Why Age?

Does sugar rule your life?

November 21, 2007 – 6:45 pm | by admin

“’Tis too much prov’d - that with devotion’s visage
And pious action, we do sugar o’er
The devil himself.“
William Shakespeare, Hamlet

I went shopping the other day, reading labels as I went, and hit a wall of frustration in the cereal section of the supermarket.

I couldn’t find any brand of muesli that did not have added sugar. Even the brand I had stuck to for years had been overtaken by a giant food conglomerate and had succumbed to the sugar avalanche that engulfs our lives.

I have since found a single brand that has no sugar but it’s too late for my allegiance. I have fallen off the commercial muesli wagon and now make my own. (See my recipe at the end.)

Why get one’s knickers in a twist about sugar? Isn’t most of what we eat broken down into sugar eventually?

Yes, it’s true that glucose fuels our cells after digestion and metabolism have converted much of our food into this ready supply of energy. However sugar is meant to be fed to our cells at the end of this process, not at the beginning. Especially not in the quantities a typical industrialised diet provides.

Next time you shop, go on the sugar alert. Read the labels of every processed food you buy and identify sugar in the ingredients list. It may be called fructose, glucose, dextrose, sucrose, or maltose. You’ll be surprised to find that every thing from peanut butter to the bread you spread it on has sugar added. The food industry is as hooked on it as we are.

“If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!”
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV

William Shakespeare knew something about sugar. His Elizabethan Age was the beginning of our long love affair with it. The colonization of America, the mass transportation of African slave labour, and the transfer of the sugar plant from Asia combined in a commercial synergy that was unrivalled in its time.

Huge wealth was created from sugar and it became a foodstuff associated with novelty and virtue. Unpalatable foods became irresistible and sugar was adopted as the darling of the food processing industry. Considering sugar is entirely unnecessary as a food  in the human diet and has only been there for 500-odd years, it is amazing that it rules supreme today.

There are two reasons for this:

Firstly, sugar makes us willing to eat things we would not normally savour, in quantities we would not normally consume.

Secondly, sugar has physical properties that make it the darling of food technologists: It minimizes microbial life, thereby extending the shelf-life of foods; it gives a certain “mouth feel” to foods, like ice cream and biscuits; and it caramelizes under heat and makes foods more attractive.

Now, it’s not foods that you prepare yourself and add sugar to that are the problem. At least there you can limit the amount you use. I bake cakes and you really need only one third the amount of sugar most recipes call for. If I add sugar, it’s the moist, dark brown variety that has aroma and flavour that allows for even less to be used. Usually, dried fruits can be substituted for sugar.

The true problem lies in the fact that most store-bought foods have lots of sugar added to extend their products’ shelf life, and to give certain taste and mouth feel properties.

Our job as anti-agers is to wean ourselves from an industrialised palate so that we can eat more fruit, vegetables and other plant foods and enjoy the age-slowing benefits they provide. You will never do this at adequate levels while sugar rules your world.

Nutritionists used to recommend that people (particularly children) only consumed 15 per cent of their carbohydrate intake in the form of refined sugar. I’m sorry to say that over the last 15 years, these rules have loosened to the point that they now recommend that sugar form only 15 per cent of total calories!

An average can of soft drink is up to 10 per cent sugar, representing 9 teaspoons. None of us would add that much to coffee or tea but many swallow that much with every drink.

The other insidious change in the industrialized diet over the last two decades has been the use of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as a sweetener in many processed foods. Fructose is not metabolized like regular sugar (sucrose) and many pundits hold it partially responsible for the global obesity crisis. Fructose occurs naturally in many plant foods, especially fruit, but the presence of fibre slows its absorption.

Corn is the source for today’s fructose and never has the human race been subjected to such an alarming avalanche of sugar so far from the form nature intended it to be consumed. It’s no coincidence that America started to fatten up as never before at the same time HFCS began to flood the food chain. This happened around 1980 and most Westernised countries around the world are following suit.

The moral of the story is to wean yourself from sugar if you intend eating a more natural diet. To eat an anti-ageing diet, you must consume large quantities of whole plant foods and sugar is a diversion from that path.

Home-made muesli

Wheat or other cereal flakes (Find one that is simply wholegrain with nothing more than salt added, e.g. “Weeties”)
Puffed wholegrain cereal (I use rice)
Rolled oats
Nut, seed and fruit mixture (Find one that combines almonds, cashews, pepitas, sunflower seeds and sultanas and the like)

Combine and store in an airtight container

Try combinations of other sugar-free cereals you can find. This way your formula is always changing. Say goodbye to those awful bran straws!