Food's too cheap (confirmed)

[MajGenl.Meade]

Obesity, South Africa's emerging health crisis
Reuters
By Tiisetso Motsoeneng
December 10, 2014 7:06 AM

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - At lunchtime outside South Africa's biggest shopping mall, hungry workmen in hard hats pour out of a building site to buy cheap loaves of bread and jumbo bottles of fizzy drinks. They are joined by middle-class office workers, forming long queues at fast-food restaurants to stack trays with fried chicken, pizza or local delicacies such as bunny chow -- a hollowed out loaf of bread stuffed with steaming curry.

Nearly three quarters of South Africans are overweight and the country ranks third in a list of the world's most obese nations behind the United States and Mexico, according to surveys by GlaxoSmithKline and medical journal The Lancet . . .

. . . South Africa is a striking example of a problem that is spreading in developing countries, where 60 percent of the world's obese people live, a January study by the London-based Overseas Development Institute found.

The number of overweight people in developing countries has more than tripled in less than three decades, from 250 million, to nearly 1 billion in 2008, the study found.

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL

Despite the heavy toll that obesity takes on their bodies and the country's creaking hospitals, many South Africans share cultural values that glorify men with bulging bellies as successful and women with rounded hips as beautiful. Nearly 90 percent of the 25,500 people interviewed in a 2013 study by the Human Sciences Research Council deemed fat as the preferable body type.

"I'd like to put on a bit more weight and I have asked my boyfriend to eat more because he's too skinny. People are starting to think he's sick," said bank teller Dimakatso Masinga, 27, at a popular fast-food outlet.

Non-communicable illnesses, such as strokes and heart attacks, account for more than 40 percent of all deaths in South Africa, and doctors say these health problems will soon overtake HIV and tuberculosis as the country's biggest killers.

South African authorities are considering imposing tax on food and drinks high in fat and sugar and using the revenue to cut the price of foods they consider to be healthy.

"The thing that really disturbs me is how expensive a healthy basket of food is and how cheap junk foods are," said Melvin Freeman, head of non-communicable disease at the government health department.

Authorities are considering banning fast food advertising aimed at children, Freeman said, and meals sold in schools and work places may have to be regulated.

"As a developing country, South Africa is least likely to respond to sick people. We have little option but to act on the prevention side," Freeman said.

It costs up to 23 percent more to treat an overweight person in South Africa than someone of healthy weight, according to the South African Medical Journal, but much of the 146 billion rand ($13 billion) annual health budget is soaked up by building or revamping run-down hospitals.

(1 US dollar = 11.4532 South African rand)

[Gob]

I hope they don't put the price up.

[rubato]

Sugar ( like other simple carbohydrates ) is too cheap. There is too much of it. And it is in too many products in too large quantities as a result.

Our bodies evolved to deal with scarcity and a variable food supply, not the continual super-abundance provided by industrial technique.

We have to replace the former methods of controlling dietary intake with new ones. Or not, and see just how bad the consequences can be.


yrs,
rubato

[wesw]

that made a lot of sense.

[rubato]

too complex for LJ though.


yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

too complex for LJ though.


yrs,
rubato

I'm sorry, did I post in this thread?

(When it comes to "pig piling" rube is perfectly capable of being a pig pile of one....)

And besides rube, if you really believe that food is too cheap then why did you insist that:

I did not say that we should raise the price of food

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=12455&p=154095&hil ... ce#p154095

When I think something is too cheap, I usually (well, always, actually) believe it should be more expensive...

To me, that just logically follows...

(But perhaps that's because I lack the profound insight provided by a centered belief about my place in the world and the universe that you possess....)

"The thing that really disturbs me is how expensive a healthy basket of food is

Ahh, now there's the real problem...(or at least the secondary problem aside from the primary problem of lack of exercise)

In some cases, healthier food is too expensive...

The simplistic construction that "food is too cheap"...

remains the ignorant assertion it has been since the outset...

[Joe Guy]

What is it that makes a person consider sugar to be to cheap? The price is based on what the market decides.

Lots of sugar in the world and not a majority of people buying it would make it cheap and cause some people to find out different uses for it- like producing corn ethanol.

If everyone were buying sugar it would cause its price to rise and people would need to pay higher prices for their sugar fix and corn ethanol.

So maybe the problem is that not enough people are buying sugar, so it remains cheap and plentiful.

[MajGenl.Meade]

too complex for LJ though.
yrs,
rubato

In the interests of a fair and balanced commentary

... rubato, y'all could wear a top hat and still walk under a rattlesnake

Thank yew. Thank yew. We'll be here all week

yrs.
gratuitous insults

[BoSoxGal]

Robert Lustig: the man who believes sugar is poison

The maverick scientist has long argued that sugar is as harmful as cocaine or tobacco – and that the food industry has been adding too much of it to our meals for too long.

'We don’t have to ban sugar. But the food ­industry cannot be given carte blanche,' says Robert Lustig.

