WOS

The War on Sugar continues.

Imagine a drug that can intoxicate us, can infuse us with energy and can be taken by mouth. It doesn’t have to be injected, smoked, or snorted for us to experience its sublime and soothing effects. Imagine that it mixes well with virtually every food and particularly liquids, and that when given to infants it provokes a feeling of pleasure so profound and intense that its pursuit becomes a driving force throughout their lives.

Could the taste of sugar on the tongue be a kind of intoxication? What about the possibility that sugar itself is an intoxicant, a drug? Overconsumption of this drug may have long-term side-effects, but there are none in the short term – no staggering or dizziness, no slurring of speech, no passing out or drifting away, no heart palpitations or respiratory distress. When it is given to children, its effects may be only more extreme variations on the apparently natural emotional rollercoaster of childhood, from the initial intoxication to the tantrums and whining of what may or may not be withdrawal a few hours later. More than anything, it makes children happy, at least for the period during which they’re consuming it. It calms their distress, eases their pain, focuses their attention and leaves them excited and full of joy until the dose wears off. The only downside is that children will come to expect another dose, perhaps to demand it, on a regular basis.

There’s more of this idiotic drivel. I guess I have to stop eating fruit, now, and that spoonful of honey I like to put in breakfast oats, that’s verboten too. I am no better than a heroin addict or a junkie snorting a line of cocaine or looking for the next fix in the crack pipe – yeh, ‘cos that’s the situation, not just eating normal foods – including carbohydrates such as sugar. No, it’s a drug of abuse.

The idea that it is an intoxicating drug and that parents are little more than pushers is risible on the one hand but deeply, deeply repugnant and misanthropic on the other – as well as being an egregious lie. The people peddling this vile ideology are doing so for the most selfish of reasons – to keep their nice little taxpayer-funded sinecures.

We need that multi-person gallows and a goodly length of hempen rope.

The critical question, as the journalist and historian Charles C Mann has elegantly put it, “is whether [sugar] is actually an addictive substance, or if people just act like it is”. This question is not easy to answer.

Yes it is (the question – easy to answer); no, it isn’t (addictive). It’s a basic foodstuff, nothing more. Like all foodstuffs, moderation is the key. Most of us manage this perfectly well. Eventually people will see these charlatans for what they are. Indeed, the recent call for workplace bans on cakes is, perhaps, a blessing, for it exposes their extremism in a manner that even the dullest will be able to see. Hopefully.

On a purely personal level, I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth, preferring savoury flavours. But, still, apparently I am addicted. Yeah, right.