If we are serious about tackling the costs of healthcare, creating well-being, beating inequality and delivering fit old-age then tackling the curse of ultra-processed foods and the massive sugar contents within them is essential.
What is more, the sugar lobby knows this and hates attention being drawn to the issue. Every time I mention this trolls appear here fur the first time to defend sugar. Why, I wonder, could that be? Might they be paid to do so?
Spud thinks his blog is important enough that someone would actually pay to get into his comments section?
Blimey. We’ll be saluting in hte direction of Ely soon enough, right?
Candidly, Big Sugar secretly controls everything in British life, as detailed in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Viennetta.
I was just thinking something the other day, how we had the “junk food” ban for kids, the calorie counts in restaurants, but it still keeps on coming, doesn’t it?
It’s clearly making fuck all difference.
You know. Maybe, just maybe, it’s about all the Lady Jabba the Huts driving their Qashqais everywhere rather than walking the kids to school or to the shops. I walked up the hill this morning and according to my Fitbit*, I burned 300 calories, which is more than the calories in a Mr Kipling Cherry Bakewell. So, I could have a little cake because I burned it off. Eating something “ultra processed” with a bit more fat and sugar than making it yourself isn’t going to be close to that extra.
* yeah, I know they aren’t that accurate, but the point still stands.
I see a pattern here. Every time he says something mental people tell him he’s mental. I think the vast conspiracy might be unnecessary..
I wonder if he is aware that all carbohydrates are converted into sugar, glucose if we’re being pedantic, by your body? Sugar is slightly worse for you than carbohydrates generally because your body doesn’t need to process it much so it goes straight into your bloodstream. So if you don’t burn it off fairly promptly it gets turned straight into fat.
“If we are serious about tackling …”
Whenever politicians or wannabees talk about ‘tackling’ it invariably and without exception means they will flail around the edges of the problem trying to look as if they are doing something but the problem never gets fixed, usually it gets worse. See climate change, immigration, crime, he NHS, you name it. All tackled, all worse except climate change, which isn’t real at all but may still be tackled.
If we are serious about tackling the costs of healthcare…
We should abandon the current spectacularly inefficient model and adopt any of the much more efficient models used everywhere else (except the USA). Roughly about a 25% saving would ensue.
“Spud thinks his blog is important enough that someone would actually pay to get into his comments section?”
There’s one way to prove it, one used by thousands of bloggers to reduce the incidence of drive-by trolling. But I think he knows the answer.
But this is how he has worked on numerous topics. His insight is so great that only people paid by some shadowy opponent could possibly oppose it.
He is the embodiment of the C.S Lewis quote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
If we are serious about tackling the costs of healthcare, creating well-being, beating inequality and delivering fit old-age we’ll be driving a fat slob in Ely down the road running for 10 miles, with whips
Candiedly.
Western Bloke,
I walked up the hill this morning and according to my Fitbit*, I burned 300 calories, which is more than the calories in a Mr Kipling Cherry Bakewell.
Accuracy aside, that’s your calories burn for the period, not the additional, active calories, you burned by walking up that hill.
Apple Watches and the like measure what is known as active calories as well as your background calorie burn, as long as you keep your weight up to date. This morning I had a slow walk of 4.8 miles which included 3 steep hills with a total elevation gain of 850′. My total calorie burn was 680 cals but of that only 520 cals, around 75% were attributed to the exercise.
If you had the same percentage then you’d have about 230 active calories. There’s around 200 cals in a Mr Kipling Cherry Bakewell which is cutting it close and that’s why people don’t lose weight when they go to a gym, they seriously underestimate how many active calories they are burning and also underestimate how many calories are in that treat they allow themselves as a reward.
I can’t shake the feeling that Murphy’s last check up ended with his GP suggesting he needed to give up the donuts and ice cream and start losing some weight.
BiND,
That’s all good points. I still have to walk home again, so I think I’ll be comfortably in the Mr Kipling zone by then 😉
I think what I’m mostly trying to say is that I don’t think a bit of extra sugar or fat in say, a ready made curry sauce over doing it yourself makes much difference. You walk for 30 minutes a day, you’ll burn it off. But there are a lot of people who just don’t do much activity. And I don’t mean going and doing sport or gym, but just general activity like walking to shops.
I don’t remember the 1970s or 1980s as being that healthy. Lots of deep fried food, lots of sugar in cereals, fruit in syrup, steamed puddings and dumplings., alcohol consumption was high. But people generally walked, cycled or rode a bus more.
But no-one wants to say “go for a walk fatty” or “put down the Mr Kiplings” when they can go blaming Big Food instead.
But no-one wants to say “go for a walk fatty” or “put down the Mr Kiplings” when they can go blaming Big Food instead.
Doubly so when you are predisposed to find everything bad is either (a) God’s Will, or (b) somebody else’s fault.
Murphy lives in Cambridgeshire.
British Sugar is based in Cambridgeshire.
I’m going to go out on a fairly sturdy limb and suggest that the fat twat has had a row with someone from British Sugar in a pub he’s allowed into – not in Ely obviously.
Probably a lorry driver to whom he was explaining lorry driving.
Tofu. Out. Now.
Interested
It was Downham Market where he fell foul of Pubwatch and was banned though no doubt publicans in Ely have had their fill of being lectured. But I do think there is something personal here. Certainly it’s a hobby horse he seems to get up and down on more often than would seem logical given the extent of his polymathy.
The origins of Spud’s anti-sugar rant are pretty obvious. He’s a fat fuck but incapable of putting down the Mr Kipling’s so wants the government to do it for him.
I don’t remember the 1970s or 1980s as being that healthy.
Indeed. I bet we all eat less sugar, drink less and consume fewer calories today. The main difference is that the 1980s predates 30+ years of pubic sector hectoring about health. The more the state has lectured, advised, nudged and bullied us towards what it claims are ‘healthier outcomes’ the fatter we have collectively become. Having identified this correlation, in the spirit of modern health ‘science’ I claim a causal link. The nanny state makes you fatter.
Furthermore, the past few years have seen overall ‘health outcomes’ decline. Yet the past few years have seen the level of state hectoring and interference increase substantially. Close down the UK Health Security Agency and Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (which replaced PHE), tell doctors to shut the fuck up and treat people, drag that Dimbleby cunt out into the street and string him up. I confidently predict that waistlines will shrink as a result.
@Marius
That needs to go in a grant application. Then it can become Thescience.
Let’s not conflate sugar/carbs and fat. Saturated fat is exactly what people should be eating.
To lose weight it is necessary – by definition – to mobilise body fat, and this can only be done on a low carb diet: one that doesn’t cause chronically elevated insulin, the fat storage hormone (sufficiently long fasts would also achieve this.)
Eat fat to lose fat. With the body’s metabolism shifted to “fat burning” (sic) there is never any shortage of energy on tap; and satiety signally starts working properly again.
Anybody who has driven on the roads around Ely in the beet harvest season, slithering through the mud from tractors on the way to the processors, will have plenty of cause to hate British Sugar.
That is rather misunderstanding the countryside, Rhoda. It’s not an amenity, it’s a factory. Those roads are to get farmers from place to place. They are their roads, not yours. That’s why farmers allowed them to be carved out of their land.