24 November 2021
I’m in danger of becoming evangelical on the subject of sugar. I am not anti-sugar as such (I’m making a glaze made of a tablespoon of maple syrup mixed with splashes of sake and red-wine vinegar with supper tonight) but I am rapidly becoming anti-free sugar and anti-processed sugars, including the use of sugars in hyper-processed food. This is not just a type-2 diabetes issue, it goes back to my notion that t-2 diabetes can be regarded as a symptom of a systemic issue, and the systemic issues also present as cardio-vascular disease, some cancers, non-alcoholic liver disease, metabolic syndrome, and others.
In the general case, sugar is – or frequently is – at the bottom of all of this.
My incipient evangelism on this is not simply a way to reinforce my willpower, though there is an element of it: deeper than that is a genuine unhappiness at what I’ve done to myself and what is happening around me.
Anyway, here are two films. The first is a 2020 lecture by Professor Laura Schmidt of UCSF, taking a broad public-health perspective on sugar and hyper-processed foods. Importantly, she isn’t about victim-blaming but about looking at broad social pressures of a sugar-saturated environment, without taking her eyes off the consequences. The second is TV presenter Fiona Phillips in 2015 taking a much more populist approach to the problem of sugar. Two very different styles, but the same underlying message.
(I got the 2009 NYC counter-advertising above from the Schmidt presentation)
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