Army life was never so sweet for Gallipoli diggers

Australia’s tank commanders are having trouble telling which large objects on the parade ground are tanks and which are the men who are supposed to be driving them. Things in the navy are a little easier. The ships are the grey things.

Recent reports have revealed that one in seven military folk are medically obese. A number like that would be trumpeted from the highest government office if it applied to the rest of us. The non-military portion of society sailed past those figures sometime in the eighties. But it’s troubling to those who were counting on the military to be of some use should we be attacked.

The average Australian digger is now 16 kilograms heavier than the men who stormed Gallipoli. But those men came from very different time and ate a very different diet. In 1915 Cadbury had only just started shipping its Dairy Maid Chocolate bar, the first ever packaged chocolate product. In the United States, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were still garage operations run out of sheds behind the pharmacies of their inventors. The men stepping ashore at Anzac Cove had never even tasted packaged chocolate or fizzy drink unless they had a generous relative in the mother country.

Corn flakes were the stuff of science fiction. Men shipping out for Gallipoli wouldn’t be able to buy breakfast cereal for another decade. And the only place they’d taste fruit juice they hadn’t squeezed themselves was in Church on Communion Sunday. It would be 40 years before they could buy orange juice at all in Australia.

There weren’t many overweight people. Four out of every five people from that time were downright skinny by today’s standards. Obesity was as rare then as underweight politicians are today. There was no such thing as heart disease and the medical speciality of cardiology wasn’t even going to be necessary for another quarter of a century.

Obviously no-one was getting rich selling diets or gym-memberships. There wasn’t even enough interest in diets to start a woman’s magazine. The first copy of Woman’s Weekly wouldn’t be rolling off the presses for another quarter of a century and it would be more than half a century before the first Weight Watcher’s meeting would happen.

The men who went off to fight at Gallipoli had grown up in households where sugar was a very occasional treat. It was too expensive to use every day and almost none of their food had any added before they bought it.

That’s a stark contrast to today where the modern soldier is fed sugar in almost every mouthful. They are eating almost 1.4 kilograms of sugar a week. Sugar is embedded in everything from their breakfast cereal to their drinks and everything in between.

The tidal wave of sugar is causing the epidemic of obesity and its nasty consequences from heart disease to diabetes. Unfortunately what we are seeing is just the start of what will turn out to be a significant problem for the defence forces (and everyone else) in the coming decade.

The military is tough on who it is prepared to take. Before 2006 you couldn’t have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30 (the border between being merely overweight and being obese). In 2006, as part of the Government’s drive to increase recruitment, the goal post was moved to 33. At the current rate of expansion of our collective waistline, soon the only person fit to serve will the winner of The Biggest Loser.  Not surprisingly, the military is conducting a study to see if the goal post can be moved again.

The elephant in the room (or perhaps in this case, on the parade ground) is getting hard to hide. For decades there has been grumbling by researchers that couldn’t prove that feeding rats fat made them fat but could prove that feeding them sugar not only made them fat but gave them heart disease, type II diabetes, fatty liver disease and testicular atrophy.

There is now no scientific doubt that dietary sugar is directly responsible for raising the amount of circulating fat in our body. And the evidence is becoming overwhelming that it is the fructose half of sugar which measurably and directly produces obesity.  But simply telling an obese soldier (or anyone else) to stop eating sugar is pointless in a society where it is almost impossible to find a food that does not have sugar added.

The well meaning digger may no longer put a teaspoon of sugar in their cuppa, but what about the fourteen teaspoons in their ‘healthy’ breakfast cereal and small glass of ‘unsweetened’ apple juice? Or the teaspoon of sugar in every dollop of sauce or mayonnaise?

Obesity can be eliminated as a chronic health problem by the simple removal of fructose from the Australian diet. If that were the rule tomorrow, the industrial food complex would have fructose free foods (which tasted identical) on our supermarket shelves by next Tuesday. But until that is the rule, we will all pay the price with increasingly impaired lifestyles and ultimately shortened lives.

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Also published in Crikey

Got Sugar?

