Last week there was an excellent article written by William Leith in The Sunday Telegraph about the growing use of sugar in our diet that most consumers were not aware of. He rightly points out that bread and sausages and many other processed foods are being stuffed with sugar for taste and as a cheap filler. To add insult the food industry is also devleoping fruit that is sweeter and is busy pushing sugar in numerous forms on all of us and disguising it as a health product. We have all seen earnest young mums offering thier children dried fruit products as alternative for sweets not realising that sugar is sugar and whilst there may be some fibre in the dried fruit – the effect on taste buds and blood sugar is not that different.
William also focused on fructose and how the body metabolises this type of sugar and the many and varied side affects of fructose on the body which positively encourage diabetes. However what he did not write about is the poison in our thinking about fructose. Fructose is used by many food companies as a way of making things sweet and indeed some food companies positively believe it is a good replacement to sugar. The reason for this is based on the glyceamic index (GI)of foods and fructose has a far lower GI rating than its well known brother sugar. For this reason some so called health companies have been busy using fructose in abundance in the belief that a low GI count will mean that it is healthy.
Fructose is low GI but is definitely not healthy and should be avoided unless you are eating it as part of whole fruit and even then too much fruit is not great for a vast amount of the population.
Thank you William for writing such a great article and thank you Dr Rober Lustig who is the anti sugar campaigner who stimulated William into writing the article.
10 April 2012
