Sugar is the New Demon

More puritan twaddle. This time it’s sugar.

Our addiction to sugar is linked to obesity, cancer and heart disease – and soft drinks are among the worst offenders. Alex Renton reports on the new health war, and reveals why some fruit juices may be as bad for you as cans of fizz

Fuck off, already. We are not addicted to sugar and there is not an obesity epidemic. There is a puritanical war being waged by the purse-lipped, self-righteous, busybody, nannying pettifogging, interfering shitbags who think that the rest of us need to be treated like infants and in so doing they use junk science and made up statistics and the bloody discredited BMI to scare us into believing that we are fat when we most certainly are nothing of the sort.

If the stats are right, this teenager in Leith, who threw the empty tin, drinks 287 cans, or the equivalent, a year: more sugary drinks than any other child in Europe.

So what? If it does him harm, that is his concern, not yours. And stats are not real – they are made up from a small – usually unrepresentative – sample. So you have absolutely no idea whatsoever how much that one person drinks, so don’t make such stupid assumptions. I’ve drunk such drinks on and off all of my life. I am still here, I am still moderately fit, I am still healthy and I am not fat.

Of course sugary drinks make work for more people than dentists. Though the drinks and food industry still hotly contests it, a scientific consensus is now emerging that fatal problems can be traced back to excessive sugar consumption.

Ah, yes, the old canard of the nannying fuss-buckets worldwide – the “scientific consensus”. There was a time when Newton’s theories about the universe were accepted as a scientific consensus. It took one man to blow a hole in it and demonstrate that scientific consensus is not worth a damn.

Sugary drinks, addiction and obesity are inextricably linked: excess sugar in the diet may be a greater cause of obesity than fat is. Obese people suffer from diabetes, cancer, fatty liver disease, dementia and heart problems to the extent that their healthcare costs are double those of people with a healthy body mass.

Hysterical scaremongering. I have been drinking these drinks on and off throughout my life – and as those who require healthcare have paid in a small fortune, then that’s just too bad. I have paid in a small fortune and have hardly used it. They can have mine. There, problem solved. As a child I ate breakfast cereals. I am slim, moderately fit, I am healthy and still here. I am not fat, don’t have diabetes and I am not fucking addicted, so stop telling me that I am.

I will eat and drink what I please. I don’t care a jot whether the fuss-buckets approve, because I will continue doing it. If it shortens my life by a year or two, that is my concern. And, frankly, I would prefer to die a little earlier having experienced the pleasures in life than live forever in a grey cardboard world inhabited by self-righteous arseholes like Renton. Live fast, die young, go happy or live to a ripe old age desperately waiting for the grim reaper to relive the tedium of dribbling in your bath chair. Your choice. However, don’t try to force that choice on the rest of us and stop trying to guilt trip us. I am not guilty of anything and am not going to start feeling guilty for my life choices. In fact, if what I do pisses off the new puritans, that’s a bonus.