We need to talk about sugar

The Right is too defensive in dietary discussions

In July, I went on a health kick and gave up alcohol. This was a big change for me as my tastes have always been a bit like what you might imagine for the character Patsy from Ab Fab, including an obsession with oysters. I defined myself - as much as can be defined - as a “savoury” person, privately judging the glutinous souls unable to keep away from dessert displays in restaurants.

But after July I realised that I did actually have a sweet tooth, only I hadn’t realised it, because the sugar I consumed was in alcohol. Now off the vino, I had intense cravings for Milkybar buttons - hardly the look I was going for at 34. One day I even imagined the two men at my local newsagents having a panicked conversation about depleting chocolate supplies. “IT’S HER AGAIN!” I thought they might say, as if I was Godzilla.

I expected that at some point I would simply snap out of these cravings, magically waking up one morning with a desire to run through a field of wheat, my skin glowing like Gwyneth Paltrow’s. But I realised that nothing had changed after four months, and I wasn’t feeling healthy or any of those amazing things you’re told when you go on a booze break; in fact, I felt a bit hungover! So I opted to do something I’d never done before: research nutrition.

Only recently it seems extraordinary to me how minimal my interest in nutrition has been (still in its infancy, I should add). I remember once learning about how Barack Obama doesn’t like cooking and I admired his mindset. Obviously it sounds ridiculous, but there was something I took away from it; I surmised that time in the kitchen must be sacrificed in pursuit of professional or intellectual endeavour. Cooking has generally always felt bothersome to me. If I could take a pill to sort out my food each day, I probably would.

Even so, I realised that I would have to look into food properly, to understand why I had such intense sugar cravings. Often I was very tired, and needed lots of coffee, when I was meant to be a health queen by now. A few podcast searches later and I stumbled upon Jessie Inchauspé, a French biochemist, author and founder of (/the actual) “Glucose Goddess”, who, excuse the cliché, offered some much-needed "food for thought".

Inchauspé’s theory, outlined in her book Glucose Revolution, is that many people are unknowingly having glucose highs and lows in their bloodstream, and that these are responsible for symptoms, such as intense cravings for food, being tired and overweight. Long story short, she offers a range of methods to help stabilise your glucose levels, some of which I followed. They weren’t even hard to do, the chief advice being to rearrange the order in which you eat and/ or add any components you've been missing (vegetables> protein/fat > sugar/ carbs).

I don’t want to be too evangelical, as it’s early days and I know diets can be fleeting things. Still, I was amazed at how quickly I started to feel better. I immediately cut down on coffees and my cravings for chocolate and other sugary concoctions significantly reduced. One of the most noticeable changes was when I went out for a run. My times had depleted significantly over the last year, but I suddenly felt like I’d gone from Eeyore (of Winnie-the-Pooh fame) to Tigger, skimming about four minutes off my previous effort. I wasn’t even forcing myself to try hard; I simply had energy.

My nutritional awakening has had me reflecting on the debates around food and health in the UK. It always seems to me that the “Right”, as we call it - my associated ideological group, is hugely triggered by conversations on unhealthy eating. This was obvious from the reaction to Dr Chris van Tulleken’s book Ultra-Processed People, which looks into all the strange dietary concoctions we put into our bodies. He received a fairly sizable amount of backlash on X, dividing the masses on whether he is a hero or the enemy of hedonism.

Whatever the intricacies of his theses, even starting a conversation on dietary choices is to provoke mass outrage. Although many do not believe that food can be “addictive”, it’s interesting to see how defensive people get when someone suggests the substances they regularly consume may not be good for them.

Many on the Right are wary of sugar taxes and the nanny state interfering in dietary choices. I am sympathetic with these arguments to a point, and generally wary of government meddling. I certainly think if the state wants to clamp down on bad things, it should offer pleasurable alternatives. With the cost of living crisis so high, is it any wonder people are turning to vices, such as smoking and drinking, to cope? Not everyone can get their endorphins from the gym, with membership costs ever-increasing.

However, as I have written before, I think libertarian ideology hasn’t quite got with the 21st century, when it comes to reconciling science with personal agency. Over the last decades, an increasing amount of research has shown that we have less willpower than we like to think in what we consume; weight is 70 percent heritable, for instance. In other words, some have more self control than others, thanks to their genetic make-up.

This means that some can cope much better than others in an environment offering a huge amount of sugar-based, ultra-processed and generally unhealthy food (i.e. the UK and other Western countries). Think about the alcoholic in a liquor store, or the drug addict at an Ibizan rave; there are food equivalents of these situations. Societies tend to have very limited ideas of what “addiction” constitutes, mostly decided around what will kill you faster (obesity does kill, but the fact it takes so long makes it appear less urgent, and the "drugs of choice" less addictive ).

Having followed Inchauspé’s tips, I’ve found that not only do I eat more healthily, but that I don’t even feel that I am doing a “diet”; the point is that it dials down your cravings for naughty food. It has emphasised to me that that nutrition isn’t some sort of tedious left-wing endeavour, designed to take our favourite treats away from us. It is an intellectual pursuit and key to self-actualisation; it is the making of Obama, rather than his prison (yes, I know he probably has private cooks). A politically engaged, rather than defensive approach, is paramount to tackling the very real health problems this country faces.