Put a cake in front of me – chocolate, sponge, carrot – and, if I let myself, I’ll start eating it. One slice or two. Perhaps three. There have been days when I’ve munched my way through well over half, maybe even the entire cake. The lunacy is that often when I start eating, I am not even hungry.
Replace the cake with a plain bowl of porridge, no sugar or honey, and I am not interested.
Does that make me a sugar addict? New scientific research suggests that perhaps it does. French researchers in Bordeaux recently reported that laboratory rats chose sugar over cocaine – despite the fact that they were addicted to cocaine.
I am not alone. Much has been made recently of how the food industry has turned us all into ‘sugar junkies’.
In the US, there is a whole genre of literature devoted to the subject. Endocrinologist Robert Lustig’s lecture Sugar: The Bitter Truth has been viewed almost four million times on YouTube – quite unprecedented for a rather dry medical lecture.
It’s often casually mentioned, as if it’s fact, that manufacturers secretly spike everyday foods with sugar to keep us hooked and that this is what is behind the spiralling number of obese Britons
Half of us are overweight, and a quarter so overweight there is a risk of a host of illnesses from cancer to heart disease. But the truth is far more complex.
According to the National Diet And Nutrition Survey, a rolling research programme that aims to give a yearly snapshot of our eating habits, we are now eating fewer sugary snacks than we were when the project began in 2007, taking in 13g of sugar in this way a day, down from 22g then.
No comments:
Post a Comment