As an enlightened six year old and the subject of what was clearly horrific verbal abuse in the corridor of the infant school at Glenmanor Primary, the most vile and demeaning retort I could muster to accusations of suspect parentage intuitively seemed to be “Oompah, oompah stick it up your jumper!”. I must tell you that the emphasis and expression, delivered with rage from every fibre of my teeny being, on the “jumper!” was something to behold. Vicious in it’s delivery. Such innocence is rather adorable.
Viciousness is not something we associate with sugar. In fact the more we understand about the relationship between sugar and disease it is definitely not to be associated with innocence!
The white death. A sweet poison to our palate. A product in widespread use, seemingly innocent and sometimes disguised as adorable. Well you see in late 1972 sugar was all the rage. Who didn’t love refreshers? MB bars? Space dust!! Remember the crackling on your tongue! Sherbet dippers. Frozen jubilees? Caramac bars? Hated those things. Yeuch! Even when we plundered some healthy, fresh, natural rhubarb from some unsuspecting gardeners patch we dipped this delicious booty, sweet yet moreishly sour vegetable in…cue learned behaviour…sugar. My best pal’s mother made the most scrumptious fairy-cakes with mouth wateringly moist and creamy butter icing. I didn’t know it was laced with sugar.
School meals were not immune to a few added barra-loads of the white refined poison in the pink custard, or given it’s visual and some would say taste resemblance to the well know cleaning product of the age, Windowlene! It was probably healthier to down a plate of the this rosy cleaning creme! That was only the very tip of the granulated white mountain. It was well and truly horrific. I reckon sixties and seventies kids were a kind of generational breed of unsuspecting sucrose testing guinea-pigs. But hey, at least we were constantly highly active.
But what’s all the fuss about? It can’t be that bad as the innocent wee white granule is stuffed with varying degrees of fullness into a quite simply enormous range of the everyday food and drink products in our nutritional regimes. I mean it’s not like its killing people by the thousands. Is it? Well, within two hours of consuming complex carbs the efficacy of the human immune system is reduced by 44%. Cue opportunistic and potentially catastrophic microscopic behaviour.
OBESITY
“Love handles”, “muffin top”, “beer belly”, “extra padding”, “cuddly bits”, “winter insulation”, “fat bastard”, “big boned”, “whale”,”rolly-polly”.
This horror of a condition is directly responsible for around 30,000 deaths every year in England alone. Thirty bleedin’ thousand! The costs directly to the UK economy sit at around £2.1bn per year. Obesity related health issues cost the NHS around £500m and account for some 6% of all UK deaths. And these are 1998 stats. I hate to imagine that figure being calculated with inflation some 19 years on! Obesity, this scourge of the new, supposedly improved and progressive world, will soon overtake smoking (tobacco) as the biggest cause of preventable deaths. Progress indeed eh? Remember that number, 6%. Now remember we locked the country down and destroyed livelihoods for 0.1%. Where are the public warnings about sugar?
Together these form a major burden in terms of the healthcare costs to the NHS and the traffic throughout the whole healthcare system. There are few bodily systems that are not affected by obesity. A list below highlights some of the conditions caused by obesity and all of these can be traced back to the long white line of sugar sprinkled with a significant dose of inactivity, or as we sometimes call it, LBS. Lazy Bastard Syndrome;
Cardiovascular |
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Endocrine |
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Respiratory |
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Gastrointestinal |
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Musculoskeletal |
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Genitourinary |
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Psychological |
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If we extrapolate current trends and according to Cancer Research UK, by 2035, 72% of the UK population will be termed as obese. Cancer rates since the ’70’s have risen five-fold. Can you imagine the cost then! The correlation is frightening.
SUGAR. CANCER’S BEST PAL
This relationship, like most, is terribly complicated. One struggles without the Other and the Other can cause the One. But if we do away with the Other it doesn’t negate the One. For all intents and purposes most of the human population wobble irritably at the thought of a day without the Other so the One is never far away.
The science though is pretty damning. We need simple carbs to survive. So does cancer. But the proliferation of complex carbs within the diets of most countries and cultures around the world mean cancer (the One being one of many) has a cause and direct source of fuel all in a single source. A kind of evil twa-fir-yin mega deal. In fact cancer cells are voracious consumers of sugars, at around twice the rate of healthy cells and with the ever increasing amount of sugar consumption, promoted and aided by the food industry all over the spinning blue planet, cancer in it’s various forms is not and will not be for some time, short of fuel for it’s despicable fiery mission.
TYPE II DIABETES
“Diabetes is the fastest growing health threat of our times and an urgent public health issue. Since 1996, the number of people living with diabetes has more than doubled. If nothing changes, it is estimated that over five million people in the UK will have diabetes.” (Source, Diabetes UK, 2017).
Holy sprinkles Batman this is horrific!!! It seems the more educated we become and the more information that is available in health and wellbeing, the more ignorant the population are determined to be. It’s a sort of petulant, childish mass reaction.
THE NHS BURDEN
At the moment the cost to the UK extends to roughly £47bn (McKinsey Global Institute, 2014). The same report highlights that the cost to the UK economy, around 3% of GDP, is attacked by a measly £638m in prevention effort. Horrendous! By the above, if we spent, per-capita, the same on the obesity crisis as much as we did on the gulf war, the UK figure for obesity prevention would stretch to some £6.15bn.
There seems to be many a finger in the pie of keeping sugar on the table.
Stick that up yer jumper and consider the link between innocence and viciousness.