A-Z of Scoff

S is for Sugar

Fat used to be considered Public Food Enemy Number One, but now sugar is being fingered instead by some health campaigners. It’s not just the sugar stirred into tea and eaten in cakes and biscuits but the large quantity in drinks and processed foods. Even savoury packaged foods have a surprising amount of sugar. Look for the words ending in ‘-ose’ on the label and beware!

‘Sugar: The Bitter Truth’, a lecture on the evils of sugar by Robert Lustig, an expert on childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, has become a surprise hit on YouTube. He argues that sweet stuff may be a cornerstone of the obesity epidemic, and therefore also the related problems of diabetes, heart disease and so on. The argument is that obesity is essentially a hormonal issue. In particular, when you have a sugary drink, or sugary foods that lack fibre, your blood sugar goes up and insulin kicks in. Do this too much and a metabolic disorder occurs which means you store more energy as fat.

Others say that there is nothing intrinsically evil in sugar — you just shouldn’t eat too much of it, as with any high-calorie food. Ideally, no more than 10 per cent of your calories should be from sugar, but it is currently more like 13-15 per cent.

One of the main ways we have increased our consumption of sugar is through fizzy drinks. But now the majority of such drinks sold in the UK are low-sugar or use artificial sweeteners. Pragmatists say such products should be used more in food. But are such invented ingredients necessarily good for you? Furthermore, sugar is used by food manufacturers to increase shelf-life and add cheap bulk, not just for taste.