Sugar!

I was listening to a short talk on the radio this morning concerning the evils of sugar. It was quite an interesting talk, filled with many "well, now that you mention it, it's kind of obvious" points. The talk was by David Gillespie, author of the book Sweet Poison

You can listen to it, or read the transcript, here. At least, for a little while. I don't know how long these episodes are available, but I have a feeling it's about four weeks.

Anyway, the gist of the argument is that we started getting fat after we started eating gobs of mass-produced sugar and other products containing fructose. Once upon a time, these things were fairly rare and we only ate about a kilo of fructose a year. Now, sugar and fruit-based substances (a major source of fructose) are everywhere, and we consume about a kilo of fructose roughly every ten days.

This is a problem, because our bodies aren't designed to process fructose effectively, so they: a) forget to mention you've had enough to eat and should stop feeling hungry now, and b) turn that fructose into fat straight away, for want of something better to do with it.

He points out that "big sugar" is as dangerous a force as "big tobacco", and we should be seriously considering the amount of sugar/fructose we put in our mouths.

One of the points he raises is that the whole "eat less fat, exercise more" mantra that nutritionists have been sprouting and the governments have been supporting for the last couple of decades won't help us much if we keep replacing the fat in our diets with sugar. Something along the lines of:

Milk isn't as bad for us as we think, and fruit juice is much worse than we realise.

This isn't the first time I've heard this, but like a lot of things in life you have to hear it a couple of times before the message starts to really sink in. Plus, Gillespie's a lawyer, so he knows how to sound convincing.

It fits in with my theory that convenience is killing us. I've often expressed this theory by stating, in an appropriately blasé manner, that the Industrial Revolution was a bad idea. Most people either humour me or ignore me (the story of my life, really), but I'm kind of serious about it.

Everything we've done to make life more "convenient" has encouraged us to get fat and lazy... Except that we're not designed to be fat and lazy and we don't cope with it very well. We tend to develop things like heart disease and cancer.

Even (and I know this sounds strange) being overworked and stressed is a direct result of being fat and lazy. The time and space we used to fill with the actions required for day-to-day living is now vacant, but we feel we should be doing something, so we invent more stuff to do, and then new ways to do that in less time, so that we need to invent more stuff to do... It's a vicious cycle. Rest assured I'll whinge about this again at a later date.

Anyway, this is relevant to the sugar thing because we've stopped feeding ourselves. Instead of growing our own food and preparing our own meals, we've outsourced that to other people. They make it possible for us to eat more sugar and fructose than we could possibly have managed back in the days when we were feeding ourselves. In fact, they make in impossible to avoid such things.

So, how do we fix this? How do we avoid fructose when we practically breathe the stuff?

Short of going back to growing our own food and making our own meals, I don't know. And, let's face it, we've managed to construct lives where we just don't have time and space for the actions required for day-to-day living anymore.

I'd like to get my hands on some of the recipes people used before mass-produced sugar came on the market. I have to admit, the one thing I kept thinking about while listening to Gillespie's argument was a bit, shall we say, "practical":

Without sugar, how do you make cake?