UCSF scientists declare war on sugar in food
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/01/BA891N1PQS.DTL
I have read a lot about this topic over the last decade or so (maybe closer to 2 decades now that I think about it) and I am mostly convinced that the processing of our food coupled with the supply of ’empty’ calories is indeed at the root of our ‘epidemic’ of chronic diseases (like diabetes, heart disease, etc.). The idea of metabolic syndrome holds a whole lot of weight for me and it is quite easy to draw correlations with our crappy diet. It is amazing to me that if you want to eat healthy it costs more in money, time and risk of sickness while to eat a crappy diet (one that puts you on the fast track to metabolic syndrome) it is cheaper, faster and much less likely to result in illness. What illness do I say? All the ‘evil’ preservatives and some of the processing our food undergoes is to reduce the chance of spoilage, something that used to kill lots of people in the ‘bad old days’. If we do away with these things then we are perforce bringing back food-born illnesses much like the e.coli outbreaks that get so much attention now a days (so much attention _because_ of its rarity!). People who babble about the evils of pasteurization clearly have never spent a week in the hospital hooked up to IVs in an effort to keep them from dying and that is exactly what happens when the wrong pathogen contaminates your food (the ‘right’ bug ‘contaminating’ your food might result in some wonderful cheeses (not to mention other fantastic foods), so bugs are not all bad!).
So, to get back on topic, the average person has no real choice in which ingredients her food was produced with. It requires wealth, education and effort (as well as the willingness to deal with inevitable spoilage (and, of course, education to recognize it as spoilt)) to eat ‘healthy’ food (note that current processed foods are not unhealthy, if eaten in moderation, it is that most people are not able to choose moderation due to their socioeconomic status). Thus, we, as a society, are actually dooming a huge segment of our population to a slow miserable death by denying them the ability to eat healthier food. Yes, there is a huge element of nanny state in their proposal and yes I have huge personal objections to being prohibited from certain activities, particularly ones that might be detrimental to my health, but I think that if the laws were implemented properly (which, naturally, is impossible in our society, so this is really all a fantasy) then people could still have access to their poisons (just like people can still (though with increasing effort) access their tobacco and alcohol), it would just no longer be the default.
