Food rant 1

At the moment I am on a gluten-free, dairy-free, alcohol-free and caffeine-free diet due to IBS which has been brought on by stress at work. I have actually been pretty ill for the last year or so, my lack of blipping being one symptom. You may have noticed more and more gluten-free foods on the shelves or even suspect you are gluten intolerant yourself but why is it getting to be such a big thing?

Well there are several possible reasons for this, depending on who you believe. As is often the case, the Americans are way ahead of us on this. There is a growing movement over there (and to a much lesser extent here) to eat more like our ancestors did, and by our ancestors I don’t mean gran and granda but our pre-agricultural ancestors who will have eaten meat and plants but not dairy or grains, the idea being that evolution is rather a slow process and the reason people are getting so sick nowadays is that we simply cannot process all the wheat and grain based foods that we eat as we have not evolved in that way. This is called the Paleo diet, although there is no single interpretation of what this actually means. I suspect it is not as black and white as this, and as I continue to look into it, I begin to feel that the truth is actually a great deal more simple and a lot less palatable.

Ceridwen recently posted on a Horizon documentary “Fat vs Sugar” in which a pair of twins went on either a high fat or a high carbohydrate diet for one month to see which one was worse. The programme more or less concluded that neither were very good for you and furthermore, that the precise combination of fat and sugar found in a lot of processed food was rather addictive and made people crave more. There is a very good (but rather long) deconstruction of this programme here in my new favourite podcast Latest in Paleo in which the author notes the bias of the BBC towards the high sugar diet. The segment starts at about 19 minutes but the whole thing is really worth listening to if you have the time. In the US, there is a drive away from sugar and towards fat, in the main because of the very heavily subsidised corn industry over there, where farmers are paid to produce corn, which is then turned into high-fructose corn syrup, which is then added to processed food and drink (or “soda” as they call it) which is very addictive. A high sugar diet has been linked to diabetes, alzheimers, depression, anxiety, IBS and pretty much all of the modern day illnesses which plague our society and which are getting worse and worse. There may not be quite the problem with high-fructose corn syrup here as in the US but high sugar foods have been very heavily pushed by the food industry here, mostly in the guise of “low fat” - what do you think they replace the fat with? And here, as well as there - farmers are heavily subsidised to grow grain crops. Vegetable farmers not so much. Futhermore, “sugar” in this context also includes all those healthy complex carbohydrates the experts have been exhorting us to eat such as pasta and bread as the body quickly breaks these down into..sugar and the end result is much the same. Sugar highs, followed by sugar lows and the resultant hunger and shakiness that comes from it. Then in the long term, a fatty liver as your poor liver simply cannot store all of the triglycerides we produce when the sugar is broken down.

This is just the first of a series that I will be blipping as I started to write out a post and it got longer, and longer, and longer.

Geo Watkins mushroom ketchup contains gluten.
Geo Watkins is owned by AB World Foods which is owned by Associated British Foods, a huge multinational corporation. Their major business interest is the production of sugar.