Cutting sugar is a good start

"The food industry makes a disease and the pharmaceutical industry treats it," say the makers of a documentary film titled Fed Up.

PERSONAL responsibility is often slammed down on the metaphorical food-laden dinner table as the cure for obesity. It's an attitude that comes from our biological contempt and disgust for people who are too fat and seemingly eat too much.

I'd buy into that to a certain point, in that I believe absolutely anybody can achieve better health and fitness by finding a regime that will work for their metabolism and body type, and being disciplined enough to stick with it. A lot of people don't have that willpower, and that is certainly their failing.

But it could also be argued obesity has less to do with behavioural issues, and more to do with everyday exposure to sugar, which is almost unavoidable in our diets.

That's the argument of an upcoming film documentary, punching in a similar weight to Fast Food Nation and An Inconvenient Truth. The film, Fed Up, is American-focused, and claims fast-food chains and makers of processed foods add more sugar to "low fat" products to make them more palatable. In effect, we are being poisoned by sugar at an early stage. The film suggests that by 2050, one in three Americans will have diabetes.

"The food industry makes a disease and the pharmaceutical industry treats it," say the film-makers.

The latter is a tad conspiracy, but I can believe our daily exposure to sugar, not fat, is the killer. According to media reports, a Kiwi eats 54kg of sugar a year. Even a tablespoon of tomato sauce could contain a teaspoon of sugar. Biologically, we have evolved to eat a lot of things over thousands of years of civilisation, but we are certainly not naturally equipped to eat sugar in that quantity. We'd have to cut that back to a sixth of that to meet World Health Organisation guidelines.

It's interesting to read about Michael Mansell in the NZ Herald, who gave up sugar two years ago, losing 25kg and reversing poor liver function in the process. Other programmes weren't working. But this nailed it, although he endured a couple of "crashes" from withdrawal.

Admittedly I'm not inspired to give up sugar; there's no immediate need. But it might be the winner for those where seemingly nothing else seems to work. Perhaps it is a case of stopping the poison, not the fat.