Is sugar killing our grandkids?

How can a two month old baby have sugar induced diabetes? Does it come out in breast milk if the mother eats loads of sugar?

The trouble with reducing sugar has been those awful sugar substitutes that get used instead. Ugh! And they have health implications too. They can cause really bad allergies.

I don’t disagree in principle. I’d like to see a model of how it would work in practice.

Some mothers stupidly add sugar to formula milk. Nobody needs extra sugar in their diet yet companies add it to most processed food due to its cheapness.

No-one actually needs sugar (I mean the white stuff, not natural sugars) and it messes with the body. It doesn't help that sugary things are delicious though.

Its the added sugars what health experts are worried about. That's the kind put in by manufacturers or by you at home. It's NOT the natural kind found in fruit and dairy. (Ever noticed that plain yogurt or milk still has sugar? That's natural.) Unfortunately, the nutrition facts label doesn't distinguish between added and natural (yet!) but you can still use this label-reading trick: Every 4 grams of sugar = 1 teaspoon. So candy with 8 grams of sugar per serving has the equivalent of two teaspoons of sugar.

I agree that people eat too much sugar and a lot is hidden in processed food. However, humans naturally have a sweet tooth and once sugar became easily available, we’ve eaten it!

When I was a child, most people took at least 2 teaspoons of sugar in a cup (not mug) of tea and lots of tea was drunk. Babies were given sweetened tea in bottles and soothers dipped in honey. Dinner was always followed by pudding - dishes like golden syrup pudding and treacle tart which I would now regard not very nutritious. Jam sandwiches were common and some children were given bread sprinkled with sugar.

I’m not suggesting this was a good diet, just that sugar isn’t a new problem. What is more recent is obesity, caused by too wide availability of cheap calories- often savoury things like chips and pizza. And lack of exercise. When you see photos of children and young people in 50s and 60s they look very skinny, despite their sugary diet.

The trouble with reducing sugar has been those awful sugar substitutes that get used instead. Ugh! And they have health implications too. They can cause really bad allergies.

I agree, Peasblossom
And aspartame has been proved to be a factor in causing obesity.
Dreadful stuff should be banned.

The trouble is a little information is a dangerous thing.
Sensible moderation (no added sugar or sugary drinks before 1y or even later), and a common sense approach to diet, and all should be well.

We're all living ourselves to death.

No, those that allows the kids to have the sugar are killing them!

Am just popping in to say that too much sugar is undoubtedly bad for you, for both teeth and health, but it does not cause diabetes type 1 in either children or adults.
The pancreas cannot make enough insulin and it’s connected to the immune system not working properly.That’s the quick explanation.Children having too many sugary things won’t cause it.

Good post Farmor?

I echo lemongrove in repeating that sugar does NOT cause diabetes. It rots the teeth and in large amounts it provides so many calories that people get obese but still suffer from malnutrition from not getting enough of other foods..

When I was a child, my grandmother would say whenever she saw me tucking in to a lovely sweet pudding "You'll get diabetes if you eat that!" but she also believed that tuberculosis was an inherited condition, due to "bad blood", whatever that was.

I thought that it was known now by everyone how diabetes is caused by the pancreas failing to automatically make then right amount of insulin to adjust normally to the amount of sugar it had to deal with.

That tiny baby with insulin must have been born with a failing pancreas.

I agree with Farmoor we had sugar in tea and puddings but what we didn’t have was snacks between meals or Processed foods.
None of our family were overweight or went on to have Diabetes, neither did our own children.
So, everything in moderation and don’t buy junk or processed foods.

Farmor - bread sprinkled with sugar - those were the days!

Golden syrup sandwiches.........

Peasblossom I so agree, I have had to virtually stop drinking any soft drink because I can smell the sweetener the moment I take the lid off, and the taste is vile.

This might seem a good thing, but I do not drink many soft drinks, but, now, when I do fancy one, the choice is down to 2; bottled water, fizzy or flat .

Like others, born in wartime, there were no snacks between meals and I have consciously made sure it was a habit I never got into. However, I am lucky, even as a child, I did not have a very sweet tooth and my disinclination to eat sweet things has increased with time. I raely have a dessert when out, preferring a starter every time. I can visit an NT cafe and drink tea, yet not eat cake, even others in the party do. No sacrifice, I just don't want it.

Geoff56, I believe it's quite crazy to just focus on sugar. Yes, we're killing our grandchildren. After all, we're living on a dying planet.

My retired scientist friend believes that we passed the point of no return back in the 1970s. So, unless a miracle happens, we can only slow down the destruction. We probably won't, though, being human, therefore inclined towards short-sightedness.

When I was a child, most people took at least 2 teaspoons of sugar in a cup (not mug) of tea and lots of tea was drunk. Babies were given sweetened tea in bottles and soothers dipped in honey. Dinner was always followed by pudding - dishes like golden syrup pudding and treacle tart which I would now regard not very nutritious. Jam sandwiches were common and some children were given bread sprinkled with sugar.

I don't know when you were a child, Farmor15 but when I was a child people were much more active than they seem to be these days. Far fewer people had cars, so you walked to and from your local shops or town, or at least to and from a bus stop...
Shopping meant visiting a number of shops, not getting it all in one supermarket. And carrying those heavy bags of shopping used up a few calories.

I think children played out more, too with less danger from traffic. And cycled to places. There may be more bikes around now, but it's been a long time since they were so common.

Then there was hard manual work. Very little exists now.

So those extra sugary calories were much more likely to be used.

You and me both Monica on the soft drinks. My go to drink when I was the designated driver used to be lime and soda, Now I can’t even have that. Artificial sweetener in everything. Yucky, ?

Aspartamine is vile as ‘sweetener’. Just yuk.

we never had puddings at home when i was young, except on sundays, when it would usually be tinned fruit, occasionally ice-cream, no fridge in the house.
i found it strange at school that puddings were everyday. my brother developed a taste for custard, which i'd never heard of. my father hated it due to seeing adverts for birds' on lorries; he assumed it was made from some extract from a bird.
i wish cake-making was not so prominent on tv now.

Mary Berry says quite frankly that she eats hardly any cake herself, and yet she makes a good living tempting the rest of us with it. Grrr...

Too much fancy baking on tv. Though I have nothing against the odd treacle sponge pud. And I have been known to indulge in a slice of bread with cholesterol reducing spread on it, sprinkled well with sugar. Shrug!

There are plenty of parents limiting the amount of sugar their children consume.

I think sugar consumption varies immensely from family to family and, indeed, country to country. I think the quality of food and diet in somewhere like the United States is very poor - and they consume a large proportion of world food production.

I remember reading that sugar was as addictive as any drug and I truly believe that to be the case.
I was Prediabetic and hugely sweet toothed. I didn’t take sugar in drinks or particularly eat cakes, however educating myself into what contained sugar and refusing anything with more than 10gs of carbohydrates of which sugar on any label. I lost two stones in weight and a sweet tooth. I wasn’t particularly overweight but could obviously afford to lose that.
Now I’m constantly trying to only have a very natural diet but it’s so hard.