Sugar Dreams 'Waking Up To The Bitter Reality'

“So many things in life start out by seeming so sweet and attractive and then later their reality dawns.  Perhaps sugar is the most obvious of all.

What a strange substance it is.  In truth it has the qualities of a drug rather than a food.  Some believe it fuelled the growth of the British Empire and the slave trade, and that slavery only stopped when machines were built that could take over the jobs in the sugar mills that the slaves performed.

Because of its financial power, and the vested interests it supported, it is able to mask its potential health threats.  When I was young Type 2 diabetes, the latest plague sweeping the world, was known as Sugar Diabetes and the cynical suggest that it was the sugar industry that caused the name change.

It is so hard in today’s world to find the truth.  There are always voices on both sides of any argument.  Many of them are paid by their sponsors to shout for one side or the other, depending on who is paying the most.

But one thing is for certain – sugar is implicated in many diseases, the rotting of young teeth being the most well known.  It is so prevalent that it is hard to find food products in your supermarket that have no added sugar.  It is put into things you would never even imagine would require sugar: so called healthy products like rice crackers, organic bread, sea food sticks, frozen peas and even raw nut butters.  Of course it is totally unnecessary to add sugar to these and there are many similar products without it.

But somewhere decisions are being made that aim to addict more and more people to   sugar.  And this really is the horror: addiction.  Because when you add this substance to nearly every food that children eat, it is an immensely difficult task for them to get off it later in life.

I have only ever met one child who refused to eat sugar.  She was the daughter of a Yoga teacher.  Perhaps her mother was able to dissolve the desire in her, or perhaps she had   never eaten any and so never had to resist.  For most other children it is a daily task for parents to stop them pouring it down their throats, as it is laced through just about every food they eat.  And that is not to mention the chocolates, cakes and other sweets.

When sugar first entered Western society en masse it began as a teaspoon or two a week. Now it is one hundred and fifty pounds a year per head.  One has to be very careful.  The white powders of our society kill more people than anything else.

Many people find it hard to live without a little occasionally, but really there is no known safe limit to consuming it.  The body is an amazing machine.  It can deal with so much, but in this day and age you have to be more vigilant than ever.  The best defence is to minimise the amount you consume and satisfy the desire for sweet things with fresh, ripe whole fruit whenever you can.

Michael Domeyko Rowland
Sydney, August 2009