Sugar

First of all, we all drink tea or coffee. The majority of people add sugar. So typically we drink maybe 3 cups a day and 2 teaspoons of sugar. That's 6 teaspoons of sugar a day from tea or coffee alone! Frightening when you think about it. 

I'm going to show you how devastating sugar. Not only are blood sugar levels on the rise when eating sugar but the diabetic rate is on the rise as well. Notice that the rate of diabetes is higher for the people 45 and older. The reason behind this is because it's late onset diabetes.

In 2010 the population of people over the age of 45 who have diabetes was 135,000 people. 

In 2010, 12,000 people between the ages of 18-44 were diagnosed with diabetes. 

The projection of this rate shows that by the year 2020 the people 45+ with diabetes will have risen by 30% to to 175,000 people. 

Between the ages of 18-44 the rate will have risen by 26% to 135,000 people. 

Let's do the maths. In 10 years the rate of people with diabetes will have risen by 56%. THATS IF WE DONT DO ANYTHING NOW TO CHNAGE OUR HABITS. 

I have a love hate relationship with sugar. I absolutely love it, but it hates me. Since being diagnosed with hypoglycemia earlier this year, I now check very single item of food for sugar. In the italic letters "of which sugars" in nearly microscopic size. 

Yes, everyone looks at calories and fat, thinking that that is the only thing that matters in keeping obesity down. In fact, I feel one of the biggest reasons for obesity is sugar, or in other less common terms high fructose corn syrup.

Let's look at obesity levels in Ireland. 1 in every 10 kids under the age of 3 are obese. Let's look at what a lot of working parents are feeding these babies. Those squeeze tubes of puréed food from flavours of ragu to cottage pie. Have the parents stopped to think how much spoonfuls of sugar is in each portion. Well I did. (I'm not a parent). There is the same amount of sugar in those puréed foods then there is in a can of Coke. Sick isn't it? 

So with that, I came across a wise man in Amsterdam wanting sugar to have the same warning for sugar as there is for tobacco and alcohol. A bit far fetched? I thought so to when I first read it until I had a think about it. 

Read the article below;

"Paul van der Velpen, the head of Amsterdam's health service, the Dutch capital city where the sale of cannabis is legalised, wants to see sugar tightly regulated.

"Just like alcohol and tobacco, sugar is actually a drug. There is an important role for government. The use of sugar should be discouraged. And users should be made aware of the dangers," he wrote on an official public health website.

"This may seem exaggerated and far-fetched, but sugar is the most dangerous drug of the times and can still be easily acquired everywhere."

Van der Velpen cites research claiming that sugar, unlike fat or other foods, interferes with the body's appetite creating an insatiable desire to carry on eating, an effect he accuses the food industry of using to increase consumption of their products.

"Sugar upsets that mechanism. Whoever uses sugar wants more and more, even when they are no longer hungry. Give someone eggs and he'll stop eating at any given time. Give him cookies and he eats on even though his stomach is painful," he argued."

Furthermore, I found a study claiming "Study shown that if rats had a free run at either sugar or cocaine, they opted for sugar". 

The consumption of sugary drink have doubled since the 70s. The hidden danger in sugary drinks? High fructose corn syrup. Why the corn syrup? Corn syrup is cheaper to mass produce. 

In the London 2012 Olympic, a study has shown that athletes had the worst teeth since the Olympics began. I put this down to sports drinks and the amount of coffee that athletes seem to drink. What do you put in coffee? Sugar!! 

Interestingly, black teeth became fashionable back when the first Queen Elizabeth modelled her black teeth as it was a sign of wealth. Only the rich upper class had the money to afford sugar.  The fact that you ate so much sugar that your teeth turned black was seen in the same wealth as people who were fat. If you were fat you could afford the foods that made you fat.

Historically, diabetes was called "The Pissing Evil". The urine smelt and tasted sweet, and a diabetic sufferer would urinate a lot. What's interesting is that diabetes is more common in black people. I believe this is down to sugar cane being readily available. I stand to be corrected.

Scotland. Seems like an odd place to pick out. If you look at the wealthy building scattered around Scotland, and in particular Glasgow. If you know the Art Museum and how big it is. This building (shown in picture) was owned by one person. He owned sugar cane plantations in Barbados. Barbados was the biggest producers of sugar cane. He actually had as much as 13,000 slaves, and also started to sell the slaves. As far as I'm aware, he is the first person to do this.  Scotland was filthy rich, and the majority of the mansions in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland were all owned by plantation owners. Sugar began to be imported into Britain, and started to be used in tea and coffee. Believe it or not, but the first coffee house was in Glasgow. Business men used to use coffee houses instead of pubs for business meetings as the sugar and caffeine in coffee gave them mental alertness, instead of them sipping beer and getting them drunk. History repeats itself. Look at how bad the Scottish diet is. After all, they did invent the deep fried Mars bar. 

The French wanted in on this sugar cane as it was like what oil is today. They felt they would become wealthy from the small white granules. However, the Brits blocked the French from travelling to the Caribbean to bring home the sugar. Napoleon got very frustrated until a group of scientists found sugar beat. Sugar beat was cheaper and easier to mill, making sugar more available to the general public. With the accessibility of sugar, it then became the fuel for the industrial revolution. From here, "high tea" was invented. People used sugar as a quick source of energy to work, and because it was now cheaper, they could use it more. The working class needed to work more hours in the day to get money to live. They didn't have time to cook full meals, and slow cook cheaper cuts of meat. 

Doesn't that last paragraph sound familiar? Eating quick, readily available meals, which lack in quality, and are packed with refined sugar! Parents don't seem to have the time to cook dinners. The convenience of taking an item out of a box, throw it in the oven for 30 minutes and you have a full meal in front of you. Yes, this saves time. Yes it's easier. But no, it's not good. 

Let's look at war rations. I know things have changed since World War 2, but what I am getting at is sugar portions.

Under rationing, every adult was allowed 8oz (230g) a week - on average we have twice that now.

Just one bowl of a typical breakfast cereal, a serving of baked beans with lunch and a Jaffa Cake would take you over your World War II sugar ration without so much as a sprinkling of white stuff.

It's also interesting to point out that sugar is a mixture of fructose and glucose. The brain can not detect fructose as much as other food sources. So when you keep eating sweet foods, you keep eating them because they don't fill you. Because you can't detect the amount of fructose that enters the body, you eat more then needed, which then turns to fat. That's the sneaky part and leads to obesity. 

What I want is for foods to show on the front of the cover how many spoonfuls of sugar each serving amounts to. An image of a spoonful of sugar and a little X to the power of whatever amount of spoonfuls of sugar it contains. 

Since being diagnosed, I am now more aware of sugar content in foods. Walk me down an aisle in the shopping centre that doesn't have something with sugar in it. In a loaf of white bread there is 2.5 spoonfuls of sugar in it. However, it doesn't taste sweet at all, but yet we consume so much bread in this country that 2.5 spoonfuls of sugar, plus the copious amount of sugar in everything else adds up, and so too does the amount of diabetic patients. 

One cake, or bar of chocolate won't harm you, but it's the accumulative amount that will. Please be more aware of sugar content.