Sugar is the topic today. Kids are eating too much before they get to school!! With my dentist, father and consumers hats on today I shall give a wee insight.
As a dentist sugar causes tooth decay, disease and tooth loss as well as associated pain. This results in fillings, extractions and the problems of aesthetics which lead onto self esteem and mental health issues as well as dental phobias.
As a parent and consumer sugar is in majority of what we eat or drink. Be it natural i.e. Fruit or milk or honey or maple syrup or refined. Even natural palm sugars and other such sugars available all have sugar in them. Now the sugar I'm talking about is in the form of glucose.
You could call glucose a building block which can be added to to make starch in Bread, pasta or rice and these can also be broken down to glucose. Our bodies fuel is glucose so we should be able to get a proportion of our fuel from natural sugars. It's the added ones which are the killers.
Our bodies store this extra glucose as fat and we all get fatter and the manufacturers wallets get fatter and I dare say many influential people like politicians also benefit.
"Fat" people have their own issues like diabetes, heart disease, and mental issues like body dysmorphic syndrome i.e. They hate how they look and feel about themselves. This in turn leads to anorexia and mental health issues. Get the picture.
Why do manufacturers use sugar?
Ans: it's cheap, readily available, addictive and a preservative. A certain US brand uses high fructose corn syrup (a cheap sugar syrup) in over 1000 of its lines from mayo to soup to sauce to cereal- I could name them but won't.
This is putting a huge burden and time bomb on our health and services and is entirely preventable. We are in the early stages of a diabetes, heart disease, obesity and tooth decay epidemic and it ain't getting better!!
I say we need sugar tax, education from government, schools, manufacturers and retailers. At the coal face it's looking pretty grim.
I would love you all to read, share and heed this. I've a bank of fotos of rotten teeth, kids as young as 3 having general anaesthetics to extract 20 baby teeth. I've also seen kids come to my surgery eating sweets and drinking fizzy drinks!!!!!
I would love you all to pass on any feed back to
belfastfoodman@hotmail.com
www.belfastfoodman.com
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