Being Happy With Sugar
8th June 2014
Yet again, everything bad is good for you.
Yesterday agave was in, and today it’s out. “Natural” has little meaning for health outside of produce aisles. Eliminating sugars from a diet can’t constitute playing it safe, in that it means getting calories elsewhere—just as the advice to cut out fat in the 1980s is blamed for making people increase their consumption of sugar. Too much fat is bad, too much protein is bad, and too much starch is bad. Everything is good, and everything is bad. Even looking back, the basic tenets of the original 1980 USDA nutrition guidelines really do seem to hold up: “Eat a variety of foods; avoid too much fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol; eat foods with adequate starch and fiber; avoid too much sugar; avoid too much sodium.” And, of course, “Food alone cannot make you healthy.”
In Fed Up, Katie Couric refers to the 1992 food pyramid, which was all carbs at the bottom, but also to the popular practice of calorie balancing, which she says is based in misunderstanding. “What if the solutions weren’t really solutions at all? What if they were making things worse? What if our whole approach to this whole epidemic has been dead wrong?”
Rhetorical questions are the currency of extraordinary implications in documentaries. What if our whole approach to this epidemic has been part of an ongoing investigation into understanding the complex nature of human metabolism and nutrition, and it’s all building on itself, and there’s some validity to most of it?
Makes you wonder when they’ll get around to abandoning the ‘scientific consensus’ behind Global Warming.