to agree with Jamie Oliver that sugar is "the next tobacco" and it should be taxed due to its health risks

[haveatarday]

I think Jo is a twat, but I do agree with this. I also think he should feel very guilty for all his promotion of sugary foods that he has made millions off. I remember him going on about crap school dinners all the while being the focus of sainsburys Christmas's foods and promoting gingerbread, trifile and other junk food all while saying go on its Christmas.

YABVVU. You and he are being over simplistic OP. What needs to be addressed is the cost and accessibility of unprocessed food, compared with the processed. Like it or not it mostly those on low income families who would be effected by such a change. This is because many of those who are parents and caregivers within this group do not have the basic skills to cook, because most likely they will have grown up in a time when home management was axed in schools, mothers moved into the work place and at the same time their was a massive drop in the cost of appliances such as freezers and microwaves ect, and consequently processed foods became more widely available and were preferred due to convenience. Therefore it is the skill gap in this generation that needs to be addressed, along with the rising cost of fuel, to enable them to cook meals from scratch without worrying about the bills. Think about the power needed to heat the oven for baked potatoes, roasts ect. I still remember my granny making sure she 'filled the oven' with bread, cake ect, to 'get the most out of it' when I was young.

Additionally, if you are not taught how to make meals, sugary stuff that is cheap and you know your kids will eat and not go to bed hungry must seem the best choice.

This is one thing that really pisses me off about JO, in spite of his mockney stick he has no idea of how many of the people he preaches and talks down to actually live. He was born into an affluent family and is now a millionaire. If you look at his books the cost of ingredients is astronomical! I think he should stay out of it, if he wants to get involved in teaching people to cook, then fab, but he should liaise with economists and dietitians, SS and so on, who understand the background to his rhetoric.

I wish he'd go and crawl under a rock

Phoenix has got it right. Local co-op, you can buy 8 kit kats in a packet for £1. Can you buy 8 apples for £1? 8 oranges? No. If your budget is only £40 are you really going to spend £2.75 on 5 apples? That's where the problem is, it's cheaper to pop to Iceland and buy chicken nuggets for £1 a bag and kit kats as you get more for your money and you don't really think about the sugar content, just that you're feeding your children (I'm not saying anyone in particular does this, my parents did though. Fresh fruit was very rare).

Yabu

People need to wise up to what they're eating and take personal responsibility for their choices.

industry needs to stop using cheap fillers to produce maximum profits...indigestible fats, that corn syrup (high fructose something or other!)

people need to be taught how to cook, how to nourish a family, simple basic knowledge that has been lost in a generation

So sick of all these eejits demonising a particular food. Then don't fucking eat it! Why should everyone else have to be dictated to like schoolkids?

JO is a cunt, too.

The Co-op's fruit and veg is notorious expensive compared to their fruit and veg LadySybil

There are many other supermarkets where you can (and many many many parents of ALL income brackets do) buy bags of apples for the same price as a pack of eight Kitkats.

There are many reasons why people make consistently make the "wrong" food choices. Artificially inflating the price of certain foods would be a very simplistic and ineffective solution IMO.

It's not sugar as such, I agree, corn syrup is the bigger problem.

Yabu. Some sugar isn't as bad for you as some cigarettes.

Healthy food should be more affordable. Don't make the yummy food more expensive. Chocolate and biscuits are my only vice, I'd lose the plot if I didn't have a bit of comfort eating every day.

Tbh I hate all this "people need to take personal responsibility". That is too simplistic when the manufactures keep adding more and more sugar to everything. Who would think it was in bread, tomato ketchup, soup etc. and as others have said, if you are on a very limited budget, cheap processed food is far cheaper than cooking from scratch.

Yes YABU. Smoking is always bad, for anyone. It's not a moderation thing.

Sugar in food and in moderation is completely fine, and people shouldn't be taxed just because some people have no self control over how much they consume.

Plus, I like Haribo.

YABU. And so is he.

It is ridiculously simplistic to blame sugar for the obesity crisis (presuming that's his angle). Stupid, band-aid suggestion.

Unfortunately, it's much more difficult to fix the real issues, like lack of basic cooking skills, access to affordable fresh ingredients, time to prepare food now that most families need two working adults, and so on.

Yy, tax sugar and well all be fed hfcs instead.

I'd prefer the sugar

Saucy in my rural town the choice is sainsburys, waitrose or the coop. There isn't a "cheap" supermarket and bus fares are extremely expensive. (£4.85 single to the nearest city where there is a very small Lidl).

There often is not a choice of supermarkets for many people.

There are alternatives to sugar, which are expensive. Honey, fruit juices etc. Food manufacturers won't use these because they know they are not cheap to add and people won't buy their products if they are too expensive.

What about palm sugar? They use it a lot in asian cooking (thanks, Hairy Bikers)

I don't disagree with him about some of the problems with sugar (though he is being somewhat simplistic) but I don't think taxing is the answer

But it's easy for him to say when he can afford to buy and cook good quality protein, veg and fats

Honey and fruit juice is just sugar anyway though - it's not an alternative

Apples are a pound a pack according to the Sainsbury's website.

What's your next excuse?

How would the sugar in an apple, say, be taxed? Or in a stalk of broccoli?

Children are growing up in a food culture awash with sugar and junk food and it's making them fat and sick.

Our food culture is a problem, and children are the victims.

Cultural problems need structural, policy level solutions. Moralising about individuals being responsible for making poor choices gets us precisely nowhere - we have acknowledged this in relation to alcohol, tobacco and recreational drugs and have sought to limit their availability to children through legislation.

No child needs processed sugar, in any food. They can get all the sugars they need by eating fruit and other food which actually has some nutritional value.

If sugar were taxed, other artificial sweeteners would be used.

I'd rather efforts went in to redesigning other aspects of life to make it more healthy, replacing apples for kitkats is hardly going to help your life overall if you're stuck in an overpriced rental with an hour each way commute and a stagnant pay packet.

I presume he's talking about refined cane sugar when he says 'sugar', and that he only means sugar added at the point of processing.

Otherwise it makes no sense at all. Clearly you can't tax every form of sugar that occurs naturally in food.

Still an unworkable, and silly, idea.

Jux - he is talking about refined sugar which is nutritionally of very little value in the form it's most often eaten by children, as sweets and biscuits.

Id far rather a little sugar than chemical sweeteners.

Agree with the others who have mentioned corn syrup as a really dire food additive (used instead of sugar as it is cheaper) and the fact that they have about 5 different names for it so it's not as easy as well don't buy it then.

I think that the food manufacturers need to be tackled (again others have said this) as they put all sorts of shit in stuff, make labelling as misleading as possible and generally will do anything to make as cheap a product as possible and as appealing to the palette as possible (salt + fat + sugar = human brain says yum) and don't give a fuck about the resultant public health issues.

Of course people need to take responsibility BUT when they are hiding all sorts of shite in foods and labelling it as misleadingly as possible then they need to take responsibility too. The average person can't be expected to read and translate the small print on every label on everything they buy. eg low fat yoghurt emblazoned across a pot and consumer thinks "ah that must be a good choice" but it's not is it as they've stuffed it full of sugar instead but that fact is only revealed if you read the ingredients.

Problem is food lobby has massive ££££ and power and influence and so govts won't do fuck all.