The Case Against Sugar

In the first week of January 2014, a group of medical and nutritional experts in the U.K. launched a rather unusual initiative called ‘Action On Sugar’ to influence the food industry to reduce added sugar in foods by 40% over four years.  If anything, this was long overdue.  Across the Western World and increasingly in India, sugar is emerging as the single biggest cause of a growing lifestyle disease epidemic.  India, I read, is the World’s largest consumer of sugar and with a growing appetite for junk food; Pepsi recently announced an investment of about five billion dollars (rupees thirty thousand crores) in helping us on our collective way to the hospital. The Action on Sugar needs to originate here.

Refined sugar is a relatively new invention to the World and is newer to India.  In our country in the 1970s, when I was growing up, sugar was rationed carefully and it was common for the poorer economic sections of society to drink their tea without it; indeed I clearly remember my gardener drinking his tea, with a piece of jaggery by the side, that he’d bite into once in a way.  Historically, sweets (or ‘sweetmeats’ as Indian sweet dishes were called) were consumed on special occasions and made with jaggery.  Acreage under sugarcane in India grew dramatically in the 1970s, with irrigation support and the green revolution, and sugar has since been widely and easily available – interestingly, this is the period in which obesity, blood pressure and illnesses resulting out of a sedentary, rich-food lifestyle have made their firm presence in all of urban India and in parts of rural India as well. 

Refined sugar has no nutrition at all and is a source of completely unnecessary calories; there are multiple sources of sweet carbohydrates in every part of India that have higher nutrition.  Sugar is known to be addictive as well: in a French study in 2007, it was reported that when rats were given the choice between sugar and cocaine, they chose sugar overwhelmingly.  Even the rats that had been given cocaine over a period, to get them addicted to it, seemed to prefer sugar.  There is enough anecdotal evidence of this in our lives as well; the craving for a sugary dessert after a meal can be intense and continuous.  While sweet dishes as dessert after every meal, rather than a fruit, are conspicuously sugary, it is the insidious addition of sugar to human diet that has caused the addiction.  All of us, children in particular, consume sugar in most processed foods: sauces and ketchup, ‘healthy’ juices that have added sugar, brown and white beverages, cookies and bakery products, junk food and bread spreads.  

As I began to study the health effects of sugar, there was as much learning as there was worry; what follows in this paragraph must make us sit up and take notice.  Refined sugar is obviously a major contributor to obesity and is a toxin for those with diabetes.  In addition, a US study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta and Harvard School of Public Health showed a link between high levels of sugar consumption and a 275% percent higher relative risk of dying from cardiovascular disease where refined sugar consumption was about a quarter or more of a person’s calorie intake.  Dr. Aseem Malhotra, an eminent cardiologist in the UK who is leading the fight against sugar, suspects that sugar causes the liver to produce more uric acid, and this leads to high blood pressure and much of the resultant illnesses, including dementia.  Sugar, he further adds, could be as inimical to the liver as alcohol, contributing to a non-reversable condition called non-alcohol fatty liver disease – the second biggest cause of liver failure after alcohol (which, by the way, is from sugar as well!). Others point to a possible role that sugar could be playing in some cancers.  No wonder then that Professor Simon Capewell of the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Psychology, Health and Society labels sugar ‘the new tobacco’.  Much of this information has been known for years, but it all came together to make a compelling case only with the increased focus in the Western World on public health which now centres around the consumption of toxic junk, including refined sugar.

So, how much sugar is OK to consume?

In January 2014, a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Dental Research suggested that added sugars should not be more than five per cent of calorie intake, to protect teeth and gums and most health specialists agree with this estimate.  This means a maximum of six teaspoons of sugar for a person consuming two thousand calories a day.  To most of us, this will mean a lifestyle change.  Remember the sugar you consume in your tea or coffee is part of the story and much of the sugar you consume is involuntary, as you eat processed food: as a yardstick for comparison, a can of any of the cola brands in the market contains the equivalent of nine spoons of sugar (actually, high fructose corn syrup, a cheaper alternative to sugar, but with the same deleterious effects), which is your quota for a day and a half. 

It is time to act now – individually and collectively - to neutralise an avoidable epidemic. Cut your sugar to the minimum – it’s the least you can do to help yourself.