If you have any interest at all in diet, obesity, public health, diabetes, epidemiology, your own health or that of other people, you will probably be aware that sugar, not fat, is now considered the devil's food. Dr Robert Lustig's book, Fat Chance: The Hidden Truth About Sugar, Obesity and Disease, for all that it sounds like a Dan Brown novel, is the difference between vaguely knowing something is probably true, and being told it as a fact. Lustig has spent the past 16 years treating childhood obesity. His meta-analysis of the cutting-edge research on large-cohort studies of what sugar does to populations across the world, alongside his own clinical observations, has him credited with starting the war on sugar. When it reaches the enemy status of tobacco, it will be because of Lustig.

"Politicians have to come in and reset the playing field, as they have with any substance that is toxic and abused, ubiquitous and with negative consequence for society," he says. "Alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine. We don't have to ban any of them. We don't have to ban sugar. But the food industry cannot be given carte blanche. They're allowed to make money, but they're not allowed to make money by making people sick."

Lustig argues that sugar creates an appetite for itself by a determinable hormonal mechanism – a cycle, he says, that you could no more break with willpower than you could stop feeling thirsty through sheer strength of character. He argues that the hormone related to stress, cortisol, is partly to blame. "When cortisol floods the bloodstream, it raises blood pressure; increases the blood glucose level, which can precipitate diabetes. Human research shows that cortisol specifically increases caloric intake of 'comfort foods'." High cortisol levels during sleep, for instance, interfere with restfulness, and increase the hunger hormone ghrelin the next day. This differs from person to person, but I was jolted by recognition of the outrageous deliciousness of doughnuts when I haven't slept well.

"The problem in obesity is not excess weight," Lustig says, in the central London hotel that he has made his anti-metabolic illness HQ. "The problem with obesity is that the brain is not seeing the excess weight." The brain can't see it because appetite is determined by a binary system. You're either in anorexigenesis – "I'm not hungry and I can burn energy" – or you're in orexigenesis – "I'm hungry and I want to store energy." The flip switch is your leptin level (the hormone that regulates your body fat) but too much insulin in your system blocks the leptin signal.

It helps here if you have ever been pregnant or remember much of puberty and that savage hunger; the way it can trick you out of your best intentions, the lure of ridiculous foods: six-month-old Christmas cake, sweets from a bin. If you're leptin resistant – that is, if your insulin is too high as a result of your sugar intake – you'll feel like that all the time.


Robert Lustig: 'I'm not a fitness guru. I'm 45lb overweight.'
Telling people to simply lose weight, he tells me, "is physiologically impossible and it's clinically dangerous. It's a goal that's not achievable." He explains further in the book: "Biochemistry drives behaviour. You see a patient who drinks 10 gallons of water a day and urinates 10 gallons of water a day. What is wrong with him? Could he have a behavioural disorder and be a psychogenic water drinker? Could be. Much more likely he has diabetes." To extend that, you could tell people with diabetes not to drink water, and 3% of them might succeed – the outliers. But that wouldn't help the other 97% just as losing the weight doesn't, long-term, solve the metabolic syndrome – the addiction to sugar – of which obesity is symptomatic.

Many studies have suggested that diets tend to work for two months, some for as long as six. "That's what the data show. And then everybody's weight comes roaring back." During his own time working night shifts, Lustig gained 3st, which he never lost and now uses exuberantly to make two points. The first is that weight is extremely hard to lose, and the second – more important, I think – is that he's no diet and fitness guru himself. He doesn't want everybody to be perfect: he's just a guy who doesn't want to surrender civilisation to diseases caused by industry. "I'm not a fitness guru," he says, puckishly. "I'm 45lb overweight!"

"Sugar causes diseases: unrelated to their calories and unrelated to the attendant weight gain. It's an independent primary-risk factor. Now, there will be food-industry people who deny it until the day they die, because their livelihood depends on it." And here we have the reason why he sees this is a crusade and not a diet book, the reason that Lustig is in London and not Washington. This is an industry problem; the obesity epidemic began in 1980. Back then, nobody knew about leptin. And nobody knew about insulin resistance until 1984.

"What they knew was, when they took the fat out they had to put the sugar in, and when they did that, people bought more. And when they added more, people bought more, and so they kept on doing it. And that's how we got up to current levels of consumption." Approximately 80% of the 600,000 packaged foods you can buy in the US have added calorific sweeteners (this includes bread, burgers, things you wouldn't add sugar to if you were making them from scratch). Daily fructose consumption has doubled in the past 30 years in the US, a pattern also observable (though not identical) here, in Canada, Malaysia, India, right across the developed and developing world. World sugar consumption has tripled in the past 50 years, while the population has only doubled; it makes sense of the obesity pandemic.

"It would have happened decades earlier; the reason it didn't was that sugar wasn't cheap. The thing that made it cheap was high-fructose corn syrup. They didn't necessarily know the physiology of it, but they knew the economics of it." Adding sugar to everyday food has become as much about the industry prolonging the shelf life as it has about palatability; if you're shopping from corner shops, you're likely to be eating unnecessary sugar in pretty well everything. It is difficult to remain healthy in these conditions. "You here in Britain are light years ahead of us in terms of understanding the problem. We don't get it in the US, we have this libertarian streak. You don't have that. You're going to solve it first. So it's in my best interests to help you, because that will help me solve it back there."

