You
will be surprised to know that of all the addictive agents that you can list such
as tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, betel and drugs, one that has probably sneakily
getting you hooked from early childhood and making the largest impact on your
health could be your addiction to sugar.
Sugar, scientists point out, poses far greater danger than we
seem to realize; it is a toxin that harms our organs and disrupts the body’s
usual hormonal cycles. Excessive consumption of sugar, they say, is one of the
primary causes of the obesity epidemic and metabolic disorders like diabetes,
as well as a culprit for cardiovascular disease. More than 20% of urban Indians
and 10% of urban school children and adolescents in India are obese largely due
to excessive consumption of sweets and sugar.
That the landscape of health across the world and especially in
India is undergoing drastic change is reflected in the WHO’s recent report
attributing over 60% of urban deaths in our country to life-style disorders of
the heart, brain or cancers, replacing the old causes such as infections and
starvation. And what lies at the heart
of these metabolic causes seems to be our addiction to sugar!
Our “Pavlovian” dependence on sweets start from infancy when we
are introduced to sugar water, kheer, sweets and ice-cream. And think again, how do we reward or show our
love for someone? By giving him or her sweets, chocolates, rasagullas or
laddoos!
The excess sugar that enters our body requires excess amounts of
insulin to be secreted by the Beta cells of our pancreas. Over time, these
cells get exhausted leading to diabetes. And as sugar cannot be stored in our
body effectively, it is converted to fat that gets deposited in our buttocks,
paunch, livers and heart!
Around the world, a growing body of opinion – the 'No
Sugar’ movement – is leading a global fightback and warning that our sweet habit
is completely out of control. Sugar, whether added to food by you or the
manufacturer, is the greatest threat to human health. And unless we wise up and
quit en masse, we don’t just risk personal obesity and disease, but national
bankruptcy and collapse as the toll our ill health takes on our countries’
economies threatens to destabilise the modern world.
The sugar trail seems to be coming back to haunt India.
Sugarcane has been grown in India since 500 BC. We learnt to make the white
crystals from the juice much before the European tongue had its first taste of
sweet around 1500. In fact, sugar was
called the white spice and was considered more preciious than gold, and shipped
to Europe by the colonizers.
The movement is led by Robert Lustig, professor of
paediatric endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco, author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About
Sugar, numerous scientific and press articles, and presenter of “Sugar: the
Bitter Truth”, a YouTube clip viewed more than 3,300,000 times.
It is time we woke up and fought our most primodial
addiction to save ourselves and our future generations!
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