Sugar Rant

There has been a lot of fuss about High Fructose Corn Syrup being the devil recently. It's blamed for the obesity epidemic amongst other nefarious things. The corn industry is fighting back with adverts saying it's natural and no different from sugar.

I do try and avoid it personally but I think people are missing the point. The problem isn't so much the HFCS, it's the fact its in bloody everything. Americans are fat because they are jacked up on sugar. I realised the other night why everyone claims English food is so bland. I think its cause we don't put sugar in everything.

I just went to an Italian restaurant for lunch where I had some spaghetti bolognese. It was pretty obvious there was sugar in the sauce. Another 'famous' Italian restaurant makes a big deal about their 'sweet' sauce. Personally I find it unpalatable these days, I like to taste tomatoes not sugar.

The recipe for meatloaf my mother in law gave me has a tomato sauce spread across the top that is tomato ketchup mixed with an ungodly amount of brown sugar.

Pizza crusts here along with bread in general has sugar added. Plain white bread is almost cakelike.

You cannot buy pre-packaged fruit these days that does not have sugar added. I got excited when I saw no-sugar added mandarins on the shelf, till I picked up the package and saw 'sweetened with splenda' on the side. For goodness sake, mandarins, peaches.. shoot almost any fruit is just fine on it's own. It does not need frickin sugar added to it.

So buy fresh fruit I hear you say.. yeah I do, but there is something nice and convenient about a pre-sized cup of fruit in juice though. I can keep it in the fridge indefinitely. Whenever I buy peaches I usually manage to miss that sweet spot where they taste great and end up letting them over ripen and some end up getting wasted.

The point being that if normal supposedly savory foods had less, preferably no sugar in and the already sweet stuff wasn't additionally sweetend with more I don't think there would be such a problem.