I suppose eventually it was inevitable that the health fascists would end up disappearing up their own fundaments as they seek ever more products to vilify, tax and ban. Or, worse, try to tell us that there is a recommended daily limit. My recommended daily limit is what I decide it is on any given day.
Juice exudes health and vitality. It is officially one of your ‘five-a-day’. It’s what they sell in juice bars, those yogafied temples of wheatgrass.
But fruit juice is also, according to the American obesity expert Robert Lustig, basically just sugar and is therefore, in his view, a ‘poison’. Lustig is the author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth about Sugar (4th Estate, £13.99), published earlier this year. He sees sugar as the major culprit in the obesity crisis. Not so surprising, except for his shock revelation that the worst sugars may be those that appear the healthiest. ‘Calorie for calorie, 100 per cent orange juice is worse for you’ than sugary sodas, Lustig says.
Ah, another deranged crackpot with a book to shill. No, fruit juice is not poison and the sugars are a form of food that our bodies use. However, the irony of juices being one of the puritans cherished five a day cockwaffle hasn’t escaped me.
This sounds alarmist, until you read some of the case studies from Lustig’s childhood obesity clinic in San Francisco.
No, it is alarmist and should be ignored along with all of the other exhortations from the bansturbators, puritans and health fascists. We should eat what we like, drink what we like and if we choose to do so, smoke what we like and if that takes us to hell in a hand-basket, well it is the hand-basket of our choosing. It is, frankly, no one else’s business how we live our lives and what we imbibe.
I like fruit juice – since I can no longer drink coffee – so will continue to do so and Robert Lustig can go back to healing the sick, which is what doctors are supposed to do. And, no, I repeat, fruit juice and the sugar therein is not a poison.
This news is galling for righteous types like me, who in the past have given their children lectures on the evils of fizzy drinks while smugly feeding them ‘pure not-from-concentrate juice’. If I tried to ban juice in our family now, there’d be uproar.
You have to smile at the mental gymnastics engaged in by the righteous when faced with their own contradictions…
Me, I ignore all of them and do as I will.
Fruit juice is not a poison, however drinking fruit juice will help put on weight. This is because juice is processed and the body has no need to do any work to digest it. If you ate the fruit equivalent the body would lose weight in processing the calories. It’s not unhealthy and people are only ‘overweight’ if they consider themselves to be so, not because some interfering fuckwit says so. I need to lose weight because I want to. I consider myself overweight, so I eat food which helps me to do that. Contrary to so called ‘scientific opinion’ exercise does not help weight loss, they body can self regulate if it is allowed to do the work itself, obviously dependant on the individuals metabolic rate.
If i choose to eat so called ‘unhealthy food’ I will put on weight but that’s my choice as is drinking alcohol or not or smoking or not.
Rant over
The definition of overweight is so absurd as to be useless. BMI, which is what these charlatans use is a nonsense.
I think I’ll just have another BEER!
Hic!
Everythign is a poison if ingested in high enough quantities.
Great to see a self-confessed ‘righteous type’ having a panic attack, isn’t it? If only she could recognise Lustig as a superlative crank, she could relax a bit and not be such an insufferable arse. 😉
Isn’t it amazing that all these health “experts” love to point the finger of blame at poor old sugar as the root of our so-called “obesity crisis,” but the same “experts” are rarely so keen to point the finger of accusation towards all those vile artificial sweeteners which drinks manufacturers use instead in the “light,” “diet,” and “sugar-free” versions of their products? I know for certain that whenever I’m unlucky enough to be served one of these I end up with the most cracking headache in the world. I’ve yet to work out whether it’s saccharine or Aspartame which is the culprit, because they both seem to feature in so many of these “zero” style drinks and because, to be honest, the process of elimination would involve consuming drinks containing either one or the other, and both make drinks taste absolutely vile. Give me a straightforward cold drink sweetened with plain old sugar any day! If I decide I want to lose weight, I’ll just drink less of it.
Well that is £13.99 that can remain in my booze fund then… 😉
Obesity has nothing to do with all the people sitting in MaccyD’s stuffing their faces then? It’s all down to fruit juice *looks shocked* .
I am so fed up with crackpot theories, I will tell you this much, during the dark days of my marriage, as I have mentioned here before, I hardly ever ate and survived on fags and Tea. For over 12 years this was my diet, when I did eat it was usually fish and chips or kebab or some other deeply unhealthy food (according to all the clever food aficionados out there in la la land). because it was what I fancied and when you are that depressed you have to eat what you fancy or you throw up, now this exercise does not work pish…for it is pish, I ate junk and walked miles every day I went from an obese 12 and a half stone to just under 10 stone in the space of 18 months when i worked full time, but i didn’t do it because I wanted to I had no choice I had to get to work and I don’t drive. In my experience trying to lose weight usually makes it worse the harder you try the harder it becomes, if you walk because you want to or needs must you will lose weight no matter what shit you eat. As I have also mentioned before i eat a relatively balanced diet now and have put on weight, this is due to not being depressed any more and contentment, I don’t eat junk food anymore and maybe walk a little less yet I have piled on the pounds! So I guess what I am trying to say is, everyone is different what works for me probably won’t work for anyone else, so we all need to do what our body tells us, my body is quite good at telling me what it wants or needs and I listen to it. It’s all relative and it’s all individual and I for one refuse to be told by any half baked crackpot that they know me better than I do, it’s ludicrous. Almost like one of those therapists who tells you how YOU feel and believes no matter how much you say “No actually you’re wrong” that they are right and you’re a moron. Just because they have a qualification does not make them omnipotent.