A devil in disguise

As a kid, I had one heck of a sweet tooth.  All day long, I could eat nothing but sweets and I was happy.  Even into my undergraduate years.  Like the one occasion when I had 22 gulab jamuns in one sitting.  And this was after having a heavy lunch!  I can't ever figure out how I was so skinny despite all that sugar and ghee ;)

And then I became an adult. 

My sugar intake gradually decreased. 

People who knew me in the old country are shocked when I say "no, thanks" to sweets.  Especially when the sweets are from a store, saying no is easy for me.  My grandmother drilled it into my head that restaurants and sweet-shops often make things tasty in unhealthy ways, unlike the stuff made at home by women like her.

I have also come to understand what a dangerously sweet thing sugar is.  As I quoted in this post, "Sugar is the driving force behind the diabetes and obesity epidemics. ... The problem is all of the processed sugar that has snuck into the modern diet. It’s so prevalent that you need a strategy for avoiding it.

Sugar is a devil in disguise!

In fact, recent reports have found that regular consumption of sugary drinks heightens the risk not only of tooth decay, obesity, fatty liver disease and Type 2 diabetes, but also of heart disease and premature death, even in people free of other risk factors.

Whatever happened to people drinking water?  Rare is a meal--lunch or dinner--where people have water.  Instead, they have sugary sodas, or sugary fruit juices, or sugary ...

If only people truly understood this:

the health risks associated with sugar relate to overeating so-called free sugars, not those naturally present in whole foods like fruits, vegetables and milk.

I rarely ever buy fruit juices.  But, I buy fruits all the time.  Lots of fruits, actually.   One of my favorites is to peel a regular orange and a blood orange; slice them up; then artfully scoop them into glass cups; sprinkle Demerara sugar on top; plastic wrap and refrigerate.  A couple of hours later, it is heaven on earth!

Sugar is not merely delivered in the liquid products that we over-consume:

Sugar-containing processed foods are ubiquitous and can add up quickly for unsuspecting consumers. In the documentary “That Sugar Film,” the filmmaker quickly developed health problems after eating “healthy” foods like cereal and juice containing 40 teaspoons of sugar a day, the average Australian’s intake. (Americans average 42.5 teaspoons of sugar a day.) The film noted that if all sugar-containing food items were removed from supermarket shelves, only about 20 percent of products would remain.

Think about what a lean-mean supermarket that would be.  Guess what?  Isn't that how grocery stores were before the explosion of processed food?

If you are like M, then you always want some kind of a constructive takeaway. Tell me what to do, right?

[The] advice to consumers is to cut their sugar intake by two-thirds: Reduce the current 15 percent average daily calories from added sugars to 5 percent, as recommended by the American Heart Association, easiest if done gradually. Learn to routinely peruse packaged food labels for the kinds and amounts of sugars they contain. 

But then the writer notes this: "a half-cup of Talenti gelato can contain 22 grams of sugar."  To which I have only one response: I'll give you my Talenti when you pry it from my cold, dead hands ;)

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Blue ketchup?

Like me, you too have surely seen kids reach for blue-colored drinks, right?  The blue colored Gatorade or one of those semi-frozen drinks from the convenience stores, ... And haven't you had kids come to you and extend their tongues out to show you the blue streaks there because they sucked on candies that were blue?

While you are not as regimented as I am, chances are that as adults you don't gravitate towards blue sweets, unlike kids.  Because, you and I are old!  Seriously, because back when we were kids, they didn't have blue sweets for us:

several decades ago, it was a truism in the food industry that you couldn’t sell blue foods, given their rarity in nature. Yet now, shelves bristle with “cool blue” Gatorades and “blue raspberry” Icees. Those associations, he says, were taught—and it helps when the flavor is novel, or indeed invented. Candy and beverages seem particularly amenable to color experimentation, suggests Delwiche. “They are like the evening wear of the food world—not what you wear to the office.” But strange colors have also crept into food marketed to children

Why do kids go for those strange colors?  Simple.  "Learned associations" are less rigid when we are kids.

There is little evidence that color-flavor relationships are hard-wired. We are all born liking sweet things, but we are not born knowing what sweet things look like.

Interesting, right?  We slowly program our brains to associate colors with tastes.  And, once programmed, well, no wonder those blue-crazy kids avoid the green veggies!

“The primary taste cortex is one of the first stops after the tongue,” says Spence. But “even activity there is modulated by your expectations.” Where the thinking used to be, notes Spence, that “all this information comes from outside through our eyes, ears, and tongue and works its way up through the cortical hierarchy, at each stage being condensed, it turns out that there are more pathways going from the inside out.”
The brain acts like a prediction engine: If bright red fruits usually taste sweeter, the next time you eat a fruit that looks bright red a top-down “back projection” might be, as Spence suggests, “constraining the activity earlier in the neural system closer to the outside, to your eye or tongue.”

I am tempted to bring into this discussion the old Hindu philosophical idea of maya. What you think you see is not real, and is an illusion ;)

Are you sure seeing is believing?  Do you really want to have your eyes tell you what you are eating and tasting? ;)

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