During the 1960’s, I weighed around 66 kilos and stood a shade under six feet (181 centimetres). I wore vests (undershirts) and jumpers in a large size. Fifty years later, I weigh 70 kilos (154 pounds, 11 stone). I now wear vests and jumpers in small or medium size.
AVERAGE weight for every man, woman and child in Britain has risen by 20 kilos (around 44 pounds, three stone) in less than 50 years.
Why? Is it because we exercise less today? No.
Sugar is a primary cause. Sugar is still pure, white and deadly with fat and salt running second and third in its contribution to weight and health problems.
We sit in bigger car seats, wear larger clothing, and use longer belts for swelling waist lines. Tens of millions in the country regularly feel depressed about their weight.
In the 1970’s, the US started the gluttony for sugar through the cheap production of glucose-fructose syrup (HFCS), an intensely sweet syrup, produced from surplus corn.
Laboratory research on animals and humans showed that sugar and HFCS is an incredibly addictive substance. The weight of poor mice used for experiments in laboratories got swollen within days after being fed processed food. These poor creatures could not put a brake on their compulsive eating. The food industry injected sugar, and especially HFCS, into as much food as possible including pizzas, burghers, soft drinks, bread, sweetened beverages, breakfast cereals, processed food and tinned food.
The industry massively expanded the production of cakes, biscuits, sweets and chocolates ensuring further our addiction to sugar. They also ensured that the shelf life of more and more food with sugar extended from days to months, even years.
The food industry continues to targets children though manipulative advertising so that the craving for sugar starts at an early an age as possible and as early in the day as possible. At the breakfast table…
You will see some of the most intense exploitation of society’s addiction to sugar and the associated obesity pandemic at sports stadiums. Billboards for McDonalds, Coca Cola and other junk food companies fill our stadiums because the sports business, including the Olympics Committee, lacks the moral fortitude to say NO to the purveyors of junk food. Men and women of supreme fitness promote and get endorsed by the feeders of obesity while TV advertisements sell potentially poisonous food and drink between events on the sports field.
The food industry places the foods with highest sugar content, such as chocolate and sweets, at the payment tills of the supermarkets and shops to encourage impulse buying of shoppers to get yet another sugar hit for themselves, their children or both. This addiction to sugar and HFCS, far worse than any other legal drug, except perhaps nicotine, has ensured a dramatic increase in the consumption of food and deterioration in health for an ever increasing percentage of the population.
The food industry has become a multibillion $$$ industry at the expense of the health of citizens. The big businesses that provide us with our food support a slow act of murder.
Our hospitals and clinics are filling up with men, women and children suffering terribly as a direct consequence of the excesses of sugar, fat and salt. Food producers, food distributors and an elite group of farmers have become millionaires, or even multimillionaires, as food consumption per citizen increased dramatically in a generation – while one to two billion citizens of the Earth continue to struggle to eat a decent meal on a daily basis.
The propaganda of the food business ensures that sugar and salt stands on every restaurant table and most homes despite the massive increase in weight, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, production of fat in the liver and other vital organs due to the addiction to sugar.
The intensity of the sugar hit on the stomach linings guarantees the signals to ensure the brain’s addiction to sugar. The daily habitual need for sugar virtually eliminates the capacity to make wise and clear minded choices around this substance.
Countless diet books, course and workshops seem helpless in the face of the food industries determination to exploit our vulnerabilities to excess of sugar.
Meanwhile the sugar industry denies that sugar is linked to lifestyle disease. Just as the tobacco industry spent decades denying that cigarette smoking is linked to cancer. Instead the industry pointed the fnger towards fat. They then engineered and marketted the low fat food industry such as low fat yogurts and much more. One scientist said reducing of fat in such foods would make the food taste like cardboard. What happened? You got it. The industry increased the sugar content to make low fat food taste more palatable.
The food industry makes war on our bodies. We live in the killing fields of sugar.
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