Sugar rush

These 'carrot cake muffins with cream cheese flavoured filling' arrived at the cafe from a well-known supermarket chain that passes surplus food on to us.  I took a bite out of one... and almost reeled with the intense sweetness of it: there was no flavour, only sugar. Looking at the listed ingredients, it wasn't hard to find out why: sugar comes top.

Just the other day I learnt for the first time about 'cake smash parties' for babies. There seems to be a trend to sit your one year old in front of a gooey  birthday cake and to take pictures as the infant  covers itself in cream and icing,  like this. Apparently it's an opportunity to introduce your baby to sugar and to get some cute photographs of the occasion. Eek! 

I know it's funny when small children get messy with food but to arrange such an event as a spectator sport, and to record it for posterity (or social media) seems grotesque and somehow demeaning. And how many people will appreciate such pictures of themselves when they are older?

Sugar, sugar, sugar -  like salt, we don't need it added to what we eat at all but the food industry feeds our addiction to both and we have no way of breaking free. The poorer people are the more their health is destroyed with cheap, low quality food. Even if we know how bad these things are for us our palates have been conditioned to desire them and we find it hard to do without. All this was covered  by Professor Graham MacGregor in an excellent short radio programme I heard today. Or read what he says about sugar here.

Without salt and sugar in our diets the NHS would probably have medical staff twiddling their thumbs waiting for patients to turn up. Or they would be able to devote time to the preventive medicine that's needed to wean us off the sugar rush.