The official action plan has been delayed,again. With continuing resistance to a tax on sugary drinks, this is a case of drift, or rather than deliberation[br]The first thing to know about nutrition is that nobody is certain about very much. Data gets painstakingly collected in diaries which don’t give a full dietary picture: even if people don’t actually fib,they wont always be certain of everything they’ve consumed, and may eat more thoughtfully when they know they’re going to be writing it down. The health consequences exhibit up only slowly, and which makes it essential to keep tabs on the same patients for decades,which isn’t easy to effect. The chemical effect of a particular food may depend on how it is prepared, and even the mix of things it is served with.
Thus it is that sunflower oil can be a superfood one decade, or a hidden killer the next; blueberries an elixir one minute,but a tooth-rotting irrelevance later. A haze of uncertainty surrounds the evolving facts and thickens to fog when it comes to finding the moral policies. Until you know if fructose is “as bad as” sucrose, it is tough to know – even in principle – whether a general sugar tax should hit apples bred to be sickly sweet as tough as chocolates. Then there is the practical danger of manufacturers replacing the one kind-but-nasty ingredient that is being targeted with something worse.
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Source: theguardian.com