I was lucky growing up in the fifties, neither of my parents took sugar in tea or coffee–spoilt the taste they insisted.
Like a good son, I copied them and in spite of Ma’s talent for baking–coffee cakes and flapjacks were unrefusable offers at “tea-time”–I didn’t develop the raging sweet tooth some people have to feed.
So the changes I made after I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes thirteen years ago were minimal and not really painful.
“Out with the whites” (refined carbohydrates like white rice, white pasta, white bread)–an earlier post–became the rule and I don’t miss ’em!
I prefer wholewheat pasta, brown basmati rice and whole rye bread–I prefer the taste I mean.
And of course I don’t drink artificially sweetened soft drinks, though I remember in the fifties enjoying my share of something colored red called TIZER, bought in large bottles from “The Tuck Shop” in Highgate Village after school.
I was doubly lucky it turns out, according to this piece from The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/11/why-our-food-is-making-us-fat
I was brought up before the development of high-fructose corn syrup (H-FCS) produced in the 1970s from a glut of corn.
This readable article is an introduction to a three-part TV series to be shown on BBC2 starting this Thursday evening. Journalist and film maker Jacques Peretti identifies SUGAR–and in particular the development and wide spread introduction into food and drink products of H-FCS–as villain in the search for why people (especially children) are dangerously overweight these days.
Obesity is strongly linked to the development of Type 2 diabetes in adults–and, more recently, also in children.
(Meredith just told me that her father restricted her to one bottle of Coca-Cola a day in the fifties but lifted the order when Diet Coke was introduced. Game, Set and Match to Coca-Cola!!)
Robin Ellis 