Soft drinks giants should not be able to claim sugary drinks are part of a balanced diet because most cans contain more sugar than a person’s entire daily allowance, researchers have said.
A study published in BMJ Open examined the sugar content of 169 types of fizzy drinks in nine major supermarkets being sold in 2014.
The average can was found to contain more sugar than the 30g a day recommended limit, with 55 percent of drinks exceeding this level.
If your statement is that you can only have half a can of fizzy pop a day to remain healthy then there’s something wrong with your limit, not with the pop.
What is this ‘allowance’? Who ‘allows’ me to drink a certain amount of sugar? Who’s permission should I get to increase this ‘allowance’ if I wanted to?
This ‘allowance’ will gradually be reduced by the fanatics to a level where Social Services will be able to take your kids away if you feed them two grapes in a day.
If you think that’s a ludicrous exaggeration, you haven’t been reading the papers.
It’s not a ludicrous exaggeration. This shit is well established in schools now, where they’d rather your child died of dehydration than let any drink other than water pass their lips. Sugar not banned from the tea and coffee in the staff room, of course.
To misquote a successful female mantra.
Its my body I will do what I want with it.
How is that not applicable to sugar or anything else the person wants?
Compare and contrast:
The time taken to read the labels of 169 tin cans and the cost of the “study”.
Mind you, I thought the BMJ Open was yet another bloody golf tournament.
‘researchers have said’
Researchers are only a half-step about “climate scientists.”
You can drink as many cans of diet fizzy pop as you want. The sugar is a real teeth-rotter (as the son of a dentist I’ve seen many horrific things sat waiting for my Dad in the waiting room at the end of the day) and really shouldn’t be getting added to any drink when there’s a viable alternative. Based on the cost of replacement of a full set of teeth, it’s the equivalent of pouring a litre of pH 4 liquid over your Lamborghini’s bonnet every morning. Eventually you’ll dissolve a £60k engine – and it’s roughly the same cost to replace a full set of teeth. That’s why all the dodderers walk around with falsies.
I’d be careful with that line, Rob. A lot of us dodderers suffered a great deal of unwarranted dentistry in our youth. Possibly accounts for more toothless gums than any other single cause.
All my relatives of my grandparents’ generation had false teeth, usually a full set kept by the side of the bed in a glass of Steradent. Now I’m getting on for the age they were when I was growing up, all my relatives (or acquaintances, AFAICT) have their own teeth.
My mid-forties sister got her first filling ever a couple of years ago. I’ve got all but one of my teeth, and that was taken out when I was a teenager. My Dad lost all his during the war because the food they were served in the Middle East was nutritionally rubbish.
Rob Moss,
‘You can drink as many cans of diet fizzy pop as you want. The sugar is a real teeth-rotter’
I call ‘HorseShit’
If I get a tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup (50/50 Sucrose/Glucose) and fill my engine with it nothing will happen (other than attracting ants and bears)
It is the acid in fizzy drinks (citric acid to be precise C6H8O7) that rots your teeth and polishes up pennies.
from google ‘ph of sugar water’
‘A sugar solution is completely neutral since sugar can’t take hydrogen ions out of the water or donate them in’
BobRocket,
No-one’s saying sugar is acidic. The bacteria in plaque eat sugar and shit acid.
The acid in fizzy drinks is still acid, though, so sugar-free drinks aren’t tooth-friendly. Probably better than the sugary ones, though.
“I’d be careful with that line, Rob. A lot of us dodderers suffered a great deal of unwarranted dentistry in our youth. Possibly accounts for more toothless gums than any other single cause.”
Indeed. We couldn’t walk past a dentist without something being drilled and filled. And sweets really were a treat, fizzy more so.
To cap it all, after being told to clean my teeth after meals for the past 60 years last week my hygienist said it was bad for teeth, something to do with acid still being around and that they shouldn’t be brushed within 30 minutes of a meal, either before or after.
So how much damage did that old advice do?
I see Pepsi has shot themselves in the foot by allowing the diversity-hire CEO to run her mouth off about Trump.
