Last Sunday night (14/6/15), 60 Minutes ran a story called ‘Secret Sugar’. Leila McKinnon described sugar as “the dietary villain of our time” and Allison Langdon opened with “many of the foods marketed as healthy are in fact choc-full of sugar…there’s a massive industry pulling every trick in the book to get you and I hooked on sugar”. It is true that we are consuming much more sugar than we should. However, I believe the problem is largely a result of a lack of nutritional education amongst consumers, rather than a deliberate ploy by food manufactures to get us hooked on sugar.

Food manufactures add sugar to their products to make them taste good. Have you ever tried a biscuit without sugar? It is bland and tasteless. A product like chocolate is too bitter and almost inedible when sugar is absent. Sweetness is required, in some form and amount, to help make our food palatable. Read more →