glucose. Therefore we suggest low gylcaemic load carbohydrates to reduce the sugar load in your body and decrease the insulin response (the hormone whose job it is to move glucose out of the blood stream where it can be destructive in high amounts and into the cells). The principals of Metabolic Balance are a great way of doing this.