S2,
Sugar is no more detrimental to your teeth than rice, it is just another carbohydrate.
brushing your teeth exposes the enamel, saliva coats the teeth immediately in order to protect against acid attack.
Plaque is this protective coating, the coating allows colonies of bacteria to accumulate and grow which as you say produce an acidic environment. This environment has a PH of around 6.
Coke has a PH of between 2.4 and 4.3.
The worst thing you can do is to drink any kind of acidic drink after brushing your teeth, this includes OJ and GFJ (the traditional breakfast juices) or Irn Bru (traditional in Scotland)
You can reduce the acidity of any acidic fruit juice in hard water areas by diluting with tap water, in softwater areas the water coming out of your tap is a weak acid to start with (which will still dilute coke, anything weaker than battery acid will do) so you are restricted to adding alkalis or drinking sweet coffee.
Sugar has fuck all to do with bad teeth, it is an almost pure carbohydrate like pasta, potatoes and rice.
A fucking carrot is sugar and BetaCarotene (vitamin A).
Would any health nazi like to step forward and say that more than one carrot a day is bad for you.
Sugar is a concentrated source of calories, Oil is a concentrated source of calories, why does it surprise you that the same people who want you back in the stone age technologically use the same arguments as far as your diet.
A sugary drink is swiftly swallowed, and saliva (which is slightly alkaline) quickly neutralises any residue.
The stuff that causes tooth decay is the food that gets stuck in your teeth and hangs around for hours. Ten seconds of sugar passing through is nothing. Five minutes of sugar from sweets is trivial. What gets you is the 12 hours between brushings with lumps of crisps or meat jammed in the cracks, kept warm and wet, and slowly consumed into a sticky acidic goo by slow-growing bacteria.
NiV,
that is correct, you should brush your teeth after eating to remove trapped debris.
But we didn’t evolve with electric toothbrushes so why are they so necessary in the 21st century.
How do the non-opposable thumb mammals and cetaceans cope ?
I think it highly likely our teeth rot because of our lifestyle today and, no matter how much the luddites like me push back, that is directed by the experts with vested interests.
Wanna buy some Snake Oil, Experts on my payroll say it’s great.
“How do the non-opposable thumb mammals and cetaceans cope ?”
It varies. A lot don’t live long enough for it to matter (especially smaller animals). Partly it depends on the species of bacteria – some are more likely to cause decay than others. (The link below mentions streptococcus mutans as a particular culprit among humans). Partly it depends on how mechanically ‘hard’ the food is – carrots and apples are very effective at cleaning teeth, while like I said, meat fibres have a tendency to stick around (at ‘stagnation points’, as the book says). But tooth decay does occur naturally among animals – it’s one of the many potential causes of death.
Ironically, I did once see a theory that it’s a particular problem in humans because people do brush their teeth. Left to itself, the ecology of the mouth settles down to contain relatively benign bacteria that exclude all the more harmful ones. But by continually brushing and mouthwashing all the time, you set up an evolutionary race in which the most aggressive, fastest-growing bacteria that can recolonise the mouth most quickly succeed, while the slow growing benign ones are killed off and cleared away.
I’m not convinced it’s true, but it appeals to my contrarian spirit so much that I like to mention it just to wind up the sort of people who get anal about preventing tooth decay.
Interestingly, I did read another slightly more believable article on a genetically modified version of the bacteria that didn’t produce tooth acid. They claimed that a simple mouth spray could immunise everyone against tooth decay for life. But it wasn’t allowed, because GENETIC MODIFICATION IS EVIL. It would mean releasing GMOs into the ‘wild’, and we can’t have that.
No doubt there’d be terrifying Daily Mail stories about the invasion of ‘Frankenplaque’…
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kKu-N0ypW54C&pg=PA456
See here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1385246/GM-spray-prevents-tooth-decay-for-life.html
NiV,
cheers for the considered reply, if the results from the mouthspray were independently verified then I would give it a go even though I tend to be against GMO simply because mostly it is propriety and tends towards monoculture.
I think a lot of sensitives have been made so by the obsession with cleanliness, you can’t kill ’em all and the survivors (by their very nature) are going to be aggressive in a clear playing field.
