Monday, October 24, 2011

Charles' Rant - a sugary white death


Take this blog any way you like. Get DEFENSIVE or AGREE, take it however you take it. But just do one thing when you have read it....

Take a step back from your life and your family and even friends lives and take a long hard look at how you live. Maybe you don’t need to make any changes. But I've got news for you...WE ARE ADDICTED TO SUGAR. 


We are at a point where we are so addicted to sugar and we have such easy access to sugar that we HAVE TO MAKE AN EFFORT if we don’t want to eat it. We have to shop away from mainstream shops to get healthy reasonably priced whole foods. From an early age we were told that fruit juice is a healthy drink for example. Kids meals at our favourite take away joints have the healthy option of choosing fruit juice. Syrupy sugar laden fruit juice. Bad for your teeth, so so bad for the rest of your body. Yet this is what we teach our impressionable kids that instead of soft drink, drink some liquefied sugar with a picture of fruit on it. Newsflash fruit juice producers: FRUIT IS SWEET. Have you ever been thirsty and juice or soft drink made you thirstier? Sugar draws fluid from within your body to dilute it. Thirst is your body’s way of replacing the fluid required to dilute the excessive quantity of sugar consumed. If you really want juice, get a juicer and make it at home.

The kids we are raising have an opportunity to stop the vicious downward public health spiral we are currently riding. As our population ages, it is so common to succumb to heart disease, strokes and adult onset diabetes. I could be wrong but I find it hard to believe that cavemen (and cavewomen) would have had a high incidence of heart disease and diabetes. For this reason we can feel secure in sticking to a diet which emulates the caveman. It is going to take a lot of work but we can change this downward spiral. Humans are creatures of habit but we are also brilliant at adapting to change. 

Can you imaging a healthy lean strong population which doesn’t become a burden on society with excessive public health expenditure? It starts now. Right after you finish this blog. Start small.  KIDS MEALS CAN COME WITH WATER as the REAL healthy option. Water gets boring, so fill your fridge with mineral water. 

Take a look around your work and watch how many sugar loaded drinks your friends are drinking every day. Do they know where all that sugar is ending up. Our society is so used to over eating sugar that we are no longer shocked to see someone who has lost a limb due to diabetes. How can we honestly be eating so much of this stuff it destroys body parts. Really humans?? We can do better than this, we have to! 

Does my bum look big in this?


If you have a truck that comes to your work every day with deep fried junk and sweet sweet drinks, ask for healthier options and mineral water. Why are they even serving deep fried sausage etc?  Why are we eating EKKA side show alley food every day at work?  It’s time to make these places take responsibility and sell healthy options with minimal junk.  How easy would it be to serve a high protein chicken and veges skewer?  

There is no reason for this not to start ASAP.  YOU can effect that change. A healthy diet should be tasty and affordable. I challenge you to find an expensive untasty recipe on the Sweat Depot Facebook page. A final note on diet: I've said it before and I won’t stop saying it until it changes. If you are a forty something white male, and you smoke and you don’t exercise and you don’t eat right you are more likely than anyone in this country to have a heart attack. If you didn’t already know this heart attacks kill. You may think ‘I know people who have survived a heart attack’ but guess what, the younger you are when you get that crushing chest pain the less chance you have of surviving because as we age our heart can develop extra blood vessels to carry blood in the event of blockages. This doesn’t occur in young people. Time to make a change.

Charles

1 comment:

Erin Cash said...

Sugar is also the reason we experience so much pain. We are a society of whingers... oh I have a head ache, I have bad period pain, my back hurts when I live, breath, pick up this bag of feathers... Sugar, by it's nature, constricts our blood vessels causing inflammation and inhibiting healing and yes... causing us pain. So the next time you hear yourself having a social whinge about pain, think honestly about what you have eaten in the previous 6-8 hours. And if you can't understand the ingredient list on the back of foods DON'T BUY IT. Chances are that if it comes out of a packet is has more sugars and preservatives than you have aches and pains. p.s.: bakery's should be a treat, not an everyday occurrence