Sugar Cubes
A while ago I posted about the Sugar Tax and my belief its missing the spot. Its like aiming for the double bull eye and hitting the single. In a nutshell, the whole objective officially is to cut the amount of sugar and reduce the impact on childhood obesity. This only appears to apply to fizzy drinks and the likes not to milk based products, and milk based is subjective. Unofficially I think its all about raising more government funds but what do I know.
Tesco is currently making a song and dance completing the initiative it started on 5 years ago in 2011. This initiative were to cut sugar in its extensive range of soft drinks to below 5g of sugar per 100ml. They announced last week that now their complete range of over 250 drinks have been reformulated to be, below the tax threshold. It should really be commended as it were the first to commit and has one of the biggest range, but that doesn’t make me like the sugar tax end of.
I haven’t tried many of Tescos offerings, but I have tried Aldi’s Vive range, their Pepsi Max (Cola XC) equivalent is quite nice but seems to lose fizz quickly, their British Blackcurrant is amazing, I wouldn’t have known I were drinking a low sugar version. I have tried many of Morissons products including Iron Bru, Shandy, Cherryade and they are all quite nice and with ice are passable as normal full sugar versions.
I will make an effort to sample some of Tescos’ goodies and report back.
Chemical S#!tstorm
The more I think about this, the more it bothers me about what is going to replace the sugar. Last time we made a huge change, Low Fat vs High Sugar its come back to kick us in the groin… HARD!. Using Aspartame already has a number of health claims, as do various other “sweeteners”. So what are they using to try and maintain the taste and what far into future reaching side effects will they create ?
My money says none of them have simply lowered the sugar content without adding a heap of chemicals to keep it just as sweet.
I call this a “Chemical Shitstorm”.
Study’s in Quality
There were a study, I don’t remember exactly what or when I read it. In this study they reduced the quality of a product very slowly over a number of months. So say it started 100%, after 6 months it were down to 50%. It were determined almost without exception none of the test subjects really noticed. The interesting thing were after the study concluded and the people were told about it, a large amount preferred the new lower quality item over the original high quality item.
There were talk at the time about this is how the body adjusts to various diets and why some people can eat stuff which makes some sick but not others. Milk were bandied around too, since its estimated that nearly every person on the planet is lactose intolerant given a high enough dose. However the more you drink, the more tolerance you grow. Salt were another named, when various peoples salt levels were slowly increased and anothers decreased, over time people didn’t notice.
Surely this would have been a better strategy rather than the current method?
Suspect Numbers from WHO
The numbers from the World Health Organisation seem suspect to me. They say sugar reduction of 20% would reduce childhood obesity by a fifth. A fifth also happens to be 20%, so a 20% reduction produces a 20% reduction, so why not say 50% reduction would produce 50%.
The fact they chose to mix the words, 20% in one point and a fifth elsewhere irks me. The fact the numbers are the same is also questionable, I haven’t looked too deeply into this as its not a major point of my blog, but it does strike questions for me.
Sugar Cube photo by Maria Kaloudi.
A Manchester Based Photographer and Website Developer with interests in Strongman, Fitness and Geekery.
