Sugar, the opiate of our times
Sunday, February 25th, 2007
(Image from Flickr)
Via Momus, a fascinating Guardian article on sugar:
The food industry, of course, is reluctant to surrender the power this sweetness has over its young customers. Global standards for foods are set by the international Codex Alimentarius Commission and these are increasingly used as benchmarks in World Trade organisation meetings. At the last meeting of Codex in November 2006, the Thai government introduced a proposal to reduce the levels of sugars in baby foods from the existing maximum of 30% to 10%, as part of the global fight against obesity. The proposal was blocked by the US and the EU.
…
“The blood sugar curves are quite different with whole foods. They give you a feeling of satiety and fullness and are metabolised slowly so that energy is released steadily over a longer period,” says Aubrey Sheiham, emeritus professor of public health at University College, London. “But as you expose yourself to sugar, your liking for it increases, and your taste threshold changes. You start needing more. Manufacturers have exploited that.” Intriguing evidence is also beginning to emerge that explains why high sugar consumption becomes quite so addictive. In animal experiments at Princeton University, Carlo Colantuoni has shown that rats that have been fed large amounts of sugar in their food and then have it removed show signs of opioid withdrawal. “The indices of anxiety and other symptoms were similar to withdrawal from morphine or nicotine,” he reports in the journal Obesity.
The industry will have none of this. It still maintains through its trade organisations such as the Food and Drink Federation that all calories are equal; the developed world’s obesity epidemic is, it says, the result of too many calories consumed compared with the number of calories expended through physical activity. British Sugar, which controls 60% of the UK domestic market, follows the typical line on its website: “Sugar is a natural carbohydrate … a source of glucose, the vital fuel for the brain and body … an essential part of an active lifestyle.”
An excellent article, well worth perusing, as is Momus’ take on the apologists. I just finished The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I’ve been thinking about nutrionalism (NYT link) and such of late. I really like the opening sentence, which is also the summary:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Corn, in all of its guises as cheap filler and sweetener, increasingly looks to be part of the obesity epidemic. (Wikipedia entry on corn syrup, and the even worse HFCS.)
We went to a child’s birthday party the other day, and the store-made cake was layered with icing. One piece of it hit me really hard, and for the rest of the day I was off-balance and craving sugar in a very intense and odd sort of way. Disconcerting, certainly.
Things to think about.
