Fat and sugar are just as deadly as cigarettes !

3 January, 2013

Fat and sugar are just as deadly as cigarettes

Camilla Cavendish 

Britain is second only to America for obesity. Relying on education alone has failed – now we must ban trans fats 

Britain is getting bigger: and not in a good way. We’re biggest in Wales, apparently, where I have just spent a few days visiting a sick relative in a hospital groaning under the burden of overweight patients and staff. I felt like the Ancient Mariner, wanting to grab some and say: “Don’t you realise you’re heading for an early death?” Diabetes, heart disease, colon cancer: all we’ve done, it seems, is to replace the miserable diseases of smoking with the grim diseases of obesity.

It has become normal to be fat. That is what I read into a new report by the Royal College of Physicians, which says that the UK is now the world’s most obese country after America. A quarter of all adults are obese and one in five of 10-year-old children. To be classed as obese, a 5ft 6in woman has to weigh 13½ stone. An obese 10-year-old boy weighs 110lb, not the 70 he should weigh. That’s an affront to nature.

The report urges the NHS to tackle the problem by stapling more gastric bands into people’s stomachs; by putting more emphasis on obesity in medical degrees; by confronting patients with information. Yet our society is drowning in leaflets. There can be scarcely anyone who hasn’t heard of “five a day”. In America, the dramatic increase in obesity has slowed a bit, possibly as a result of health education, but is still rising.

Rather than expecting the NHS to pump out more messages to people who don’t seem to listen or to operate on people so grotesquely overweight that extra-large beds must be built for them, we should consider banning some of the worst substances that have insinuated themselves into our food.

One is trans fats. These are cheap industrial substances that prolong the shelf-life of products such as cereal, doughnuts, processed meat, ready meals and crisps, and give them more bulk or texture. Hydrogenation turns liquid vegetable oils into harder substances that clog our arteries and are associated with obesity, type 2 diabetes and the increased risk of heart attacks and stroke. They were named as a toxin by the World Health Organisation in 2009.

Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Seattle, California and New York City have banned trans fats or reduced them to an absolute minimum. But the UK Government has merely urged the food industry to act. Waitrose, M&S and other companies have eliminated trans fats from their own brand products. But they remain in other ranges, and in corner shops, kebab stalls, takeaways. The result is an increasing inequality between what the rich and poor consume — where you shop dictates what you eat. This persuades me, as someone who usually loathes banning things, that some people are being virtually condemned to be ill. Dr Alex Richardson, of Oxford University, has suggested that trans fats may even affect mental performance and increase aggression.

I have just looked to see how many trans fats lurk in my kitchen. A packet of crackers states reassuringly that it contains 0g of trans fat. But it lists “shortening” (hydrogenated vegetable oil)” as an ingredient. That is trans fat. If manufacturers are still misleading even conscientious consumers, the Government is being nowhere near tough enough with the food industry.

Low-fat foods are another problem. For years the Government has encouraged people to eat them. Yet many are stuffed with sugar and refined carbohydrates (including, in some cases, those same hydrogenated fats). Many low-fat fizzy drinks and other products contain high-fructose corn syrup, which has been linked to diabetes, insulin-resistance and obesity because people drink so much of it and because fructose is converted to fat quite quickly in the body. Even “no sugar” drinks contain chemical alternatives, designed to satisfy the craving for sweetness: the aspartame in Diet Coke is sweeter than natural sugar and may mimic sugar in increasing the craving for other sweet things.

In his book Fat Chance, the US paediatric endocrinologist Professor Robert Lustig argues that sugar, not fat, is the main cause of American obesity. He argues that sugar is as addictive as nicotine, because it switches on the same hormonal pathways that “reward” behaviour. Low blood sugar affects mood, concentration and the ability to inhibit impulse. Eating or drinking something sugary reverses the effect: but if the pattern is repeated for long enough it results in insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and obesity. Professor Lustig believes that it is not possible for most people to quit through willpower: that has been eroded by the cycle of craving.

This strikes me as extremely plausible. It would explain why so many people trying to do the right thing by eating low-fat products are still fat. It would explain why telling some people to shape up only sends them into a spiral of comfort-eating gloom. We all know how much sugar cravings are accentuated by eating sugar. Since I had my third child I have found myself drawn to the office kiosk most days at around 4pm, staring at the chocolate muffins and no longer finding solace in a banana. I used to be very strict about this and couldn’t understand why other people caved in. But I have got into a cycle that is unstoppable unless I go cold turkey on all forms of sugar for at least two weeks. This is despite my being an educated, genetically thin person with a high metabolism.

The comparison that Professor Lustig draws between nicotine and sugar also leads me to wonder if people who quit smoking have simply turned to sugar for an alternative high. Recent research published in The British Medical Journal suggests that people gain more weight when they stop smoking than had previously been thought. It looks more and more likely that we have simply swapped one vice, nicotine, for another, obesity.

Are we destined to self-destruct? Not necessarily. It seems particularly terrible to me that small children are developing type 2 diabetes because of what their parents feed them.

That must be stopped. And not just through persuasion, but by reducing our exposure to processed foods. There is no reason for offices, schools or hospitals to contain vending machines full of fizzy drinks and chocolate, any more than there is for them to sell cigarettes. There is no reason other than profit for any food to contain trans fats or, I suspect, high-fructose corn syrup. In serving up low-fat meals and artificial sweeteners, the food industry has partly been jumping to officialdom’s tune. But if some processed foods are as addictive and dangerous as nicotine, we must come down much harder on a temptation that is afflicting the nation — and the poor — as badly as cigarettes.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/camillacavendish/article3646395.ece

Graham