Denmark introduces "fat tax"

[longfingernails]

news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/16081190

We should do the same - and use the money to pay for an income tax cut.

I just did a blog post about how our diets compare to those of people in 1910, if you are interested.

Here

Interesting article. My mum's been saying for years that a high sugar diet buggers up your metabolism - she reads every nutrition book going - and that sugar is far worse than fat in health terms.

Biking I've definitely noticed that if I have a lot of sweet stuff, I then end up craving it more and more. It's like my body has become dependent on the sugar hit. The same applies to refined starchy foods - bread, mashed potato, white pasta etc - if I eat them lots, I want them more and more. So by the same token, it ought to work the other way - if I stay off it, I should want it less eventually?

Breakfast like a king, lunch like a richman and supper like a pauper - isn't that how the saying goes? I definitely need more food during the first part of the day than the latter (which makes sense).

I do find cultural differences in diet interesting - not just globally but also historically as in your blog post.

There are only a few things in that list that we don't eat, although we don't eat meat every day.

I accidentally did sugar cold turkey once - in other words, I went a month and realised I had stopped eating it. I didn't miss it, kept it up, and I lost two stone and looked fantastic. Then someone bought me a Magimix and I started baking. I put on a stone. Three more children later, I have put on four stone.

Maybe there's something in the whole sugar thing.

I managed to wean myself off sugar a few times (and I'm someone who can easily put away 200g chocolate a day during my worst periods ) I found that it slowly crept back into my life when I was listless / bored. I.e. when I was unemployed, sending applications and not getting anywhere, I found myself constantly making a coffee and a snack (which invariably was mostly sugar).

So for me it was a case of going cold turkey (although not to my friend's extreme) and keeping my life full in a positive way (so when unemployed, to make sure I met friends, went for a walk etc as a regular thing to stop the downwards despair cycle) and the cravings are definitely not as strong. I still eat chocolate but not 200g a day, and I make sure that I have reduced / cut out where possible the sugars in other areas of my diet.

There was a really good thread on mumsnet somewhere about sugar and weaning yourself off it.

BoffinMum - that's me down to a T - do really well, feel great, then something comes along and buggers up all my efforts :o

For me it definitely works that the less sweet food I have, the less I crave. Physiologically, sugars have a very strong effect on the body, which is why it is offered to people who go into shock. We tend to get desensitised to its effects, because we chow down so much of the stuff, half the time not even realising that we are eating so much. Sucrose, lactose, maltose, glucose, corn syrup, dextrose are all sugars & are in so many products. The huge surge in Type 2 diabetes has a great deal to do with the phenomenal amount of complex carbs & sugars we eat nowadays. If you think about it the human body was never designed to eat so many huge ripe fruits, so much bread or pasta. Go back to our hunter gatherer days & we would have had access to seasonal fruit & veg (none of which would have been anything like the size they are today) and animal products. I don't think for one moment we can all revert back to some kind of paleolithic diet - but I feel agrieved that so many "health & diet" products are actually contributing to bad health & an enormous amount of money is being made out of them. Same thing bugs me about fags too - but at least everyone knows now how bad they are for you.

TBH I don't eat a lot of sugar but I think I am not genetically disposed to cope with it well. I am seriously considering cutting it out again now.

I have some great Anglo-Saxon dessert recipes sans sugar that I might put on the blog for like minded people later in the week!

minipie - that's just like me. If I have a bowl of cereal I immediately want more. I've done low-carb diets and definitely ate less overall yet felt totally satisfied and the cravings went away.

It does get boring though and carbs tend to creep back in ...

At the moment I am avoiding bread, pasta, rice and the like in favour of veg, salad, eggs, cheese, fish, meat, yoghurt. etc. But I do eat ice cream as my treat - hey I'm pregnant. Also fruit for the same reason.

Ooh Boffinmum yes please!

I had a good recipe for oat biscuits sweetened with mashed banana and raisins (so technically not sugarfree as it had fructose) but would love to try some more sugar-free recipes.

Actually I've found that for a lot of recipes for cakes etc you can get away with cutting the amount of sugar at least in half and so far no-one has complained when I've done that probably too polite :o

Not everyone seems to be affected by sufar in the same way. See sites like radiantrecovery.com. For some it's as addictive as alcohol and cocaine can be. I don't have it. I do eat fruit. I don't eat bread usually but that's because I'm intolerant to yeast and is nothing to do with the sugar issue although there is often sugar and all sorts of other stuff in bread. In fact even British fruit in 2011 has been bred by farmers to have a much sweeter taste than fruit used to do.

