Historians of sugar, beginning with Sidney Mintz’s landmark 1980s study Sweetness and Power, have noticed that the way children and nations become addicted to sugar follows similar paths. Just as a little sugar in an infant’s diet trains the child to become dependent on it throughout life, as an emotional reward and physiological prop,
Human breast milk is notably sweet as compared to other mamallian milk. Lactose and others, see?
The human desire for sugar is not something created, it’s something assuaged.
You only have to watch an infant greedily sucking down a sweetened pap (water mixed with flour or breadcrumbs) and making faces at the unsweetened one, he added, to know that it was a natural taste.
Err, yes, lactose.
Twats.
“Historians of sugar, beginning with Sidney Mintz’s landmark 1980s study…”
His brother Murray is more famous.
Very true, Sam V, but Murray -though good- would have taken a lot longer to complete a study.
Newspaper that campaigns for children to get injected with tranny hormones and Covid vaccines is complaining they might eat a Wispa afterwards.
Are the Libs ok?
@Steve: Christmas is coming and the NuPuritans want to make sure no one thinks of enjoying themselves. See also the tirade in the Guardian about ‘junk food’ this morning.
Organic creatures like food with energy in it.
In other breaking news, pope found to be Catholic, rain – is it wet? and stay tuned for our shocking revelation of where bears go for a shit.
Is the Pope still Catholic?
My doctor finally persuaded me that my risk from elevated cholesterol is now greater than the side effects and risks of Statins after I failed to bring the levels down with diet changes. She did add that I could eat all the cream and chocolate I want at Christmas as part of the conversation.
I wonder what the NuPuritans would make of that advice?
I was introduced to sugar as a child. I gave up sugar and tea and coffee when I was about 20, and only a tiny splash of skimmed milk or none – not sure why, but discovered what those two beverages actually taste like. I can’t drink them with sugar in them. I don’t put sugar on things or eat much sweet stuff.
What went wrong?
Sugar and/or it’s big brother carbohydrates – which all end up as glucose in the body – is in just about everything: fruit, veg, dairy, pulses, grains – but not the one thing we are told we shouldn’t eat – meat, which is packed full of essential amino acids for human tissue development, particularly brain cells (see vegans), and also contains vitamins and minerals. It does not make you fat.
Poor advice, BiND, in my opinion. Statins do not extend lifespan i.e. they do not reduce all-cause mortality.
Insofar as they work at all (which seems to be on a few people, largely male, who have already had a heart attack or angina) they displace deaths to other causes in the same time frame.
The side effects can be pernicious but – like probably all drug side-effects – are underestimated by the medical trades, in both severity and number.
Fascinatingly, such modest beneficial effect as they have is not achieved by reducing cholesterol, it seems to come from their anti-inflammatory property.
The man to start with is Kendrick. His website is good but I also point you to these:
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/books-by-dr-malcolm-kendrick/the-great-cholesterol-con/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2043330/
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/statin-nation-the-documentary/
P.S. 1 If you want a wonderful read about the shortcomings of the medical trades read his brilliantly titled “Doctoring Data”.
P.S. 2 This is neither professional nor advice – I’m not a medical man. (My being a bloody sight more right about the whole Covid thing than those plonkers were is, strictly, neither here nor there.)
Bears shit in my front garden, I have the door camera footage to prove it
Human breast milk is very sweet with c.200 different sugar molecules. Milk oligosaccharides — a type of complex sugar — are thought to promote the growth of good gut bacteria. Lactose is not a particularly sweet sugar. The enzyme lactase breaks lactose into the simpler and much sweeter sugars, galactose and glucose.
“She did add that I could eat all the cream and chocolate I want at Christmas as part of the conversation.”
Last few times I’ve been to hospital as part of post-operative checkups, the medic has told me: your blahblahblah is a bit low, why don’t you pop downstairs to the canteen for a Full English.
BniC
What did you do to annoy them ?
I find sugar has to have context. I have never had it in tea or coffee or if I make my own cocoa. I also don’t like sweet beers. But I do have a sweet tooth for biccies cakes etc.
Anyway, I thought that it was established fact that the young like sweet things and that taste preference becomes more bitter with age.
Some champion boxers attracted nicknames such as sugar, sweetness, even ice-cream. My nickname was the flake and I never entered no record book. But wonder if sugary monikers will be expelled from history book one day.