The Stream

Feeding into our sugar addiction

With nearly 30 percent of the world’s population overweight, why are food systems so unhealthy?

Around the world food has become tastier and waistlines bigger, but why? Some experts say it comes down to one ingredient – sugar. In various forms, it’s pumped into every single item you consume- fizzy drinks, snack foods, cereal, and the list goes on. Foods rich in this ingredient don’t fill you up, satiate your appetite nor give you the nutrition you need. In fact after a short spike of energy, you are left even hungrier. Increasingly popular for its accessibility, portability and price fast and junk foods are also loaded with sugar. Food industry advocates deny these claims.
 
Globally there are now 1.9 billion overweight people, more than 600 million of them classified as obese.  But the recently published Global Nutrition report found that 794 million people don’t actually get the energy they need from food and 2 billion don’t get the nutrition they need.

We’ll examine why our food is making us fat, the power of the food industry and why it’s so difficult to consume healthily.

In this episode, we speak to: 

Malcolm Kendrick @malcolmken
Doctor and writer

Gary Taubes @garytaubes 
Co-founder, Nutrition Science Initiative
garytaubes.com 

Brooke Barnett @excessmatters
Blogger
excessmatters.com

Ishi Khosla @IshiKhosla1 
Clinical nutritionist
theweightmonitor.com

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