I don’t know if anyone has discussed this before, but I discovered “that sugar film” on Amazon Prime last night, and it was actually quite interesting.
An Australian man, who has a healthy, non-processed food lifestyle embarks on a 60 day experiment to eat 40g of sugar a day. The rules are, he’s actually allowed no sweets at all – all his sugar must come from actual food (fruit juice, pasta sauces, breakfast cereal, etc). He must choose the low fat/fat free options, maintain the same number of calories as he was eating before (2300/day) and maintain the same exercise levels (running twice a week, and 3x 10min workouts a week.
Over the 60 days, he did some research into how sugar changes our perception of foods – he did an experiment to fool his taste buds into thinking anything he ate was sweet, and showed how he could then down a pint of vinegar without noticing, he showed what it would look like if you actually added the sugar to food (like a glass of water with 9tsp of sugar instead of a soft drink), and he also had a day where he ate the whole 40tsp of sugar from things you’d find in a kids lunch box.
It was really eye opening - they can fool us into thinking the worst things are tasty as, just by adding the perfect amount of sugar.
At the end of 60 days, he had gained around a stone (6kg), he was barely able to finish his workouts, he was irritable, and he had fatty liver. His typical diet before the experiment consisted of a lot of avocados and nuts, and ironically he was now eating less fat than before, but had gained so much weight. What’s worse is the idea he was doing the recommended amount of exercise each week, and he was also eating under the GDA of calories, but he was still overweight!
After the experiment, he went cold turkey and I took him around a month to feel back to normal again. He returned to his pre-experiment diet, and lost all the weight again without even dieting.
The best bit is that my OH came in part-way through the film, and I asked if he minded if I finished watching it. My OH usually thinks these films are a load of biased rubbish, but afterwards, he admitted that my years of nagging about how much sugar we eat weren’t unfounded – this week he’s resolved to cut out his daily can of coke!
I thought I'd share the film in case anyone else is interested.
you're right too - if it got through to my OH, it would be a useful tool to persuade anyone that sugar is bad.
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