THE SWEET TOOTH-A WEAKNESS INHERITED!

Who has to bear the blame for to day's over eating trend among young as well as the old, rich as well as the poor? The blame game drags in all the players who have some thing to do with food production, processing, marketing, consuming, food science and governing but the problem does not fit into any equation or mathematical modeling. What is needed is a concerted effort by all to tackle this menacing problem after understanding the reasons underlying the problem. While education of consumers, persuading the industry for voluntary action and coercion by government have the potential to reverse the present trend, so far none seems to be working as per expectations. Latest controversy about the policy being promoted in New York for banning large sized sugary beverages which has created a ruckus among human right activists and some consumer organizations is another example of the intractability of this grave problem. According to some analysts coercive policies only will work because the present addiction to sugary products is inherited through human evolution and unless humans are helped to over come this attraction to sugar through some compulsions, no voluntary action may work to chuck this trend. Here is a critique on this issue which appears to be reasonable in its conclusions.

"Since sugar is a basic form of energy in food, a sweet tooth was adaptive in ancient times, when food was limited. However, excessive sugar in the bloodstream is toxic, so our bodies also evolved to rapidly convert digested sugar in the bloodstream into fat. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed plenty of fat — more than other primates — to be active during periods of food scarcity and still pay for large, expensive brains and costly reproductive strategies (hunter-gatherer mothers could pump out babies twice as fast as their chimpanzee cousins). Simply put, humans evolved to crave sugar, store it and then use it. For millions of years, our cravings and digestive systems were exquisitely balanced because sugar was rare. Apart from honey, most of the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate were no sweeter than a carrot. The invention of farming made starchy foods more abundant, but it wasn't until very recently that technology made pure sugar bountiful. The food industry has made a fortune because we retain Stone Age bodies that crave sugar but live in a Space Age world in which sugar is cheap and plentiful. Sip by sip and nibble by nibble, more of us gain weight because we can't control normal, deeply rooted urges for a valuable, tasty and once limited resource. What should we do? One option is to do nothing, while hoping that scientists find better cures for obesity-related diseases like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. I'm not holding my breath for such cures, and the costs of inaction, already staggering, would continue to mushroom. A more popular option is to enhance public education to help us make better decisions about what to eat and how to be active. This is crucial but has so far yielded only modest improvements. The final option is to collectively restore our diets to a more natural state through regulations. Until recently, all humans had no choice but to eat a healthy diet with modest portions of food that were low in sugar, saturated fat and salt, but high in fiber. They also had no choice but to walk and sometimes run an average of 5 to 10 miles a day. Mr. Bloomberg's paternalistic plan is not an aberrant form of coercion but a very small step toward restoring a natural part of our environment".

The perfectly balanced argument questions the right of the parents to guide their children or the schools to ban undesirable foods if government based on scientific evidence cannot do any thing to curb consumption of super rich, nutritionally unbalanced foods that destroys the health of its citizens, knowingly or unknowingly. If suicides can be prevented by coercive laws or if smoking can be restricted through restrictive policies, why not force people to restrict consumption of patently unhealthy foods? When a patient goes to a physician, his ailment is diagnosed and appropriate medicines, may be bitter to taste, are prescribed. Does the patient protest about it? Rarely, because he knows that it is done for his good. Then why not accept scientifically based restrictions for curing the disease of obesity? Sooner this bitter truth is realized, better it will be for the human race as a whole.    

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com