Hattie Ellis

S is for Sugar Fat used to be considered Public Food Enemy Number One, but now sugar is being fingered instead by some health campaigners. It’s not just the sugar stirred into tea and eaten in cakes and biscuits but the large quantity in drinks and processed foods. Even savoury packaged foods have a surprising amount of sugar. Look for the words ending in ‘-ose’ on the label and beware! ‘Sugar: The Bitter Truth’, a lecture on the evils of sugar by Robert Lustig, an expert on childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, has become a surprise hit on YouTube. He argues that sweet stuff may be a cornerstone of the obesity epidemic, and therefore also the related problems of diabetes, heart disease and so on.

Q IS FOR QUANTITY The problem with food and health can now be summed up in one phrase: ‘too much’. More than six out of 10 men and five out of 10 women in the UK are overweight or obese. Talk to medics such as cancer experts and they say it’s especially important not to put on weight around your middle — the dreaded middle-age spread. How to lose it? ‘Eat less’ is obvious — but too simple. Increasingly, obesity experts think the environmental aspect of overeating also needs to be addressed. In the 1990s, the phrase ‘obesogenic society’ — in which we in the West live — was coined.