Sweet sins. Who to Blame?
I live in Central London. I love films and I go to the movies about two times a week. I have a favourite cinema in Piccadilly. A few months ago, on my way to the pictures, I noticed that a new enormous shop had opened at Coventry St: Kingdom of Sweets. The shop occupies half of the shopping space available at the block.
I have never seen such a large sweet outlet. Different colors and shapes of sweets and chocolates dressed the walls and the floor space is occupied by gondolas with special offers. There are paper bags in every section and people were filling their bags as if this was the last chance to have a sweet before the world ended. The store was busy. There were quite a few people waiting online to pay.
The question I had in mind was: how many tons of sweets need to be sold to turn a profit and pay the high rates of rental space in this expensive location? How can we explain that in a time when governments are worried about the serious impact of an ever growing obese population,
Kingdom of Sweets is a success. It has opened a series of shops around central London and all shops are in prime locations.
England has a free national health system and the cost of an obese population is already taking its toll in the overstretched health budget.
England is not alone: obesity is a global problem. Last Oct, according to WHO, the world had 603 million obese adults and 107 million children.
The UK created a sugar tax for soft drinks that went into effect last April. Producers are taxed and there are two bands of taxation. The aim is to tackle childhood obesity — around a quarter of the children in the UK are overweight when they start school. As the UK government bares the cost for the health care, there are incentives to try and reduce the enormous impact of obesity on the health budget. In the US, the country with the largest number of obese people, the ex-Mayor of NYC, Michael Bloomberg, tried and failed to impose a sugar tax on soft drinks.
The sugar tax has made many manufacturers to start developing new recipes with reduced amounts of sugar to meet regulations and avoid taxation. But the soft drinks industry is not the only culprit: the food industry plays a crucial role too. People buy pre-prepared meals and processed foods. The level of sugar is extremely high and the labels tend to be not very clear as to how much sugar each package contains. The language chosen is particularly confusing. Most people cannot tell how many spoons of sugar is on 65 grams of energy…
The trends are for sweeter times. We want everything sweet, even our veggies and fruits. The modern agriculture has responded to this demand and, in then past decades, they have developed bland, sweeter fruit and vegetables by breeding out from the produce the chemicals that were their first line of defence against pests. As a result, farmers are spraying the crops much more to avoid pests.
Obesity is a world threat and so serious that WHO created a World Day for Obesity. The impact of obesity in ones health is very serious, debilitating. The number of young children and adults with diabetes is fast growing.
Governments, industry and each one of us must take responsibility to avoid a catastrophe. Advertising ‘diet”or low sugar products is very irresponsible. There is a direct relationship between the market for sweets and the one for diets. One feeds the other. But education is the source for change. There is nothing good in a sweet death.
