The Nourisher - Editor’s Blog

The New Scientist today has published an article about Obesity.

It seems “the number of overweight or obese people in the world now exceeds the number of undernourished” so says Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina, to a meeting of agricultural economists on Queensland’s Gold Coast this week.

I knew that two-thirds of the population of the 1st world was overweight or obese but I never imagined that this meant we have more obesity than starvation on the planet. This realisation has just blown my mind.
Popkin and many of his contemporaries believe governments should tax high sugar foods just like cigarettes, saying it is the only way to combat the growing global crisis. “You can’t handle the problem with simple solutions like education.” says Popkin.

I have two issues with this statement:

Education is certainly not simple.

It will take a grand cultural shift to relieve this obesity epidemic: from a fast paced, immediate gratification and entertainment driven consciousness to a more nourishment based, long term goal oriented consciousness.

We could begin by valuing our health more than we currently do and make different food and lifestyle choices. We could value our time in the kitchen more and make sure our food is cooked with love and the welfare of our family in mind. Rather than only valuing peoples productivity in a job, we could celebrate stay at home parents who cook proper meals for their families. (How many times have I baulked at that dreaded question when meeting someone new “And what do you do?”,”I build my family’s incredibly healthy bodies” just doesn’t seem to cut it.)

We could start re-evaluating the messages we give our children. Every event my family attends at school involves consumption of sugar. Children even receive lollies for rewards for work well done. My kids know that if they refuse lollies and cake, they will be rewarded with home made treats but it’s difficult for them. It is a quite a slog combatting the bombardment of advertising and encouragement they receive from almost everyone they meet to eat sugar.

All I have is education, and I’m glad to say, it’s working. Not only my kids; their peers and teachers and parents at school are getting an opportunity to rethink the sugar paradigm. Just by being aware that my family chooses not to eat sugar, they get an opportunity to rethink their food choices. I wonder how many other parents are doing this? We could certainly do with some help. Banning their current nutrition education - sugar laden food advertisement - would be a good start.

Education may seem ineffective to agricultural economists and politicians, but it certainly works for my family.

When does taxation stop people from taking drugs anyway?

How many people are still paying $10 for a packet of cigarettes? Does the cost stop them? Sugar is indeed a drug. (I have written before about overcoming my sugar addiction.)

The medical community and the mass media would have you think people who eat sugar are fat and lazy and should be punished (with taxes). Not once have I heard any mainstream medical personality speak about sugar as a drug. It is a drug, just as cocaine is refined from a plant, so too is sugar. Sugar is a simple compound of mostly carbon and hydrogen, not the rich complex whole food it once was. It acts in the body the same way any drug does. It damages the organs, bones, teeth and tissues and the body requires extra nutrients to clean up the mess. And it is addictive.

People already pay too much for sugar laden foods, why would this change when they are taxed. Consider an ice cream treat. A commercial ice cream in a packet cost around $2.50 at the moment for about a 50g ice cream. If you were to make your own ice cream at home, using similar ingredients, you would pay under 30c for the same product.

The same goes for any fast food or eating out at restaurants. We virtually never do it. For our family to eat out it costs more than 4 times what it would at home - and I cook with only organic ingredients. I certainly don’t add vegetable oil refined sugar and flour, table salt or msg like so many restaurants do. Unfortunately, however, we are not the norm. Most people know that eating out is way more expensive but they still do it in droves, so why would they make their own sweet treats to avoid paying exhorbitant prices for sugar.

Surely people will just buy less fruit and vegetables so they can still feed their sugar addictions. It should be the gigantic food corporations who are knowingly living off people’s addictions who should be taxed, not the addicts.

People think to give up sugar is impossible, only because they are not aware of the whole food alternatives. Apart from honey and maple syrup, we can now buy Rapadura - dried whole sugar cane juice - in Australia. Rapadura has all the vitamins and minerals that were in original the sugar plant, it tastes similar but won’t go bitter in your mouth nor will it make your blood sugar crash as does the refined version, and you can use it exactly the same way sugar is used. The only reason Rapadura is not used in our confectionary is it’s expense. It needs too much manual labour to manufacture and transport because it won’t pour like white sugar does. Refined sugar is a poisonous drug, Rapadura is food. (You can buy some chocolate made with Rapadura or Dehydrated Cane Juice - ask your health food store.)

It’s shocking that there are as many western people obese as those who don’t have enough to eat. We may be eating a lot of food, but the average western diet probably has as much nourishment as an undernourished refugee. We’re fat but we’re starving. We have too much to eat but none of it has any nutrients. Not only that, Michael Pollen’s book shows us that the industrial nature of our food supply requires so much fossil fuels, we are destroying our planet while we simultaneously destroy our health.

Reading this story in the New Scientist has spurred me on even more to work on Nourished.com.au. I want to inspire as many people as I can to ask themselves often, “what is the most nourishing thing I could do for my body, my children and my planet right now?”

About the Author...

Joanne Hay, Editor of Nourished Magazine, Chief Nourisher and Mother of three is very grateful to live in Byron Bay and be able to share all she has learned about Nourishment. She has trained as an Acupuncturist (unfinished), Kinesiologist (finished) and parent (never finished). She serves the Weston A Price Foundation as a chapter leader. She loves sauerkraut, kangaroo tail stew, home made ice cream, her husband Wes and her kids Isaiah, Brynn and Ronin (in no particular order…well maybe ice cream first).