Friday, January 04, 2013
Sweet Tooth
For those of us still struggling with left over tins of biscuits, cake and sweets from Christmas, the Independent had a rather sobering article yesterday on the impact of increasing sugar consumption on our health. But it is not the obvious foods causing the problem, rather our increased absorption of the sweet stuff has come about because of the surreptitious sweetening of other foods:
According to Dr Lustig, whose new book Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth about Sugar, it comes down to a change in diets in the 1970s; a change most of us probably didn't even notice. The Seventies saw the development of foods with manipulated low-fat contents. And low-fat food, according to Dr Lustig, is making us fat.
"When you remove fat from food, it tastes like cardboard, The food industry knows that. So when they took fat out, they had to add the carbohydrate in; and in particular fructose sugar," says Dr Lustig. So as the low-fat dogma took hold, we cut out the fat and started taking on vastly more fructose. In America fructose intake (mostly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup) has increased 100-fold since 1970.
They say that in the UK, the quantity of stand-alone bags of sugar sold, that is stuff lingering in granny's baking cupboard, has decreased. Yet in the period from 1990 to 2000 consumption of sugar went up by around a third, and a significant quantity of that is sucrose, which is 50 per cent made up of fructose. This is what researchers mean when they refer to the rise of "invisible sugar".
It is invisible in the sense that few of us notice it but it very much exists. Take, for instance, a Volvic Touch of Fruit Lemon and Lime (1.5 litres) – how much sugar would you guess was in that? You'd be hard pressed to guess: 16 sugar cubes. Or barbecue flavour Pringles? They have 1.5 cubes. A plain bagel? 1 cube.
How have we become accustomed to sugar in just about everything that passes our lips in such a relatively short period of time? According to Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, we are used to it because we eat more – and we eat more because we need more. "We experience it in increasing amounts and grow accustomed to it. Think of it like eating chillies – the more you eat, the more you need to eat to feel the level of heat."
This goes some way to explaining what the writer Felicity Lawrence found when she studied fruit and vegetable production in 2007. She discovered that farmers are increasingly concentrating on producing super-sweet varieties of fruit that hitherto had been thought sweet enough. Why? Because our whole diet has an ambient quantity of sugar in it – so a sweet apple suddenly seems bland.
So it is almost addictive and the effects of this are pretty disastrous health-wise:>.
Because although sugar – as we know it – is made up of glucose, which is essential for life, it also has a fructose component. It is this that causes the problems, says Dr Lustig: "The mitochondria (the energy-burning factories in our cells) in our liver have a fixed capacity for burning the fructose. When you overload them with extra fructose, they will burn some, but they have no choice but to turn the excess into liver fat.>.
"That starts the cascade of insulin resistance, which then promotes chronic metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.".
This is a direct cause of obesity but also of tooth decay. Putting the amount of sugar we do consume in simple terms is quite frightening. The average person now consumes 150 pounds of sugar each year, that is the equivalent of approximately seventy five one kilogram bags or 33 tablespoons each day.
I find that very disturbing indeed.
According to Dr Lustig, whose new book Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth about Sugar, it comes down to a change in diets in the 1970s; a change most of us probably didn't even notice. The Seventies saw the development of foods with manipulated low-fat contents. And low-fat food, according to Dr Lustig, is making us fat.
"When you remove fat from food, it tastes like cardboard, The food industry knows that. So when they took fat out, they had to add the carbohydrate in; and in particular fructose sugar," says Dr Lustig. So as the low-fat dogma took hold, we cut out the fat and started taking on vastly more fructose. In America fructose intake (mostly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup) has increased 100-fold since 1970.
They say that in the UK, the quantity of stand-alone bags of sugar sold, that is stuff lingering in granny's baking cupboard, has decreased. Yet in the period from 1990 to 2000 consumption of sugar went up by around a third, and a significant quantity of that is sucrose, which is 50 per cent made up of fructose. This is what researchers mean when they refer to the rise of "invisible sugar".
It is invisible in the sense that few of us notice it but it very much exists. Take, for instance, a Volvic Touch of Fruit Lemon and Lime (1.5 litres) – how much sugar would you guess was in that? You'd be hard pressed to guess: 16 sugar cubes. Or barbecue flavour Pringles? They have 1.5 cubes. A plain bagel? 1 cube.
How have we become accustomed to sugar in just about everything that passes our lips in such a relatively short period of time? According to Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, we are used to it because we eat more – and we eat more because we need more. "We experience it in increasing amounts and grow accustomed to it. Think of it like eating chillies – the more you eat, the more you need to eat to feel the level of heat."
This goes some way to explaining what the writer Felicity Lawrence found when she studied fruit and vegetable production in 2007. She discovered that farmers are increasingly concentrating on producing super-sweet varieties of fruit that hitherto had been thought sweet enough. Why? Because our whole diet has an ambient quantity of sugar in it – so a sweet apple suddenly seems bland.
So it is almost addictive and the effects of this are pretty disastrous health-wise:>.
Because although sugar – as we know it – is made up of glucose, which is essential for life, it also has a fructose component. It is this that causes the problems, says Dr Lustig: "The mitochondria (the energy-burning factories in our cells) in our liver have a fixed capacity for burning the fructose. When you overload them with extra fructose, they will burn some, but they have no choice but to turn the excess into liver fat.>.
"That starts the cascade of insulin resistance, which then promotes chronic metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.".
This is a direct cause of obesity but also of tooth decay. Putting the amount of sugar we do consume in simple terms is quite frightening. The average person now consumes 150 pounds of sugar each year, that is the equivalent of approximately seventy five one kilogram bags or 33 tablespoons each day.
I find that very disturbing indeed.
