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.

Portions are huge and people eat between meals, eating between meals was forbidden when I was a child as was eating in the street which was deemed the height of bad manners by my Mother and I really can’t remember seeing this apart from an ice cream by the sea type situation.

People consume vast amounts of food these days. But middle aged folk even with the same amount of exercise in the main need smaller portions to just maintain weight. My boss told me this when I was a mere slip of a girl and she was approaching 60. She said she ate 30% less than when she was young. She still ate everything, just much smaller amounts. Post menopause my weight started to creep up, I made an adjustment to portion sizes just after Christmas I have lost about half a stone.

“In the 90s we had biscuits in the house and I ate them every day. I had a friend who chocolate bars in our house and we would eat 2/3 every day. We were skinny so no-one cared.”

My experience of the 90s was not like this - we didn’t have sugary snacks available as children, we were some skinny, some not. But our two experiences mean nothing when you are looking at population level.

The availability of sugary food, and sugar/carb+fat foods, has increased hugely in the last couple of decades, with 24-hr supermarkets, coffee shops etc - it’s quite hard to get away from food in many ways, and given that we are animals who are SUPPOSED to derive satisfaction from eating (otherwise we wouldn’t seek it out and would die of starvation) it’s natural that many are tempted to overeat - it’s an obesogenic environment

curlyhairedassassin my parents are the same. Both of them are diabetic, yet the minute my children walk through the door, it's a constant barrage of 'do you want a milkshake/waffles/biscuit/chocolate' from my mum and it's one after the other as well, so they will say yes to one thing and then its another thing offered to them 5 minutes later. I end up shouting at her. It confuses the kids and damages her relationship with them because it seems their interaction with her is based entirely on her forcing food on them from the minute they wake up to the minute they go to sleep. My brother is diabetic at 40, one of her brothers and her mother are dead due to complications of diabetes, another one is on dialysis, and another had to have toes amputated. Yet she is in complete denial that this is all due to poor regulation of diabetes and excess sugar consumption.

Agreed HerSymphonyAndSong but just wanted to counter the tide of anecdotal evidence from other posters that no one ate sweets every day in the 90s.

Op says 2-3 decades ago. Aka the nineties. People talking about relying on harvest or there not being any cars around clearly weren't paying attention

People didn't just suddenly appear in the 1990's with fully formed opinions. Society has seen huge changes since post WW2, and attitudes are based on what we learned from our parents, their parents, and our social class.
While living conditions have changed, many attitudes haven't. My older working class relatives hoard so much food much of it goes out of date. They constantly offer comfort foods because they see it as a huge treat.
People have a hard time changing their attitudes in response to new conditions. We get stuck in a rut.

None of the major foods groups are bad for you in moderation, surely? I was a 50s child, and skinny with it, but I would have eaten sweets all day if allowed. Meant all my baby teeth ended up with fillings, so not good.
However, I think the problem with obesity comes down to many factors.
Food (in the uk) is cheap compared to the 50s to 70s. My parents simply couldn't afford to buy vast quantities of food, so meals were a sensible size of necessity.
Fast food; before the 70s, apart from Wimpy bars, there was no such thing as fast food. Eating out was a rarity.
Portion size; when did portions become so large, yet be considered normal? A bucket of popcorn and another bucket of coke, just to fortify one person through a film at the cinema? Crazy.
And finally, lack of physical movement. When I think of the energy my mother expended to do the weekly wash for example (all by hand), it's no wonder she was slim.
I have a 1950 housekeeping book with suggested year round meal planning. There are four meals a day (breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner), but the portions are small, everything is home cooked and you would not have been expected to eat anything else during the day, plus you were moving a lot more.
There is just too much cheap sugary and fatty food readily available these day. Most of it we really don't need at all.

TheInebriati fair enough but as a child/teen of the nineties that all seems very old fashioned in my experience. Harvest played no part in my life other than harvest festival at school. My family had two cars. We had sweets and treats in much the way my children do now.

A few years ago, Robert Lustig wrote a book about the mistake made in demonising fat as the source of heart problems and cited John Yudkin's book 'Pure white and deadly' published in the 60s about the health problems caused by sugar. Due to increasing heart problems in the US, the surgeon general had to make a recommendation - either low sugar or low fat. He went for low fat, and industry retooled and to get the same 'mouth feel' sugar and starches were added. Low calorie diets are also relatively new - in 19th century people used to be said to be 'banting' named after either a surgeon or the person whose life was saved by cutting all carbs. Think he was diabetic. There's a reference to someone banting in an Agatha Christie book, trying to lose weight.
The fat that is dangerous is artificially created 'trans' fat - the oil is hydrogenated to solidify it and in adding hydrogen to the double bond, it's added trans, ie opposite, as opposed to cis, on the same side. Naturally occurring saturated fats are cis, not trans.
Agree with a pp that things that were treats in the 60s are now eaten generally. As an example, I bought all my sweets with my 6d/week pocket money - about 4oz boiled sweets or a small bar of chocolate. My parents wouldn't have dreamed of buying me sweets with the shopping. Ice cream was an occasional treat for Sunday lunch and bought specially.

I met someone whose first graduate job had been in marketing for British Sugar, trying to convince people that it wasn’t bad for you. That would have been in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I am just old enough to remember the tail end of some of that advertising, mostly in colour supplements that my mum might have kept for the recipes. There was definitely an active marketing campaign to persuade people to use more of it in cooking etc.

The other issue is that because we eat so many carbs (as we're advised to by the NHS/government), this actually increases our hunger. So we end up snacking.

There are millions of food posts here about snacks that people have, and plan into their day. So no longer are we a nation that eats three times a day. We have breakfast - a mid-morning snack - lunch - a mid-afternoon snack - and then dinner. Oh, and if you drop in for a coffee anywhere, there's a huge amount of temptation to have a biscuit/cake with it.

This amount of snacking is seen as entirely normal - indeed, people will say it's healthy if they're snacking on fruit.

But all these snacks, usually carb/sugar-based, do us no good at all.

Incidentally, John Yudkin was shunned by the medical profession when he wrote that book, despite there already being lots of science to support his work.

I'm awaiting delivery of more sistema pots for sweets. We buy family bags because it's cheaper and share them. There have been arguments lately over who has had more so from now on I will be dividing them up into individual pots. Apart from avoiding arguments it will also control the amount they have.
We seem to have given up our biscuit habit. I've just not bought any for ages and no one has missed them. They love baking cookies though. Lots of oats and raisins so much healthier than a chocolate digestive I guess.