Politics

Percy Pigs won't kill you. But official weight loss advice is often a porkie pie


You could be forgiven for thinking, from the way it has hogged today’s news, that a chewy pink sweet is the main cause of the coronavirus epidemic.

But cast your mind back to 2015, when scientists said sausages could be as bad for you as a cigarette. Or 2018, when a 10-year study found a link between bacon, hot dogs and poor mental health.

And only last year, a group of vegetarian doctors claimed a bacon sandwich was just as likely to give you cancer as – wait for it – asbestos .

Who benefits from such stories is often the answer as to who or what is behind them. So it is clear, to anyone with an ounce of knowledge about how the media works, that the pigs have a much better PR company than the bats.

Those bloody swines

What’s happened is that a government food strategy report into the nation’s diet  – which makes some very good points that everyone’s ignored and the government will do nothing about – has been overshadowed by the fact its author used Percy Pigs to show the problem with our sweet tooth. Despite claims to have cut its sugar content, there are in fact 4 different types of sugar hiding in plain sight on the ingredients list.

Sugar is the current bête noire of the food-faddists, officially labelled as the reason why two thirds of adults, and a third of children aged 11, are overweight. And, like a lot of food fads, it’s hogwash.

Sugar is natural, and normal in lots of different types of food. What’s not a good idea is added sugar – and most of that entered our diets back in the 1980s when the food-faddists thought fat was the thing that was killing us.

It created a huge market for low-fat foods, and a huge problem, because taking out the fat also removes the flavour. So in its place came added sugar, and an addiction which has taken root across the wealthy, western world.

Cheaper than meth, and you can put it in your tea

The faddists should have realised that, as humans have been eating fat for millennia and only got heart disease recently, something else might have been to blame. And 40 years on from all the government advice, health drives, and low-fat campaigns, there’s now science to prove fats are a vital part of the diet.

You may now enjoy your double cream, lap up the cheese, smear butter all over your bum. But the damage has been done – added sugar is in ready meals marketed as a healthy option, granola and protein bars, ready made soups, yoghurts, sauces, salad dressings, smoothies, vitamin waters, in fact almost everything sold as being good for you.

And it’s not table sugar we’re talking about. It’s more often fructose, a form of sugar which is particularly likely to increase fat around your liver, leading to obesity and type 2 diabetes, as well as bad cholesterol which causes heart disease. It’s smuggled into the ingredients list as corn syrup, or HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). It occurs naturally in fruit and honey, but is pretty unnecessary for humans, who need it only to produce semen.

But fruit and honey have been eaten by humans since forever. The Vikings weren’t obese, and they ate ham, drank mead, and scoffed berries and carbs and plenty of other stuff the faddists scream at us for eating now.

What they didn’t do was extract fructose and add it to their Big Macs.

They were also a bit more active

Perhaps it’s exercise, then. It’s the wealthier nations that are fatter, and incidentally have more jobs where you sit down. But we have also fetishized slimness, and if cycling to work was enough to keep you fit Boris Johnson would never have hit 17.5 stone in the first place.

Not long ago, being skinny was an unattractive sign of poverty. Fat was sexy, and when duty was introduced on beer in the 18th century, male writers bemoaned the fact that wenches would lose their curves.

Today obesity is considered hot only by spare tyre-loving deviants. We’re not just curvy – we’re wobbling Wall-E style piles of flubber, glued to screens, and instead of invading places or farming the land we’re creating memes about how we’ll never give up our freedom to a Percy Pig.

So if it’s not all down to bacon, or fat, or sugar, or cycling, or what we think is sexy, and we’re richer than ever before, then what, exactly, is the problem?

Well, it’s probably linked to the fact that something in the previous 16 paragraphs came as a surprise. We spend all this time grazing the internet, which holds all of human knowledge, and it turns out we’re rubbish at remembering most of it.

We latch on to a food fad, and forget the last one turned out to be bollocks. We go 5:2 or 2:5, or low-carb, or high-protein, and don’t spot the fact the thing they all have in common is they cut out added sugar. We say “ooh, fructose, bad!” but don’t ask ourselves why the Greeks didn’t fret about raisins.

A well-functioning brain is the best way to get a good memory. Your brain is made, mostly, of fat. And for the past 40 years, we probably haven’t been eating enough of it.

Yeah not that sort of fat

The truth is we’re malnourished. There are 155m children in the world whose growth is stunted, 52m who are wasting away and 41m who are obese. The cause of all three of these things is poverty – financial, and intellectual.

It’s proven beyond doubt that children who don’t eat well do worse. That’s why Marcus Rashford campaigned for free school meals, and why the government had to give in. In particular the first 1,000 days of life – long before children get anywhere near a school dinner – does an enormous amount to switch on good genes, get the brain wired properly, and fire up a strong immune system.

Failing to do that has been shown to have genetic effects which can last for generations. It can lower the IQ and increase anti-social But despite living in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, our government does not collect data about food insecurity, or culinary knowledge. Statistics about malnutrition concentrate on deaths among the elderly, not cock-ups with our kids.

The way to solve obesity, malnutrition, and their consequent social and health costs is to decrease poverty, and increase education. It’s to teach everyone in the country how to read an ingredients list, and to make it a legal requirement for them to be written in plain English.

It would hurt no-one but big business fructose freaks to make feeding yourself a mandatory part of the national curriculum. Teach kids how to make their own smoothies and soups so they know what’s in them, source in-season fruit and veg, use every last bit of the chicken, educate them about balanced diets rather than faddish exclusions of natural, normal food that’s vital to keep their body working.

And if the government really wanted to tackle obesity, and the risks of more deaths in a second wave of Covid-19, it doesn’t need to waste money on vouchers to fix a puncture on a bike 95% of us don’t have. It could ban added sugars tomorrow, and for free.

They’re not necessary, and we need weaning off that addiction with more urgency than the government said we must be weaned off the furlough scheme. These extra, unbalancing, and therefore lethal, sugars could be obliterated with existing emergency coronavirus legislation, and we’d all have lost 10lb by Christmas.

Ditching Percy Pigs might be an idea. Making them healthier would certainly be more productive than making memes. But they’re not what’s going to kill us – it’s being too stupid to keep ourselves healthy that will do that.

As with all things, engage brain, and don’t listen to the gammon. Stick a slice of pineapple and a fried egg on it instead. YUM.





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