The problem has mushroomed all over the world in 30 years and is driven by the profits of the food and diet industries combined. We're not looking at a global pandemic of individual greed and fecklessness: it would be impossible for the citizens of the world to coordinate their human weaknesses with that level of accuracy. Once you stop seeing it as a problem of personal responsibility it's easier to accept how profound and serious the war on sugar is. Life doesn't have to become wholemeal and joyless, but traffic-light systems and five-a-day messaging are under-ambitious.

"The problem isn't a knowledge deficit," an obesity counsellor once told me. "There isn't a fat person on Earth who doesn't know vegetables are good for you." Lustig agrees. "I, personally, don't have a lot of hope that those things will turn things around. Education has not solved any substance of abuse. This is a substance of abuse. So you need two things, you need personal intervention and you need societal intervention. Rehab and laws, rehab and laws. Education would come in with rehab. But we need laws."

The Obamas hate him, he says, because they don't want to fight the industry. "They've got a lot of enemies. I'm not mad at them. I actually kind of like them." On paper, Lustig is absolutely livid. "In America we have this thing, it's called the Declaration of Independence. We are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say a damned fucking thing about the pursuit of pleasure." But he has seen how it worked with tobacco. It took a long time, he says, but industries can't poison people en masse for ever.

"We have to do something about it, or there will be no healthcare. In fact, there will be no society. Are you ready for that? That's what's gonna happen. It's just not OK. There will be no money left for anything else."

His predictions for world health are apocalyptically pessimistic. Yet in his bearing, he has the deep-rooted optimism of a person who knows the fight is worthwhile, and believes that, in the end, he'll win it.

source: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle ... gar-poison

[Guinevere]

What is it that makes a person consider sugar to be to cheap? The price is based on what the market decides.

Lots of sugar in the world and not a majority of people buying it would make it cheap and cause some people to find out different uses for it- like producing corn ethanol.

If everyone were buying sugar it would cause its price to rise and people would need to pay higher prices for their sugar fix and corn ethanol.

So maybe the problem is that not enough people are buying sugar, so it remains cheap and plentiful.

Nope. Sugar is one of the most heavily subsidized commodities on the market. As the links below notes, for at least the last 45 years, sugar producers have been subsidized so that they are paid twice what their sugar is actually worth on the market:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic- ... -consumers

It's well worth reading Michael Pollen's expose of the sugar/corn industry in the Omnivore's Dilemma.

[wesw]

raisin cane about sugar, don t that beet all, honey?

[rubato]

What is it that makes a person consider sugar to be to cheap? The price is based on what the market decides.

Lots of sugar in the world and not a majority of people buying it would make it cheap and cause some people to find out different uses for it- like producing corn ethanol.

If everyone were buying sugar it would cause its price to rise and people would need to pay higher prices for their sugar fix and corn ethanol.

So maybe the problem is that not enough people are buying sugar, so it remains cheap and plentiful.

Statements which can never be falsified by evidence have no extrinsic meaning.


yrs,
rubato

[Jarlaxle]

What a perfect example of five-dollar words from a five-cent mind.

[oldr_n_wsr]

Education has not solved any substance of abuse.

12 step programs which educate the addict have solved substance abuse in many an alcoholic and addict. Of course is also takes action by the individual, be he first must be taught.

Sugaraloholics Anonomous anyone?

And burgers have added sugar?
Where does he buy his burgers from?

[BoSoxGal]

Burger buns are processed white flour with added sugars - fast food burgers, and those at home, are often slathered in ketchup and other sauces that are full of sugar.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I'm asking about the burgers themselves (aka patty's). The rest I know about.

[rubato]

I'm asking about the burgers themselves (aka patty's). The rest I know about.

You can more easily just look it up for yourself.

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/bee ... cts/6204/2
http://caloriecount.about.com/calories- ... ean-i23568
http://www.sparkpeople.com/calories-in. ... rger+patty

And not annoy other people with a dishonest question.

yrs,
rubato

[MajGenl.Meade]

And not annoy other people with a dishonest question

Yer a dick!

[BoSoxGal]

I imagine some of the processed burgers might also contain added sugars in the meat - who knows?

But the big problem with burgers, any nutritionist will tell you, is the buns and added condiments. SUGAR!

I quit sugar a few months ago - until a recent fall of the wagon - and when I initially did, I purged my house of added sugar.

I had to give away most of what was in my cupboards. Sugar is EVERYWHERE!

[oldr_n_wsr]

You can more easily just look it up for yourself.

I did and found no amount of sugar in chop meat which I make my burgers out of or pre formed patties. I was asking if anyone else knew of sugar being placed in those. If I wasn't clear about that, I appologize.

And not annoy other people with a dishonest question.

I try not to be dishonest and I don't see how my question was dishonest. I was trying to find out if there are instances that sugar is placed in burgers (not including fast food burgers). If I am annoying you, that's your problem, put me on ignore if you like. No one else here seems to be annoyed by this question or any other I have asked in the past.

To the general population here, am I annoying you with this question or any other I have asked in the past?