My mantra was: all things in moderation. But as the evidence against sugar stacks up, I’m growing anxious. Although I won’t give up fruit…
One day earlier this month, I opened TheOxford Companion to Food, for so long a bible to me, and looked up sugar. The entry ran to several pages, taking me from its composition (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) to the various forms it takes (dextrose, fructose and so on), and then to its sources in nature (honey, cane, beet). Finally, there was a section titled “Sugar as a Food”. This dealt, in a way that already seems rather old-fashioned (the book, edited by the late Alan Davidson, was published in 1999), with the difference between white sugar and brown. The latter, the writer stressed, is not healthier than the former; and while overconsumption of both kinds may lead to obesity, this is not the fault of sugar, but of those who eat too much of it.
It’s been a long time since I heard anyone suggest that brown sugar is healthier than white; it’s the kind of thing my granny might have said in 1979. But it wasn’t this that caught my attention. What surprised me was the writer’s firm placing of the blame for sugar-related weight gain on human beings rather than on, say, the industries that relentlessly push sugar our way in the form of fizzy drinks and ready meals. Nor had he mentioned the now well-established connection between the overconsumption of sugar and type 2 diabetes, cancer and even, it is thought, Alzheimer’s disease. Having registered this, I was then surprised by own surprise. Once, I would have read the words “the fault of the people who eat too much of it” and nodded my head. Now I was shaking it instead.
Related: Is sugar the world’s most popular drug? | Gary Taubes
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