The numbers listed on your packaged foods replace the chemical or common name of food additives. These are used to enhance the colour, flavour, texture or prevent them from spoiling.
Like many great challenges of the 21st century, the science identifying the problems with sugar seems clear. What’s lacking is the will to address them.
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s campaign to introduce a sugar tax on fizzy drinks and snacks has been gaining momentum. Oliver has a history of trying to persuade the British public to eat more healthily…
Robert Lustig, University of California, San Francisco
Researchers have found that cutting sugar out of kids’ diets can improve their blood pressure, cholesterol readings and other markers of metabolic health.
Are you a “carb craver” or “chocaholic”? We often use language associated with addiction to describe our relationships with food. But is it really possible to be addicted to certain types of food?
We’re told to breakfast like kings but is the first meal of the day really one for champions, or chumps who’ve been taken in by the marketing of ready-to-eat cereal manufacturers?
Anyone who knows me also knows that I have a huge sweet tooth. I always have. My friend and fellow graduate student Andrew is equally afflicted, and living in Hershey, Pennsylvania – the “Chocolate Capital…
Back in 2012 the Which? Breakfast Cereal Report identified worryingly high amounts of sugar in 50 of the most popular breakfast cereals. Three years later and a new survey by campaign group Action On Sugar…
There’s a milk revolution going on in supermarkets and it’s showing no sign of retreat. Where formerly we might have had a simple choice between cow milk and soy milk, with a few other niche products available…
The Eatwell plate is the UK government’s official food guide about which foods we should eat to achieve a healthy diet. It is essentially a pie-chart depicting the recommended intakes of five specified…
Coca Cola has begun carefully rolling out its green-labelled “Life” brand, filling its iconic hour-glass bottles with a new fizzy drink which has nearly a third fewer calories than Coke Original. It is…
A collaboration between historians, text mining, and information visualisation researchers has thrown up new insight into the hunger for sugar, coffee and rubber in the 19th century, as well as how fat…
Kate Flinders, Defence Science and Technology Organisation
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released draft revised guidelines on daily sugar intake for adults and children. But if people are to follow the WHO’s advice, they need to start thinking about…
Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand