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.

We'll all be sitting in our mansions or spare bedrooms saving for some KitKats .
Quinoa and buckwheat will ge tax exempt.

Thing is that some things you won't expect to have salt / sugar / whatever in will, and some won't. But unless you go around avidly reading labels, you won't know.

TBH I think that if things are not what the average person would expect, it should be incredibly obvious on the packaging. The food industry are terrible with their labelling, they deliberately set out to mislead the consumer. There is a line between packaging something to make it attractive and packaging something in a way that leads the purchaser to think something that is not the case, and the industry at the moment has crossed that line by quite some margin.

Like that stuff with "British beef" was it, and they were allowed to put it on the packet if it was assembled in Britain, it wasn't what a normal person would understand to mean "British beef" at all. So they had to change the rules to stop them doing it. But you can't make up enough rules to stop people for whom profit is everything - there is no goodwill or ethical consideration of the consumer there.

Makes me really angry.

Like most people want to buy decent food for themselves and their kids, and reading the front labels of stuff you would think well that sounds fine, but read the small print and it's all nutrient devoid shit.

I agree with your post Omn.

LadySybilLikesSloeGin Of course there's sugars in kidney beans! They're kidney beans... but I would be willing to say with a high degree of certainty that there are no tins of kidney beans on sale in the UK with sugar added other than tins of bins in chili sauce type stuff where it would be a very small ingredient.

The figures for sugar in the EU can be found here ec.europa.eu/agriculture/sugar/balance-sheets/index_en.htm you'll see that isoglucose (HFCS in the UK) is 3.7% of production (and then there's imported sugars which are mostly cane and palm bringing the actual percentage even lower.). It's simply not much used, it's more expensive than simple sugars from beet etc.

It is used in the US, because there the subsidies and quotas are done differently making it cheaper. But as I said it's all irrelevant as it's just sugar, almost identical to the stuff you get from beet, the fact it came from corn rather than beet is irrelevant.

If they taxed sugar, I wouldn't be able to afford to bribe my kids out of the park

I'd rather sugar than artificial sweeteners (and buying squash is hard enough atm without extra difficulties). And thats purely on a taste basis.

And what is the cut off? I'd rather the sugar came out of savoury foods, and the puddings / treats are left alone. Or we will end up taxing grapes, and letting tomato soup get away with it.

I was under the impression that corn syrup was sweeter than bog-standard sugar, and did something weird to your metabolism.

Apols for the lack of scientific terminology

And I've seen it labelled in branded and supermarket own brand stuff like cakes, biscuits and ice cream a lot.

addictedtosugar yy I was on holiday and the supermarket which was BIG had a whole aisle of squash and every single bloody one had sweeteners. In the end I found two super-organic ones that were £££ and that was it. No normal squash with sugar in the place. Really bad.

Hi-juice from waitrose is what we normally get that's got sugar in it

Tesco value and morrisons savers kidney beans contain only beans, water and firming agent. Some brands do add sugar/salt eg batchelors.

Anyhow - bring back rationing, that's what I say. Include petrol too, job done ;-)

Let them eat cake if they choose but let them be in no doubt that many of the processed foods, sugars, even excess of fruit and fruit juice never mind all the low calorie substitutes are absolutely dreadful for you. It is no surprise I am never ill as I don't eat that stuff.

Also just drink tap water - even someone with very little money can do that.

When I can peel myself away from my mahoosive flat screen I do y'know read labels and stuff.

It's funny how a lot of the smart price stuff has very few additives. I mostly cook fresh food from scratch but on days where I do need to use jarred sauces it's often the cheap stuff as it's not as messed with.

years ago it was fat, then it was wheat, now it's sugar.

Just eat well and you'll be fine. A bit of sugar is totally harmless.

OmnipotentQueenOfTheUniverse There's lots of different sugars depending on how complex they are chemically, they generally taste differently sweet to us, some of the complex sugars we can't even digest (lactose being a common one where only some people can digest it).

However as an ingredient "sugar" means sucrose, a mixture of fructose and glucose, the same as HFCS is, the difference being the source. Fructose is both sweeter and digested differently, so that's your "weird to your metabolism" thought.

However, HFCS is generally about 42% Fructose when used for cooking, whereas normal sugar is 50% Fructose, so if fructose really did weird stuff, then HFCS would be the healthier choice. Glucose is what generally makes up the remainder of HFCS and is the other 50% of regular sugar.

Fructose is the dominant sugar in things like apples and pears too.

There was one of those food programmes (where they swap diets for a week) a couple of years ago which proved that, Lefty. The 'posh, expensive' diet contained more additives than the basics food.

I don't eat kidney beans so don't know about the sugar, sorry! I do buy bags of mixed beans and rehydrate them though. Add with some tomatoes and chilli and eat with bulgar wheat.

Thanks fred I was just googling and there is quite a bit of stuff about how it interacts differently with the body than "normal" sugar - especially to do with the liver? - and of course reams of stuff from the US corn syrup industry saying it's just marvellous.

I think at best the jury is out, isn't it? There certainly seem to be plenty of sources saying it is bad stuff.

LadySybil Yes I'm not surprised maybe it depends on the branding of the "posh" stuff like lots of M&S food is full of fat sugar salt so it's really not as easy to "guess" which things will be "better" unfortunately which is kind of what pisses me off.

The idea that someone might treat their family to one-up in price some weeks and be getting something worse for them for their efforts is just really depressing. And that applies across the board whether your starting point is value in x shop or mid-range in another IYSWIM. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

ladysybil I go through phases of weighing my cereal. I've had to go gluten free and it costs a fortune so I need to ration it.

Inactivity is probably just as bad a problem as too much sugar. Driving short journeys and sitting at a desk all day is a dreadful thing to do to a body.

I wouldn't trust any government on this either. That daft 'change for life' campaign suggests eating low fat and diet foods, I wouldn't put that poison in either mine or my childrens bodies.

I thought fructose messed with your liver etc. but I eat barely any fruit anyway

"Just eat well and you'll be fine. A bit of sugar is totally harmless"

I think what most people are highlighting is how difficult it can be to stick to just a little bit of sugar, due to circumstances and often despitw best intentions

I think something needs to be done but I am not entirely sure what. I think we are bringing up a generation of children who don't know how to taste real food because everything has so much crap in it. I cook from scratch most nights but even basic foods such as pasta and bread have so much sugar and salt added and I don't have time to make those myself.
I think a tax on food/drink void of any nutritional value would be a good thing. No one needs to drink those awful Monster drinks or a bag of sweets.

I think the fibre in fruit stops the fructose messing with your liver. Which is why fruit is okay but refined sugar is not. This is from a half-remembered Ted Ed talk, so could be rubbish....

MrsFrumble you are right and I doubt JO will be talking about naturally occurring sugar in whole food. Our bodies are equipped to process fructose along with the rest of the whole fruit... 'Unwrapped', concentrated fructose that is used as a sweetener in so many processed foods (along with sugar by up to 100 different names) is a much bigger problem for the health of the general population. I agree that sugar is as much of a health threat as tobacco was. I believe a sugar tax will happen. I would like to see food labelling clearly showing the amount of sugar that has been added to any product so that everyone can understand it. At present, even if you have a fairly good understanding of nutrition it can be near impossible to tell, as discussions re HFCS and kidney beans on this thread show

No I don't think the jury is out on HFCS, there's simply no scientific mechanism for HFCS to be different to regular sugar, fructose and glucose are very simple molecules. HFCS is just a substitute bogey man to divert the attention from the real problem of over-consumption and lack of activity.

The world has been running a massive epidemiological study of HFCS vs Sugar for years (because the US use HFCS and the EU use Sugar) and we're all just getting as fat as each other and dying of just the same diseases, linked purely to calories eaten rather than their source.

If they take away the fat, they replace it with chemicals, salt and sugar. I'd rather have the fat, at least I know what I'm eating and I don't have to google every single thing. I cook a lot from scratch mostly, but they seem to meddle with even the basic of foods. I buy a lot from Abel and Cole but I spend less then I would at the supermarket, even though I buy organic, only because there's less choice and I meal plan. I do think there's far too much choice in the supermarkets, which leads to food waste. You can buy 10 different bags of salad (at least), 10 different sorts of bread, 20 different sorts of jam (I'm making these up) etc. People would buy less and feel obliged to eat less if there was less choice. I used to go to the supermarket and think 'that looks nice' and put it into the basket, but I wouldn't really need it. Too much choice.

I never quite finished what I was going to say about 40g of cereal, it isn't much is it. Maybe I need smaller bowls.

Fruityfruitfruit Sun 04-Jan-15 20:38:39
If they taxed sugar, I wouldn't be able to afford to bribe my kids out of the park wink

that is brilliant

40 g is a recommended serving but it's tiny! Smaller bowls or more nutritious food?? Can you eat things like an omlette? Pancakes and fruit (gluten free flour)? I think plates have increased. A dinner plate looks massive to me and I use the next one down unless I've not washed up

I think the only way to truly deal with this is to stop putting people against each other (often based on socio economic groups) and start holding the corporations who produce and sell this shite responsible.

We dont manage to achieve much in the uk via people power do we? Probably because we're too busy sneering at each other and expecting the education system/ NHS to do if for us. We're easy to manipulate.