since when did sugar become the enemy?

[FishCanFly]

Ok, what's too much is unhealthy.
But i remember the past - well, think 2-3 decades ago. I remember it was always preserves, jams, jellies, marmalades, compotes - people made them at home, and white sugar went in by bagloads. Yet there much fewer clinically obese people around.

All of those things listed in the OP were treats- people didn't eat them all the time. They would be made once a year at harvest time and probably run out before the next harvest.
Not really. Ice cream was a treat, chocolate was a treat. But a jam roll was a very ordinary snack. And I wouldn't say lifestyles for city people were much different. Well, maybe less cars. But office jobs were pretty sedentary too. SPeaking 80s and 90s here, not post war.

replacing fat which is now good for us.

Dieting propaganda aside, fat has always been good for us.

When fat was demonized (wrongly) in the 70s food companies replaced fat with sugar/carbs (it's all the same) so food tasted of something and sold it as 'health food' an attitude that prevails to this day. Just look at how cereal is perceived as a health food in lots of cases until recently.

Unfortunately this has been a double disaster. Fat is hugly important for our health. Lots of nutrients are only soluble in fat and and there are many 'essential amino acids' which is code for fat. It's also incredibly satiating and makes food taste better (as it activates our tastebuds) by removing it from food it makes it makes food less satisfying and so people eat more and more and more.

At the same time food was pumped full of sugar/starch to improve the now bland taste. This is awful for a number of reasons. Firstly because of the blood sugar high and crash caused by eating carbs/sugar it works in a similar way to a drug making it essentially addictive. Ask anyone who has fasted or done keto about keto flu/ sugae withdrawal and the sudden cessation of craving because they have escaped that high/low cycle.

Also insulin. I would recommend everyone read about insulin. Sugar/carbs doesn't just provide energy it creates a hormonal response in a way that fat doesn't. This hormonal response is actually damaging long term to your pancreas which controls your fat stores and also effects your hunger signalling. This is considered by many to be the cause in the surge of diabetes and potentially other 'modern' diseases including dementia (experts are starting to call this diabetes type 3) and some types of cancer.

're sugar being the enemy. Actually this isn't a modern idea. Pre 70s this was the status quo and the 'fat is bad idea' is the fad. Some of the oldest diet books suggest eating less carbs. It was a shiny new idea that came from some very dodgy science and public desperation to find a solution to heart disease after some high profile people had heart attacks. It sounds sensible doesnt it. Eat fat get fat. Fat clogs up your drains so of course is clogs up your arteries. Unfortunatly there is very little evidence to suggest this is the case in reality. We are eating less fat then ever yet obesity and 'lifestyle' diseases are accelerating. We are eating fewer calories but obesity is on the rise.

Actually, the experts have known sugar and not fat was the "enemy" for decades but the food industry is so powerful it was all covered up.

In my youth we had cake and biscuits, probably most days but I don't think we had it in the quantities people have come to think of as normal now. My mum's fairy cakes are miniscule compared to today's cupcakes. We certainly didn't drink the same volume of fizzy drinks and we didn't eat it in process meals in the same way that people do now.

And people started getting fat in the 80's and 90's

I don’t think the way we shop has helped. I don’t recall my parents using the supermarket for anything other than basic food. I remember in the early 80s walking to the shop with friends to get a 10p mix with our pocket money. Maybe once a week. None of us could have gone to the kitchen cupboard and pulled out family packs of chocolate bars and sweets. I’m not sure family packs of those things even existed. If you wanted eg a Yorkie you had to go the sweet shop to buy an individual one. I remember multi packs of certain things being launched and I think that has been a lot of the problem. It’s just too easy to overindulge.

Plus things like fresh orange juice once being seen as a starter . I remember in one hotel we went to as kids (not cheap!), I would choose that, while my mum had grapefruit juice (both served in a little glass on a side plate , or sometimes a consommé style soup.

Think of the difference. Then fresh fruit juice was not viewed as something to have every day at breakfast like we do now. It is full of sugar with all the fibre taken out. And what else is available on menus now? You rarely see consommé any more on the starters, which is very light. It’s Deep fried things with garlic mayo in pub style places. desserts are bottomless ice cream, drinks are refillable and fizzy, a whole pizza is eaten by one person, burgers are mutilayered, often double burgers, with extra fat by way of layers of bacon and cheese. You get an extra large milk shake and no-one needs that many calories!! We drive to get those calories and don’t even need to get our fat arses out of the car before we stuff our faces with calories we will never burn off.

And it’s our sedentary lifestyle. Not many families had 2 cars. People walked much more to do their daily activities. Kids played out more.

So yes, sugar IS a major deal these days because we are consuming far MORE of it, and we are burning far LESS of it. And we are living longer so need our teeth! (Many older people years ago had false teeth as dental hygiene was worse). So yes, we need to be aware of WHEN we are eating sugar.

