Sugar

23:09

I remember when I was younger, I used to read food packages and see low fat and pop it in mum's trolley because if it was low fat then it HAD to be good for me. Looking back now, I can't believe how naive I was but at 12/13 years old, I generally believed everything I read and the food packages kept telling me that I was eating low fat and low calories.

Now I rarely purchase processed foods, however, I always find it interesting to look at food packets and discover that the low fat, less than 100 calorie granola bar contains 15g of sugar. Insane! It's no wonder that parents are being fooled into purchasing these products thinking they are helping their children and instead doing them a disservice.

To simplify the problem, we are eating too much sugar. WAY to much sugar.

It began when the world began realising that there were a lot of obese and overweight people getting around. In fact, worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980. There are an array of alarming statistics available from the World Health Organisation. Perhaps one of the most frightening statistics states that in 2014, 39% of adults over 18 years were overweight and 13% were obese!

As these statistics continued to rise, Governments tended to the problem and thought "well we are getting fat, but why?". Simple, they thought! We are eating too much fat and not moving enough. They were on the right track and campaigns began encouraging everyone to move, be active and avoid fatty foods. Soon, everyone was afraid of fat and moving more but obesity rates were still rising and no one could work out why.

The key word here is fat. Everyone was brainwashed to fear fat because fat makes us fat, right?! Well yes too much fat makes us fat but as everyone was afraid of fat, food companies had to remove the fat from their foods in order to continue making money, however, taking the fat out of the foods leaves their products tasting pretty bad. So what did they do to make their foods taste nice? Added sugar, and lots of it.

Some products more than doubled in sugar but were advertised as low fat, so customers were purchasing these products presuming they were eating healthy.

What most people didn't realise was that all this sugar was making them fat. In simple terms, our body can not digest excessive amounts of sugar so the high levels of sugar people were intaking had no choice but to turn to fat. This was why the obesity rates were rising despite the 'health' phenomenon of low fat consumption.

Studies have also shown that sugar is just as, if not more, addictive than cocaine!
When we think about how much sugar people were eating in their yoghurts, their muesli bars, their breakfast cereals and even in their pasta sauces, it is safe to say most people would have been and still are addicted. 


Even now that the issue has been acknowledged, many people will find it hard to avoid sugar as it is EVERYWHERE and if you're not aware of what you're eating, you would be surprised how much sugar you consume each day.

Sugar hides under various names as well, which makes it tricky for us to identify ingredients in our foods that are actually sugar, but easier for companies to fool us.


I am by no means an expert on this matter and this is a collation of the knowledge I have gained over time, however, when I think of how easily i was fooled by the packaging, I wonder how many other people are falling for the trap too.

I now avoid sugar as much as I can. It's not easy but it starts by going back to basics. Make as much as you can from scratch, avoid packaged and processed foods, read the ingredients, look at how much sugar is in what you are going to consume.

To educate yourself further, I have linked a few resources I found super helpful to understand just why sugar is so bad for our bodies and how we can avoid it.
Do yourself a favour and continue learning about sugar from the experts. I can assure you that you will be overwhelmed and alarmed by the statistics and the damaging affects of excess sugar consumption.

Resources





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