Sugar And Salt

When we look at what society currently considers to be dangerous substances, most ordinary people would probably put illegal drugs at the top of the list, followed closely perhaps by alcohol and cigarettes. In actual fact, smoking is the biggest killer. Alcohol kills about ten thousand people every year, 5 times more than all illegal drugs put together and cigarettes kill about a 100,000 people a year, some 20 times more than all illegal drugs put together. Although the law currently makes a fuss about people who choose to take illegal drugs, some of which are comparatively harmless, some of which one should never contemplate taking because of their addictiveness and associated problems, most drug deaths are either due to combining alcohol or due to drug inconsistences, that is a lack of quality control.

While we sit and wait for the state to wise up and realise it should take some responsibility for its failings in this department, we can at least acknowledge that in recent times we have begun to acknowledge, act and educate regarding the problems we have with alcohol and cigarettes, two of the biggest killers, which are both freely available at the corner shop. However, there are other killers that have found their way into the shops and into the food chain that people don't know so much about and the acknowledgement cannot be said about these. What are they? Sugar and salt! Sugar and salt you say, what on earth is the problem with those? Exactly! Most people just don't know. In fact salt kills some 40,000 people a year in the UK, 20 times more than all illegal drugs put together and scientists in lab experiments with rats have shown sugar to be eight times more addictive than cocaine. But how many people know that?

The average child, aged between four and ten, now consumes an average of 5543 sugar cubes, about 22kg of sugar every year. More than the weight of the average 5 year old. Amongst other things, too much sugar is responsible for fat build up, diabetes, some cancers and heart disease. Dentists say that children under the age of ten are more likely to be treated in hospital for rotten teeth than for any other problem and that sugar is the number one cause of that. More education needed, definitely!