America has always followed their own lead – if the Brits want less sugar that is fine – doesn’t mean America has to follow them! When we visited the Brits their sweet buns were not sweet then – so if they reduce their sugar more – it will be like eating bread. Their tea cakes during afternoon tea are not sweet!
Why are these scientists so interested in our health when they keep saying the world is over-populated. Are they talking out of both sides of their mouth?
If the Brits want to – ‘Take out the sugar and everything changes’: the lab on the food wars frontline. That is fine!
As health experts step up the attack on the amount of sugar in our diets, scientists are testing just how much change ordinary consumers will accept.
Scientists say we must cut our sugar intake by half.
Tracy McVeigh
Saturday 18 July 2015 19.05 EDT
Inside a modern office block in Westerham, Kent, Great Britain, a team of ordinary people with extraordinary powers has been assembled. They turn up every day to put on lab coats and sniff, chew and slurp their way through whatever is pushed at them through little serving hatches.
They are doing some of the most crucial experiments we’ve never heard of, tests that will affect all our lives. This is the frontline of the sugar wars.
The independent laboratories of Marketing Sciences Unlimited are where food manufacturers are bringing their products to test on ordinary consumers to see if they are likely to accept changes in formulation or recipe that will mean we can finally stop eating so much sugar.
Experts are calling sugar the new tobacco – and last week a major report from a committee of scientists advised the government to half the current recommended daily intake. Sugar consumption is causing not just obesity, but is linked to type two diabetes, cancer, heart disease, chronic fatigue and tooth decay. Nutritionists say no more than 5% of our daily calorie intake should come from sugar – about seven teaspoons.
To reduce the amount of sugar we eat would mean accepting a change in the over-sweetened, over-fatty foods that we’re being served by supermarkets and manufacturers every day. This is the crucial sticking point for the industry. However, Anna Herron of Marketing Sciences said she was seeing more manufacturers looking at voluntarily reducing the amount of sugar in their products, based on evidence that consumers were interested. “But a lot of food and drink is about habit. Changing habits is quite difficult,” she said. “But it’s also the fact that you can change one ingredient, or the amount of that ingredient, and it affects so much else about the product.”
Their own in-house experiments have shown consistently that products which replace sugar with other sweeteners are coming up constantly as having an “artificial” and “chemical” taste. “Mouth drying” and “bitter” are other frequently used words, which will strike terror into food manufacturers’ hearts – and hit profits. If they are going to reduce their sugar content, they won’t want us to notice. “It’s quite a challenge,” said Dr Debbie Parker, head of the sensory department at Marketing Sciences. Her super-tasters are drawn from what is estimated to be the 15% of the population who have good enough senses of smell, touch, taste, hearing and sight to make the grade.
“Sugar has several functions; it’s not just providing sweetness – [it affects] texture, [the way it feels in the] mouth and it helps to hold a product together. So take away sugar and everything is going to change. The whole point is that we can give manufacturers information that they can act on,” she said. “We’re not asking our tasters ‘which one do you prefer?’, we’re asking them to discriminate and describe, using their senses to look at a product in-depth.”
According to the British Medical Association, the issue of diet-related ill-health in the UK is thought to lead to 70,000 premature deaths each year, roughly 12% of the total number of deaths. Equally, poor diet was found to have a high financial impact on the NHS, costing around £6bn a year.
That means that leaving such a crucial health issue to food manufacturers is wrong, say campaigners. Sugar is the deadliest threat facing Britain today, and yet it is all but ignored by politicians and sold in every town across the country, said Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Wolfson Institute, Queen Mary College, University of London, and chairman of the health pressure group Action on Sugar, which wants urgent government action.
“The socially deprived and children are being targeted heavily by very clever people and it’s a disgrace. Fast-food outlets are in socially deprived areas and every one is selling fat, sugar and death.
“But it’s not just the socially deprived,” MacGregor added. “There are all these TV chefs – their food is not much better.
“People haven’t twigged that the biggest cause of death is what we’re eating. It’s no surprise that we’re so obese; the biggest surprise is why aren’t we all obese. We’re all being slowly poisoned. We’re all eating too much sugar – people grossly underestimate how much they consume. We know that because in surveys, if you ask people how much fizzy drink they consume, you get a figure two-and-a-half times less than how much is being sold.”
According to MacGregor, there are easy lessons to be learned from reductions in salt content in recent years. “We’ve been very successful in reducing salt. It’s gone down by 30-40% and nobody’s noticed. That was because there was the political will in the Labour government. We can easily do the same thing for sugar and fat. And without it, frankly, we’re looking at a bankrupt NHS. Diabetes already costs the NHS £10bn a year and is set to go to £30bn by 2020. It will eat half the NHS budget.
“The food industry walks all over us. It is seen as untouchable. The government knows it can enforce [change] if it wants to. We did it with tobacco; you can easily take out up to 50% of the sugar without anybody noticing, if you do it slowly.”
Herron suggests that consumers expect the action to come from the industry, not their own habits. “Humans enjoy fat and sugar and things that are bad for us. All our research shows that consumers don’t want to change but do feel that it’s the manufacturers’ responsibility to reduce the sugar in their food and drink. It’s clearly what a lot of companies are thinking,” she said. “We’re seeing far more looking to test sugar reduction and how reformulation is going to affect their products.”
So the lab experiments in Westerham will continue, and the nation’s health experts and professionals will be praying for a breakthrough.
Sugar facts
High sugar consumption causes not only obesity and tooth decay but is linked to type two diabetes, heart disease, chronic fatigue and cancer.
A can of Coca-Cola or Pepsi contains the equivalent of nine teaspoonfuls of sugar. Most supermarket-brand carbonated drinks have between nine and 13 teaspoonfuls.
One in five breakfast cereals now contains more sugar than three years ago, and some are 18% sweeter.
The UK consumes around 2.25m tonnes of sugar each year, 75% of which is sold direct to the food industry. Since 1990, consumption of sugar in Britain has increased by a third.
Comments:
There are 30% more obese people in the world than undernourished people. In 2011, there were 366m diabetics in the world, more than double the number in 1980. In the US, this figure could be as high as 33% by 2030.
We have reduced salt by 60% and nobody has noticed. That’s why many foods taste like crap these days. I purchased a can of Heinz Spaghetti yesterday as beans play havoc with my IBS, and it was tasteless. Ended up throwing it away, luckily I only wasted 50pence as it is on offer from 70 pence in Tesco. And how come 500gram of dried spaghetti is a pound yet when it ends up in a tin it costs 10 times as much? By all means offer products lower in sugar /salt / fat but don’t stop selling the original. I am fit and healthy, have a blood sugar reading of 4 and love my sugar. At least unlike tobacco, my habit doesn’t stink or affect others with dog ends and smoke. Before we play around with sugar content we should ban all those junk food snacks beloved of supermarkets and since when did cereals need chocolate in them? And what about all these ‘healthy’ breakfast bars? Full of sugar. Give the scientists some new toys to play with and leave us sugar eaters alone.
kommonsentsjane
kommonsentsjane 