Saturated Fat

What would you say to the unhealthiest food on the planet?

Trans fat?

Saturated fat?

Salt?

Well, I’d like to tell it's the white stuff we bake with, the brown stuff we sprinkle on our porridge. It's honey. Molasses, maple syrup or the high fructose corn syrup you've heard of, but chemically it's all the same thing and it's in nearly everything we eat - it's sugar. Sugar is now the most hidden poison ever. Believe it or not, the average person in this room consume 40 kilos of sugar per year. That’s 20 bags! It’s destroying our health and we don't even realise it.

For our ancestors sugar was only available as fruit at harvest time, which is only a few months in the year and as honey, which was well guarded by the bees. In recent years sugar

has been added to nearly all processed foods. Nature made sugar hard to get - man made it easy.

Fructose is good sugar, found naturally in fruit. Bad sugars, the ones hidden come under names like sucrose, dextrose or high - fructose corn syrup. This is confusing, as take your average bottle “cranberry and orange juice”, we’d all expect it to be healthy, but look a bit deeper and see the second ingredient on the list is high fructose corn syrup. You’ll find it in almost everything and these are the kind of so called health foods we put into our bodies daily. We assume that they are healthy but they're not. We are destroying our health one bite or sip at a time.

High fructose corn syrup is way less expensive to manufacture but the impact on our health costs a lot more in the end. The top 10 most bought foods in supermarkets are sugar rich junk food and this comes as no surprise when major fast food companies spent 35 billion dollars on advertising these sort of products to public. I wonder where all the ads are for promoting fruit and veges? Too much sugar can be poisonous and there's no question that our consumption of sugar has grown and so have our bodies. Even our evolutionary shape is actually changing. Obesity has been rising and spreading worldwide like a rash and it's definitely a major concern. We might be ignorant to a lot of these issues but the food industry has known for decades that there is a link between sugar and disease. The ministry of health and the sugar associations have been fighting a tug of war since the 1970’s over the definition of sugar. Too much inexpensive, good tasting, super-sized, energy - dense foods are the real problem and these are exactly the type of foods the big companies are selling us... Obesity is now considered the number two killer in the world and this leads onto many other obesity linked diseases. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, cancer and diabetes are just some. Children are developing type II diabetes at an alarming rate, a disease usually associated with the people over 45. Jack smith a 16 year old boy weighing 120kg when one day his mother noticed he was slimming down rapidly and was always drinking. She took him to the hospital and he's diagnosed with diabetes and a life of having to inject insulin into himself. It is said that in 15 years 500 million people worldwide will have diabetes leading to a massive tidal wave of suffering.

Unfortunately there's other consequences, than just storing fat. Sugar is a carcinogen which means cancer causing. For every bite of sugar you eat, your immune shuts down for an hour, so if you’ve been snacking on a bag of sweets over the day, your bodies’ cancer fighting ability is non-existent!

SO, what was once the sweetest, most useful thing in our pantry - the thing that could make almost anything taste better has now gone sour and we need to do something quickly? It is critical that we not only educate ourselves about nutrition but we must discipline ourselves as well. If we can learn to read nutrition labels, it will alter the way we think and then should alter the way we eat. The amount of sugar needed by our body is zero.
Sugar is not a food group,
Contains no nutrients,
No proteins,
No healthy fats,
And no enzymes.
The best thing we can do is stick to eating whole and real foods as much as possible.

Quitting sugars is not a diet but a new way of living.

The worst thing about sugar is it causes intense craving but there's no need to give up the sweets stuff altogether as there are now great natural alternatives. Stevia is 300 times sweeter than sugar and it’s now even in your coke. Coconut sugar, maple syrup are a two that can also replace sugar.

On a national level there has not yet been any drastic political measures against sugar and this is a shame because if there had been interventions it would lead to major gains for our health, just like it has on the fight against smoking and other poisons. So, even though we are surrounded by it every day, our foods are loaded with it and it’s no surprise the we are eating way too much of it, we must listen to the facts and make healthier choices. Sugar affects our bodies in a powerful way and we are consuming more of it than ever before. It has been a constant companion in our lives but now we know the damaging effects it has on us. If we educate ourselves we will be able to lead healthier and more productive lives as individuals we are given one body to get us from birth to death, let’s put the biggest space possible between those two events and we know, by quitting sugar, life would become a whole lot

sweeter.