Health obsessions come and go. You will recall the successive demonization of fat,
cholesterol, trans-fats and the great anti-carb crusade. The last of these caused perfectly
rational people to convince themselves that a diet of bacon cheeseburgers was
perfectly OK as long as you abjured the bun. I suspect 2011 will be recalled as the year when demon sugar
caught the fancy of the nutritional exorcists. And don’t think this is an isolated American phenomenon, I
just read a long article about how sugar is leading us to damnation in the
Czech Republic’s foremost financial paper, Hospodarske
Noviny (here’s the link
if you happen to read Czech).
Nonetheless, the American health-advice industry still leads the world:
just read Gary Taubes “Is
Sugar Toxic?” New York Times
article from last April. That
piece was largely devoted to examining claims made by Robert Lustig, a
specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and childhood obesity at UCSF. Lustig makes no bones about it: sugar is poison and it is evil. By the end of the article Taubes
appears largely convinced. “Sugar
scares me too,” he writes and worries about giving it to his sons.
Lustig’s argument is not that too much sugar is bad but
rather that any amount of refined sugar is bad. It’s like saying that because rhubarb contains oxalic acid
(which can cause health problems) strawberry rhubarb pies should be
banned. Americans have a tendency,
though, to label food “good” or “bad.”
If you eat the good stuff you will be svelte and fabulous and never die
and if you eat the bad you will go straight to hell wearing XXXL sweats from
Walmart. Subtlety does not make
careers or sell newspapers.
That said, Americans undoubtedly do eat too much sugar and
other sweeteners, probably about twice as much as is healthful according to a
FDA study quoted by Taubes. But
what exactly does that mean? We’re
eating some 90 pounds per year.
Which works out to about a half a cup a day or 24 sugar packets. A quarter cup would be probably be fine
though, according to the FDA study, and just in case you’re wondering, that’s the
equivalent of 8 Toll House cookies, 4 glazed donuts or about 3 slices of
pumpkin pie. The problem, of
course, isn’t that people are eating too much dessert but rather drinking too
much soda. But telling people to
eat a sensible quantity of sugar rather than abstaining altogether just isn’t
the American way. It’s like the
advice American teenagers are given about sex: just say no. It’s no wonder our teenage pregnancy
rate is one the highest in the developed world and our obesity rate is just as
bad.
So why can’t we just be sensible about all of this? I think it has a lot to do with the
fundamentally puritan nature of our culture. At the root of this is the idea that pleasure is
sinful. Abstaining from pleasure
(especially such sensual pleasures as sex and food) will ensure you a place in
heaven while self-indulgence will send you straight to hell. Sometimes the vocabulary makes this
self-evident. Sugar is
“demonized.” It is “evil.” Sometimes it’s more subtle than
that. There is a widely held
belief that it is up to you to determine how long you live. The more discipline you have, the
better you are able to control your natural urges, the closer you can get to
life everlasting. The good (those
who haven’t succumbed to their instincts) get to play golf in the Elysian
fields well into their nineties, while the bad (who lived on Coke and KFC) are
punished with an early, painful end.
This is the secular answer to heaven and hell but there is the same moralizing
quality. When citing various studies on the effects of diet, journalists often
write that eating or not eating ingredient X lowered the study participants’
death rate. Of course what they
mean is the death rate from a particular disease but that’s not the way it
reads. To the best of my
knowledge, our death rate remains 100% no matter what we do or eat.
We are hard-wired to like sugar much as we are designed to
enjoy sex. Pleasure has an
evolutionary basis. In nature,
foods that are sweet are invariably not poisonous whereas bitterness signals
danger. In many cultures
children’s first taste of real food is something sweet and kids naturally
gravitate to sweet foods. Does
that mean that they should be indulged with a diet of Cocoa Pebbles and
soda? Of course not, but neither
should they be told that those things are “bad.” They need to learn that pleasure has its time and place;
otherwise they will only associate it with being drunk in the back seat of a
borrowed car—and regret it the next day.
There is a twisted logic at work here: if pleasure is sinful you can only get pleasure from sinful
activities and thus the greater the transgression the greater the pleasure. You will notice that the term “sinfully
rich” does not occur in Catholic Europe, but to us “sinful” is just a synonym
for “pleasurable.”
Sugar has long been a natural target for those who wish to
save our souls. Well before the
current sugar-bashing fad, sugar was associated with the miseries of the slave
trade and, while it is undoubtedly true that European sugar consumption habits
in the 17th and 18th centuries were the primary cause of the transatlantic
slave trade and its associated horrors, it does not follow that sucrose is
somehow malevolent. Was the sugar
produced by peasant farmers in India during this time more virtuous? Or the beet sugar produced after 1800 morally
superior? Certainly 19th century
abolitionists thought so (there was a movement to boycott slave-grown sugar in
the early 1800s). Some made this
explicit, describing consuming slave-grown sugar as partaking “of other men’s sins”
and the need to refrain from the pleasures of the tea table to safeguard their
own virtue. (See Lectures
on Slavery, 160).
More recently
(in the 1970s) sugar was linked with hyperactivity in children though
the consensus among researchers is that no such link exists.
Undoubtedly the current sugar witch hunt will come and go
leaving people ever more conflicted and confused about what is on their plate
and ever guiltier about each and every pleasure. But in the meantime I have every intention of enjoying my
next donut or that slice of tarte au citron and feeling virtuous pleasure with
every bite.