Apparently I’m not getting my Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) of sugar.  According to the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes I encountered in the supermarket this morning, I am supposed to be eating 90g of the stuff every day (or almost 33kg a year). 

Hang on!  I should be eating almost 22 teaspoons of sugar every day?!  Where do they get that from?  I had to find out more.

You won’t find it on their packs, but the answer is buried on the Kellogg’s site under the FAQ for Health Professionals.  They say:

Sugar – 90g - Based on 18% of total energy. This is in line with the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults [2003] which recommend to consume only moderate amounts of sugars and foods containing added sugars, and is consistent with the target stated by the Nutrition Taskforce of the Better Health Commission [1987]

I added the links into that quote to make it a bit easier for you to check than Kellogg’s did.  The first report does not set a target of 90g per day or indeed any target at all. It just says you should moderate your intake of sugars. 

The second report is so old that it isn’t available on the internet so I can’t tell you what it says.  But given the first report was written 16 years later and doesn’t mention any guidelines from that older report, I don’t hold out much hope for finding the 90g figure in it either.  And even if it did contain such a recommendation, I wouldn’t put much trust in it given the mountain of human metabolism research that’s been done since then.

Perhaps Kellogg’s pulled the 90g from The Daily Intake Guide produced by its industry lobby group, the Australian Food and Grocery Council.  That guide also uses the 90g figure.  It says that the value is ‘derived from the Nutrient Reference Values for Australia and New Zealand’ [2006]. 

That document prepared by Department of Health and Ageing and does not set any RDI for sugar at all.  It simply notes that the World Health Organisation recommended a level of not more than 10% of energy from sugar in its 2003 Report on Diet and Chronic Diseases.

So in short, I’m at a loss as to where Kellogg’s (and everyone else who signed on to the AFGCs nutrition labelling system) got the figure of 90g of sugar from.  But I do know that putting that on a packet of cereal makes it seem ok that a standard serve (by that I mean what your kids actually eat not what the pack calls a standard serve) contains up to five teaspoons of sugar.  After all, that's less than a quarter of your RDI.

Calling it an RDI gives legitimacy to the figure as if it’s an essential nutrient without which we would expire.  No-one needs to eat 3kg of sugar a year, let alone 33kg! 

It’s time for food manufacturers to stop playing ducks and drakes with food labelling.  The RDI for sugar should be 0g per day and the amount the food exceeds that should be clearly labelled.

Sugar makes you stupider

Anyone who's read Sweet Poison would agree that you'd have to be pretty stupid to eat sugar. But research published this month in Diabetes Care establishes a direct link between consuming fructose and 'impaired cognitive function'. Put more directly, sugar makes you stupid.

2,977 people suffering from Type II Diabetes, aged 55 years and older took part in the study.   They were subjected to a 30-minute battery of tests designed to measure things such as how fast they performed calculations and how well they multi-tasked.  Some of the tests also measured the accuracy of their memory.  

The tests are part of a standardised set used for detecting early signs of dementia.

The researchers then compared the results of the tests to measures of each person's average blood glucose reading over time.  They found that there was a significant correlation between a person's score on the tests and their blood sugar level.  The higher the blood sugar level, the lower their score on all the tests.  Just to put icing on the cake, the researchers noted that a one per cent rise in blood sugar takes you two years closer to dementia!

In the book I outline a series of studies which establish definitively that fructose causes elevated blood sugar levels and leads to Type II Diabetes as a direct result.  But I know you only want the latest research hot from the labs, so here is yet another human study that establishes this lovely property of fructose (and therefore sugar) beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The study's lead author Karen L. Teff, PhD, a metabolic physiologist, summarised one of her findings by saying "Fructose can cause even greater elevations of triglyceride levels in obese insulin-resistant individuals, worsening their metabolic profiles and further increasing their risk for diabetes and heart disease." - translation: "Fructose increases circulating blood fats making you more likely to have heart disease and diabetes and it is even worse if you are already obese or pre-diabetic".

So there you have it, yet another reason to avoid sugar.  Not only does it give you Type II diabetes, it also makes you thick (that's the technical term) and accelerates your journey towards dementia ... Bon Appétit!

Food bigger factor than exercise

Paul Lucas, Queensland’s Deputy Premier has a weight problem. His jeans don’t fit but that’s not really the issue. Portly Paul’s boss, the botox pumpin’, half marathon runnin’, Premier is his real problem.

Captain Bligh wants her crew to shape up or ship out before the next election. There’ll be push-ups on the poop deck and calisthenics on the quarter-deck if Bligh gets her way. Concerned that her front bench will soon all be visible on satellite pictures, the Premier wants Queensland’s leaders to show the rest of us how a little bit of exercise can turn them back into able-seamen first-class.

The new ministerial lard reduction policy is very much in line with Queensland’s current ‘Find your 30’ fitness campaign. It exhorts everyone to find 30 minutes of activity every day so they can stop being so obese (perhaps not an exact quote). And is a response to reports like the one released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in October.  That report revealed that in the last decade alone the number of overweight and obese Australians jumped from 41.1 percent in 1998 to 59.3 percent now.

The usual response to this kind of report is that we haven’t been doing enough exercise. But according to the Australian Sports Commission, in 2006, two thirds of us exercised at least once a week and almost 43 percent of us participated in sport three or more times a week. These numbers should be treated with caution as they are based on self-completed survey forms. We all tend to exercise more when filling out survey forms.

As with most things, money may be a more reliable indicator. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, between 1998 and 2004, we spent almost 20 percent more on physical activity including a whopping 92 percent increase in the number of gym memberships we purchased. 

Even in the US, where all kinds of unwelcome records are being set for obesity, the figures don't match the spin. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, the number of students participating in high school athletics has just increased for the 19th consecutive year. And it's not just the kids. Like us, their parents have been spending up big on sports gear. Sporting apparel sales are up 35.3 percent since 2000 and sports shoe sales are up 44.2 percent. Sports equipment sales more than doubled between 1990 and 2008 (from $30b to almost $70b).

Perhaps we are just enrolling in gyms and filling our cupboards with gym equipment and gear to make us look like we exercise - it happens. A better test would be a fitness activity that we pay for only when it is really used. Personal training is a very high growth industry in the US and Australia. In 1999 there were 127,310 personal trainers in the US. That figure had almost doubled to 219,990 in 2007. Australian data shows a similar trend. In the 2006 census, 13,800 people said there were employed as fitness instructors up from 7,669 in the 1996 census.

The numbers don’t lie. Most of us are exercising much more than we used to, but we’re still getting fatter at an alarming rate. If only being thin were simply a matter of running around the corridors of power for an extra half an hour a day.

The problem with exercise is that it just doesn’t burn that many calories. And any calories that it does use are very easily replaced with very small changes in diet. A quick bit of maths on a calorie counter tells us that the average overweight pollie will burn up to 100 more Calories in their daily 30 minutes of moderate exercise than they would have if they had been sitting in Parliament. The small packet of Chico Babies that Premier Bligh likes to keep in her ministerial car contains almost five day’s worth of Calories at that burn rate. So why not skip the Chicos and the two and half hours of jogging and call it a day?

Even in the 1940s, doctors supported the self evident proposition that if you exercise more you will eat more. Most of the medical profession quite logically suggested that bed rest was more likely than exercise to help with obesity. One leading medical textbook at the time even famously quoted a study which showed that lumberjacks ate twice as much as tailors and concluded that 'Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal’. It shouldn’t then come as much of surprise that study after study since then has failed to establish any direct link at all between weight loss and exercise.

This message was hijacked in 1960’s by influential French-American Nutritionist, Jean Mayer. Aided and abetted by the newly created sports shoe and sports clothing industries, the ‘exercise makes you thin’ message gained momentum to the point where today we are faced with incessant state sponsored cajoling towards exercise as a solution to our obesity problem.

Logic says exercising to lose weight shouldn’t work and science backs that up, but neither is relevant to a politician wanting to look like they are doing something. But before Captain Bligh sends us all for a long walk on a short plank for failing a fat fold test, let’s take a look at what the research really says. Exercise won’t stop you getting fatter but being choosy about what you put in your mouth very definitely will.

Published in The Australian