No Added Sugar.

A friend of mine once complained bitterly about an advert for some food that was using the phrase "pure brown sugar" in its blurb; being of a scientific bent, he realised that pure sugar is white and that brown sugar contains impurities. What he didn't know was that brown sugar contains sufficient impurities to give bees dysentery.

Jnr has never taken to tea or coffee, so went out to buy this bottle of drink - from one of the more reputable manufacturers. You will notice the claim that it contains no artificial flavourings or added sugar; however, the stated list of ingredients include aspartame and saccharine which are quite clearly artificial flavourings.

Health experts, such as the Daily Mail, are running a campaign to have sugar abolished from our diet, but I have never been convinced that it is particularly bad for us. I have always held the view that we should eat as varied a diet as possible and that there is no reason why a moderate amount of sugar should not be included. Some twenty years ago, Mars recruited a dietician on to their staff and she was interviewed on Radio 4; to provide a "balanced” argument the programme included a lady from the health food movement. When Mrs Mars said that the occasional chocolate bar could be part of a healthy balanced diet, Mrs Health retorted that she wouldn't like her child to eat six of them a day; Mrs M's answer was that she wouldn't want her child to eat six bowls of organic muesli a day either.

Now-a-days, we're even being told that we shouldn't eat too much fruit because of its high sugar content, but we know what sugar does to us: it damages our teeth, which we can avoid that if armed with a tooth-brush, and it can make us fat, we can avoid that by balancing the energy that we consume with the energy that we expend. I go along with Mrs Mars, sugar in moderation isn't going to do me much harm.

Now, what harm are saccharine and aspartame going to do to me? Well, I don't really know and, probably, neither does anybody else; but I do know that they taste revolting. Forty years ago, sodium cyclamate was banned in the U.S. as, in large doses, it caused bladder cancer in 3% of rats, other cancers and other unpleasant conditions were also involved; in this context, 3% is a very large number; with any carcinogen there is no safe threshold, just a reduction in risk with a reduction in dose. In addition, since humans live a long time compared with rats, their exposure is greatly increased. While this sweetener is not banned in Britain (as I was surprised to discover), it isn’t widely used here; I am an avid reader of food labels and it is a long time since I've seen it mentioned.

Going back to just over two hundred years ago, lead acetate was used as a sweetener. In particular, it was an ingredient of Devonshire's favourite beverage, cider, giving rise to a disease called the Devon danglers, aka Devon colic; in reality, it was lead poisoning; the obvious sign is that paralysis of the arms caused them to dangle, hence the name. A similar affliction affected the residents in the province of Champagne for exactly the same reason. It was Dr George Baker who did the research into the cause of the disease, he also found the cure; neither were popular. Cider was the drink of the working man who couldn't afford the higher price that would result from using sugar as a sweetener, neither could he afford the cost of drinking the copious amounts of spa water, or the immersion in it for several hours each day, required to leach the toxin from his body. Of course, ordinary clean water would have served as well, but Baker's research didn't extend that far.

I shall just carry on drinking "made from concentrate" fruit juice and sod all those "experts".