There is some stuff about reprogramming to do with allergens (I don’t suffer so I don’t really care) that is very interesting, completely alt. so big science isn’t interested but from what I can tell it is logically consistent.
Dentistry itself has barely moved on from the 19th Century
“…even though I tend to be against GMO simply because mostly it is propriety and tends towards monoculture.”
Yeah. The problem is regulation. An open competition between lots of developers would soon eliminate monocultures, as well as overpriced monopolies. But the regulations make safety tests so insanely expensive to carry out that only huge multinational companies with deep pockets like Monsanto can possibly participate. Regulatory capture created by the protestors prices Monsanto’s potential competition out and preserves their monopoly.
More irony, eh?
The problem I see is patentability of genes, Monsanto should have the patent on their version of GMO soya and I shouldn’t be allowed to sell seed beans containing their patented genes however I should be allowed to sow 2nd+ generation seeds (kept seeds) for crops.
The way the rules seem to be going Monsanto will eventually (via air based cross pollination) own all crops going forwards which will do no one any good (least of all them in the long term).
Patents are the fudge we use to deal with invention being a public good. It’s like software, or music, or medicines. It’s very, very expensive to produce the first one, but then ultra-cheap to copy it and produce more. Nobody can make enough money selling it to make it worth developing them, so you have less invention than we really want. It’s a classic market failure.
Patents are the grant of a *temporary* monopoly sufficient to get back the investment, but which then puts the invention into the public domain thereafter. It’s not an ideal solution – no non-market mechanism ever is – but it’s arguably still a positive thing compared to the alternative.
If you don’t like it, set up in competition and release your own inventions for free. Nobody says you *have* to patent stuff.
As I understand it, Monsanto don’t sue for accidental cross-pollination. The main example the campaigners used was one where a farmer sprayed his own non-GM crop with glyphosphate, to leave the few cross-pollinated plants with the roundup-ready gene, before collecting it for replanting. It was this *deliberate* selection of the GM genes that got him in trouble.
—
The bigger issue with this sort of thing is F1 hybridisation. Crossing different strains gives a more productive plant (hybrid vigour), but it only lasts one generation because they’re sterile. You have to buy new seeds every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F1_hybrid
It’s already a standard feature of plant agriculture – separate from GM. But nobody complains about that. F1H is so effective, it’s actually more profitable for the farmer to buy the new seeds every year than to retain old ones. They’d not sell, otherwise.
Bob,
> Sugar is no more detrimental to your teeth than rice, it is just another carbohydrate.
You made quite a specific claim, that sugar does not erode teeth at all because sugar water is not acidic. I pointed out that that is a straw man, as no dentist on the planet is claiming that sugar water is acidic. Talking about rice doesn’t change that.
I see from your subsequent posts that you do in fact accept that bacteria eat sugar and shit acid. So not entirely sure why you’re arguing.
> we didn’t evolve with electric toothbrushes so why are they so necessary in the 21st century.
Lack of chewing due to refining and cooking food, is the dominant theory. Our ancestors had to chew the hell out of each mouthful, thus generated a lot more saliva than we do.
North Dorset,
> To cap it all, after being told to clean my teeth after meals for the past 60 years last week my hygienist said it was bad for teeth, something to do with acid still being around and that they shouldn’t be brushed within 30 minutes of a meal, either before or after.
> So how much damage did that old advice do?
Loads. I still remember the official advice when I was at primary school: brush your teeth five times a day: when you get up, before bed, and after each meal; and brush for ten minutes. Yes, fifty fucking minutes of toothbrushing per day. The government sent advisors to schools to tell us this. It was such obviously insane advice that I concluded that dentists were ridiculous morons and stopped brushing my teeth. Which, of course, was quite bad for them. So I have fairly bad teeth to this day, all thanks to stupid state dental hygienists. Of course, there were other people who took the advice seriously and have ended up destroying their teeth with brushing. Mine aren’t as bad as theirs.
I started brushing again when I met a dentist who told me once a day is fine. Reasonable, followable advice.
Trouble is, dentists may have abandoned that stupidity, but only after establishing a very strong meme.