Fergus Walsh agonises about cutting down on sugar. It’s the usual progressive cockwaffle – taking everything the health Nazis say as some sort of gospel.
I guess I consume way more than the current recommended limit that 10% of my calories should come from added sugar, or the natural sugar in fruit juice.
Well, given that the recommended limits for sugar are, like the recommended limits for alcohol, plucked out of the collective arseholes of the fake charities and quangos that come up with them, I wouldn’t bother. Indeed, I don’t bother with any of it. I simply eat what I fancy and the hell with the lot of them. But not our Fergus, good little BBC progressive that he is.
I am not alone. Every age group in the UK exceeds the current guidelines.
And we very sensibly don’t give a fuck because they are made up.
So halving the sugar limit to 5% is, to say the least, ambitious.
Nope. Not at all. I don’t plan to do anything whatsoever about it.
But on the wider issue of promoting public health, the new guidelines on sugar are fundamentally about calorie control.
There is no such thing as public health. There is my health, your health and other people’s health. Guess which one is any of your business or that of the state?
Added sugar is a major source of calories – and given that two thirds of adults and a third of children are overweight or obese – cutting sugar consumption could make a dramatic impact on our waistlines, and the health of the nation.
Food is a major source of calories. Consume more than you burn off in exercise and you put on weight. The form the calories take is largely irrelevant – if you exercise enough to burn them off, you will be fine. Unless as one commenter here points out, you are diabetic – in which case, yes, you have to worry about sugar intake. If you are not, well, it ain’t a problem. Take a good walk, or cycle ride, or run, or whatever. I’m fairly active in my work. I eat or drink way over the “recommended guidelines” shat out by the puritans and I am slim, fit(ish) and healthy.
Sugary drinks deserve special attention, according to Dr Alison Tedstone, chief nutritionist at Public Health England: “There is something special about sugar-sweetened drinks that appears to encourage over-consumption”.
Bollocks. Sorry, but that is all this claptrap is worth. I like sugary drinks. I like fruit juices. I do not over consume. I drink when I am thirsty and don’t when I am not.
So if you cut out added sugar, what should you eat instead?
Whatever you like. Just don’t agonise over it.
“We need to reduce sugar intake but should not swap from sugar to fat”, said Prof Susan Jebb of the University of Oxford. “A greater proportion of our plate should be fruit and vegetables and more fibre-rich carbohydrates and whole grain.”
“We” don’t need to do anything. You, on the other hand need to fuck off and mind your own business. My health – and more specifically my lifestyle – is none of your concern.
To do that you need to eat all of the following: five portions of fruit and vegetables, two slices of wholemeal bread, a high fibre breakfast cereal, a baked potato and a portion of whole wheat pasta.
Fuck off. I hate breakfast cereal (although I seem to recall that was on the hit-list of verboten foodstuffs a couple of years ago) and will not touch the stuff. As for five portions – that, too, was plucked out of the arseholes who come up with this dreck.
I’ll eat whatever I damned well please. I never, ever, follow guidelines or targets produced by the state or its parasitic hangers-on. What does need a starvation diet though is the endless stream of funds from our pockets to these scumbags.
But offered an apple or a biscuit with my cup of tea, I know it’s the latter I’d choose.
Fine. Have the biscuit and stop whining about it.
I’ll eat whatever I damned well please. I never, ever, follow guidelines or targets produced by the state or its parasitic hangers-on. What does need a starvation diet though is the endless stream of funds from our pockets to these scumbags.
+1. No, make that +100.
And I totally agree with everything else you write.
What is wrong with people? That they even give these proselytising wankers the time of day? Do they not possess an ounce of common sense? Have they not looked around them, and seen that their eyes give the lie to all this garbage?
Honestly, LR, sometimes I despair of the human race. They seem determined, lemming-like, to hurl themselves over the next cliff of ‘experts have said’. Nobody seems to have the will to employ any degree of critical thinking when confronted with an ‘experts have said’ situation.
Oh well. Fuck ’em. Probably to our children’s advantage if they ‘experts have said’ themselves out of the gene pool anyway…
Eh, Nisaki mou, glad to see you’re still writing in your usual restrained style! Don’t hold it in, man. (Agree with your every word and could add a few choice ones of my own…)
And excellent post from Longrider, of course.
All part of the conditioning of the people. Our masters lists of do’s and don’ts grows daily. Sadly they are winning, for every free thinker like Longrider there are hundreds of people support or even demanding more laws, more control, more state intervention. I despair.