"For some it's as addictive as alcohol and cocaine can be"

Funny you should say that Xenia because I have always felt that way in terms of me and sugar. Like people say that an alcoholic is always an alcoholic (and those don't drink anymore are just dry alcoholics). I have never had a drink or a drug addiction so can't completely compare, but I feel like I do have a sugar addiction and I have had some really bad periods and some really good periods.

Generally though for me, it's not just a case of weaning myself off the sweetness but also recognising when that listless or slightly despairing mood takes over, that's the danger zone for slipping back into bad sugar habits again. But we're all different, so could imagine that for others it is just a case of getting used to less sugar and that's it.

Just sounds a bit OTT when you try to compare a sugar addiction to a drink addiction or a drug addiction - I don't have experience of either and I am definitely not trying to trivialise drink or drug addictions by comparing them to sugar addictions (hope that's clear - not expressing myself well today!)

BikingViking, if you look at the rapidly rising numbers of morbidly obese people - perhaps it doesn't seem such an extreme comparison.

I do think people don't take serious over weight people who binge eat and laugh at them as if they were Billy Bunter yet would be very sympathetic to smoeone addicted to alchol. You get people peddling sugar in offices - have another cake, have a biscuit. Some of those people receiving them don't want them and are in a sense addicted to them but no one really takes this seriously even though I suspect obesity, diabetes and other consequnecs of sugar et are probably a bigger problem for this country than drug use in terms of numbers of people affected.

Anyway

We are surrounded by cake, that's true. Often you end up eating the stuff because people are urging you to go on, just have a little bit. And often if truth be told, the stuff is cheap and nasty and tasteless (office chocolate cake being my least favourite sickly thing on the planet). Yet we criticise overweight people and harp on about the obesity epidemic. I wonder if as a society we are having a kind of collective nervous breakdown about the role of food in our lives.

That's interesting! I looked up sugar addiction and found:

In 1998, Kathleen DesMaisons outlined the concept of sugar addiction as a measurable physiological state caused by activation of mu opioid receptors in the brain. Her work extracted data from studies done by Blass showing that sugar acted as an analgesic drug whose effects could be blocked by a morphine blocker. Acting on years of anecdotal evidence from her work in the field of addiction, DesMaisons noted that dependence on sugar followed the same track outlined in the DSM IV for other drugs of abuse.

Since that time, a growing body of laboratory evidence has corroborated DesMaisons' hypothesis. Bart Hoebel at Princeton began showing the neurochemical effects of sugar, noting that sugar might serve as a gate drug for other drugs.

In 2008, Nicole Avena published data stating that sugar affects opioids and dopamine in the brain, and thus might be expected to have addictive potential. She references "Bingeing," "withdrawal," "craving" and "cross-sensitization" are each given operational definitions and demonstrated behaviorally with sugar bingeing as the reinforcer.

Apparently sweet tastes (including sweeters) activate the opiate receptors. The same mechanism makes nicotine and heroin addictive ...

What was that?

Heh, Boffin, I just ate nearly half a malt loaf. Am hoping to get stoned on it

ROFL at Boffin - you need to get to rehab!! I think you can take the sugar thing too far. Most of us can enjoy a cake or toffee without bingeing (sp?) & getting morbidly obese, just like most of us can enjoy a drink without becoming an alcoholic. I think there is still alot we don't know about heavily processed foods & those reasonably new to our diet that we now consume in previously unheard of quantities.

Well I am not tripping, that's for sure.

TBH I eat very well, and while I might be a bit chunky, as my GP so tactfully puts it, they did my bloods for some other reason recently, and were impressed with how healthy I was in terms of internal organs and all the other things they can test you for, so I don't think I am going to keel over any time soon. I've got low BP and can run up a flight of stairs, osteoarthritis permitting, so I think a bit of cake is neither here nor there, although I would like to look a bit more sophisticated in a swimsuit.

I think the principles behind the passage quoted above is about eating to ensure those levels of things like seratonin in the brain are what keep people happy. That of course is also in prozac. So it may be we medicalise with drugs conditions which might not be anything like so bad or even absent if people ate like they used to - no sugar and meals of meat, rough carb, carrots etc. I think the research shows that many people do not have the same biochemistry and will not have a problem with sugar but some will.