ANYONE who worries about their diet must have had a few anxious moments about sugar in recent weeks. The media has been full of stories about its effects on health, from obesity and diabetes to liver disease. Some stories were exaggerated, but many got it right (see "Sugar on trial: What you really need to know").
It's hardly news that sugar is bad for you, so why the sudden interest? One underappreciated reason is the success of a public health battle against another white crystalline powder.
Around 20 years ago a small group of cardiovascular specialists in the UK decided to do something about the large amounts of salt being added to processed food. As a result of their campaign, people in the UK now eat around 15 per cent less salt than they used to, preventing thousands of deaths a year from strokes and heart attacks.
How did they do it? The answer was to work with the food industry, not against it. The campaigners persuaded manufacturers to gradually reduce the amount of salt in processed foods. The aim was to wean people off salt. It worked: people in the UK now prefer foods with less salt. That success is being replicated worldwide.
Salt is still a problem, but the salt campaigners have made enough progress to turn their attention to sugar. There are reasons to believe that the anti-salt tactics will work again. Like salt, sugar leads to habituation. The more you eat, the less sensitive your taste buds become to it, so gradual weaning should work.
Salt reduction has shown that the food industry can do the right thing for public health. Sugar is a problem on a similar scale. The industry can – and should – help to solve it.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Look to salt success to reduce sugar"
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