A slice of cake immediately after a normal sized evening meal when you’ve been physically active in the day and not snacked between meals is not going to do much damage. Compare that to A slice of cake after an overly large evening meal of fried food when you’ve driven to and from work, had a burger for lunch, after a missed breakfast then stemmed mid morning hunger by having 2 bars of chocolate and a coke, pack of sweets in the afternoon, a cream cake because it was someone’s birthday.

And so much added sugar in processed food! I have noticed a real difference if I cook totally from scratch for a week or two then have say, baked beans or a ready meal that is in a sauce. It tastes overly sweet. I hope our bread doesn’t start tasting too sweet soon, as it does in some other countries. Manufacturers are ruining our tastebuds

Exactly! The 80s and 90snwere the beginning of constant snacking, aisles of fizzy drinks and sweets.

Around the time we refined it and started adding it to most of our food. We’ve just cottoned on this wasn’t such a great idea.

Sugar became the enemy when we started stuffing our faces with it in ways unprecedented ever in the history of human existence!

Humans weren't designed to metabolise such high carb / high sugar diets. For thousands of years we ate meat, greens, roots, nuts, seeds, berries / fruits obviously only when they were in season and in their wild form, so smaller and infinitely less sweet than we're accustomed to nowadays. It was only with the advent of agriculture we started increasing our bread intake and only in the last 4/5 hundred years we started eating sugar and only really the last 50 years that we have it with and on and in absolutely everything.

Didn't ready meals really take off in the 80's?

PP are quite correct, sugar consumption has exploded since the 80's and seems to be in EVERYTHING.

I was born in the late 50's and the change in diet and lifestyle is extraordinary, especially for children.

Hmmm... MN advertising is working as it should! This doesn’t help, MN Towers!

Whoops, forgot photo!

It takes a while for over consumption of sugar to become a problem, because your pancreas packing up is the end result of excessive sugar consumption. We now have an epidemic of diabetes after 30 years of people being told to eat a low fat diet, that is usually high in sugar. I grew up in the 80's. We ate sugar sandwiches, but we didn't guzzle fizzy drinks all day. Our portion sizes are enormous compared to what they were as well.

But in a jam roll there's what a teaspoon of jam? Which is about 3g sugar. 2 teaspoons maybe so 6g. That's actually the same amount of sugar as tomato ketchup

In a can of coke for example there's 35g. So 10x the amount
In a pasta sauce there's 15g, 10g in baked beans.

Even a banana has 14g

Your sugary snack isn't that sugary

I only really put on weight when I passed my test 18 months ago

I don’t think there is any evidence that a diet high in fat is good for you.

A biscuit used to be a custard cream. Now it’s 300 calories of choc chip cookies from the bakery counter. That’s your answer.

Time for a diet overhaul in the Peabody household I think. Small one is a sugar fiend like his mother no one is overweight but I'm pushing the boundaries. I cook from scratch but have fussy children who would live off cereal and crisps if I let them.

My grandmother used to keep me supplied with sweets as a child. Remember bags of kali and Spanish liquorice sticks? Yum! I turned veggie and couldn't eat many sweets due to gelatine but now they are making lots veggie and I love sweets since being pregnant with ds. It's a miracle I don't have any fillings!

I noticed a few months ago that DDs were expecting pudding after dinner every night. At their dads they get several chocolate biscuits for pudding and want that here too. Erm no. I used to do an apple crumble and custard at the weekend but that was it or ice cream. Dd2 wants ice cream every blinking day. Pudding was a once a week thing not so long af

Not so long ago! Stupid phone

Small changes now leading to big changes overall in September. School don't help with their 2 puddings nonsense.

Artificial sweeteners are worse imho.

I'm not 30 yet and I remember sweets were a treat for the weekend - Friday night with Top of the Pops or Saturday night telly. Sunday night we'd have a bit of cake/trifle or something sweet after our roast. The rest of the time it was the occasional biscuit - and a biscuit was a digestive or a custard cream, maybe a Tunnocks Tea Cake if mum was feeling fancy. It was very unusual to be allowed to get a 10p mix from the shop on the way home from school, and even then it was 10 little sweets - that was a perfectly acceptable portion size. A lot of the kids I know would look at me like I was an alien if I gave them 10 gummy bears.

By the time I got to high school (2001) things were changing and they were completely different by the time I left (2007).

It's the same in my household peabody. My kids aren't overweight but love sugar. My family is ravaged with diabetes too, so they will be genetically predisposed to getting it when they are older. For me, I'm just trying to stave it off for as long as possible. The advice for diabetics is moving away from low fat to low carb, which includes cutting out all sugars.

What do you want people to say, OP? Your vague memories of a couple of decades ago are more informative than scientific evidence? No one’s going to argue that reducing your sugar consumption will do any harm, anyway

Iirc some victorians promoted a low carb diet for weight loss, so that’s not a new thing

@BlueCornsihPixie

But in a jam roll there's what a teaspoon of jam? Which is about 3g sugar. 2 teaspoons maybe so 6g. That's actually the same amount of sugar as tomato ketchup

It's not just about the jam though. There's also four in there, which is a carbohydrate - and the body treats carbs and sugar in the same way, biochemically.

Since people stopped using their brains and common sense and relied of the internet to run their lives.