Sugar Tax

antrobus

mwpt wrote: »

Antrobus has said it more politely and better than I did.

I am not a food scientist or medical researcher but I believe the conclusion most reach is that our bodies did not evolve consuming as much sugar as we do these days.

I take the op point about putting unknown chemicals in our body though. I hardly drink soft drinks anyway, but of course I go ahead and drink loads of full fat milk (I love the stuff) which is full of lactose sugars...

Isn't there something deliciously ironic about somebody proclaiming that they refuse to consume aspartame on the grounds that it was invented in a laboratory and is produced in a factory, and is therefore not 'natural', in the context of a debate about soft drinks? Which were of course invented in a laboratory and are produced in a factory.:)

antrobus

kinger101 wrote: »

Many of the non-calorific sweeteners are natural. Stevia. Xylitol. And many of the artificial ones are composed of subunits found in our diet already. Aspartame for example breaks down into two amino acids and methanol (which is present in esterified form at higher amounts in many fruits).....

Isn't aspartame produced from bacteria? Aren't bacteria part of the natural world? No one seems to complain about the role they play in similarly produding beer and bread and ........

kinger101 wrote: »

...But natural and good are not synonymous. Ricin, cholera toxin and snake venom are are natural)..

The natural fallacy has a powerful emotional grip.

kinger101 wrote: »

....What is unnatural for humans is drinking large amounts of liquid containing high concentrations of fructose.

Most things that humans do are unnatural. We built the world we live in.:)

Shrimply

antrobus wrote: »

This.:)



Evolutionarily speaking, sucrose has not been a feature in our diets at all. For one thing we only invented agriculture about 10,000 years ago; we evolved long before then.

There is nothing 'natural' about humans eating processed sugar cane in the form of suagr crystals, any more than there is something 'natural' about humans eating processed wheat in the form of baked bread. They are all the product of human technology.

All you are doing is pedalling the fallacy that somehow the products of old technolgy are somehow more 'natural' than the products of new technology. But it's all the same; it's all stuff that we made.

Sucrose was present in fruits and plants way before agriculture. Just because we didn't purify it doesn't mean it wasn't there and in relatively high quantities. I'm not pedalling any fallacy of the sort. Plenty of evolution can occur in 10000 years and we didn't "evolve before that", some of our evolution occurred before that.

Yes some of these other products are maybe "natural", in that they are naturally occurring. But by using them to sweeten drinks we are often using them in unnaturally high quantities. To a far greater extent than with sucrose etc

I'm not a food scientist, nor a chemist but I do think that arguing over the terminology of what is natural, artificial etc takes away from the real point. Unfortunately, as much as I wish I could, I don't have time to properly read through the literature on all the ins and outs.

In my opinion though sugar is not in itself dangerous and you can argue that it is processed as much as some of the alternative sweeteners but I'm not sure if that's completely true. I'm also pretty sure that many of the drinks companies could (do?) use sugar that has had very little done in terms of processing if they wished.

Malthusian

But when I do choose a sweet drink I would much much rather have a drink that is full of sugar that one that has a whole load of extra random chemicals.

In 99% of commercially sold soft drinks, sugar IS an extra random chemical.

As others have covered at length, it is no more natural or unnatural than aspartame or xylitol or E-God-Knows-What or any other random chemical they might put in, to act as a superstimulus and encourage people to drink more than they need.

The fact that sugar is perfectly harmless, even necessary, in the relatively low quantities you would find it in a fresh apple or orange, does not mean that sugar is still harmless if you take several teaspoons of refined white sugar and dump it into an already sugary drink to con people into drinking it to excess. Anything consumed to excess is harmful, including water and oxygen.

Generali

The difference between sugar in a drink and sugar in a fruit is pretty easy to demonstrate. A half pint of apple juice contains the juice from about 5 apples. Try timing how long it takes to eat 5 apples versus drinking the juice and see how you feel after each.

Shrimply

Generali wrote: »

The difference between sugar in a drink and sugar in a fruit is pretty easy to demonstrate. A half pint of apple juice contains the juice from about 5 apples. Try timing how long it takes to eat 5 apples versus drinking the juice and see how you feel after each.

And how many trees would you have to consume to get the same amount of xylose? I'd rather have the apples. :rotfl:

Generali

Shrimply wrote: »

And how many trees would you have to consume to get the same amount of xylose? I'd rather have the apples. :rotfl:

I think I made my point badly.

My point is that by turning sugar into a drink rather than consuming the fruit whole you enable the consumer to consume vastly greater quantities of sugar. This, IMHO, is probably not a good thing on balance given the weight problems many people have.

kabayiri

Generali wrote: »

I think I made my point badly.

My point is that by turning sugar into a drink rather than consuming the fruit whole you enable the consumer to consume vastly greater quantities of sugar. This, IMHO, is probably not a good thing on balance given the weight problems many people have.

I don't get the shopping channel obsession with these nutri bullet blender type things*.

There's a good argument for consuming pulp mass alongside the sugars contained within it.

(*other machines capable of mashing food into a bland gunk are available)

kabayiri

Does anyone else feel our consumer calendar contributes to the problem of over consumption of sugar?

Off the top of my head, in approximately a quarter of a year, we have had

- Christmas day with choccies and selection boxes
- New Years Eve over indulgence
- Valentines day choccies
- Mothers day choccies
- Easter chocolate eggs

Every single event has a plethora of treat displays in all the food retailers, and for weeks after as they discount off the overstock.

antrobus

Shrimply wrote: »

Sucrose was present in fruits and plants way before agriculture. Just because we didn't purify it doesn't mean it wasn't there and in relatively high quantities. I'm not pedalling any fallacy of the sort. Plenty of evolution can occur in 10000 years and we didn't "evolve before that", some of our evolution occurred before that.

Yes some of these other products are maybe "natural", in that they are naturally occurring. But by using them to sweeten drinks we are often using them in unnaturally high quantities. To a far greater extent than with sucrose etc

I'm not a food scientist, nor a chemist but I do think that arguing over the terminology of what is natural, artificial etc takes away from the real point. Unfortunately, as much as I wish I could, I don't have time to properly read through the literature on all the ins and outs.

In my opinion though sugar is not in itself dangerous and you can argue that it is processed as much as some of the alternative sweeteners but I'm not sure if that's completely true. I'm also pretty sure that many of the drinks companies could (do?) use sugar that has had very little done in terms of processing if they wished.

I am pretty much 100% convinced that at no point in history have we evolved to consume Coca Cola, no matter what it is sweetened with.

Your argument is both fallacious and absurd.