Sugar, sugar everywhere so let’s all have a drink

JACK THE INSIDER
November 25, 2016
The Australian

The long, soul-destroying national debate has begun. Should the Commonwealth find yet another way of pick-pocketing the citizenry by taxing sugar?
Predictably the Greens are behind the push, having gone to the last election with a sugar tax as part of their grab bag of feel good policies. The Greens have said they will introduce a “sugar-sweetened beverages tax” as a private members’ bill in the ongoing freak show that is the Australian Senate at some time over the next 12 months.
Barnaby Joyce was incandescent – well, more incandescent with rage at the proposal.
“People are sitting on their backsides too much, and eating too much food and not just soft drinks, eating too many chips and other food,” Barnaby said.
Perhaps inadvertently, the Deputy Prime Minister had outed himself as a hand wringer for the public good of a different kind. He’s pro-sugar but anti-fat.
Treasurer Scott Morrison has kept his options open, mindful of the half a billion that would flow into commonwealth coffers every year.
Welcome to the war against obesity, to join the war against drugs, alcohol, nicotine, gambling and cavorting about in a desperate attempt to have a little fun. While the other doomed conflicts offer only the chance of Pyrrhic victory, this ugly campaign amounts to an arse tax and I do some of my best work on my arse.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m three or four economy-sized bottles of Coke over my fighting weight but I don’t want to receive a letter from the ATO telling me, “Dear Sir, Your assessment notice reveals we’re going to have to tax the bejesus out of you until you can slip comfortably into size 36 underpants.”
Let’s not forget fat people are hilarious, scratching their heads and stumbling around bumping into things. Call my sense of humour unsophisticated if you will but the evidence is there for all to see. Stan Laurel pulled amusing, whiny faces but for a real belly laugh, you couldn’t go past his larger partner-in-comedy, Oliver Hardy slipping over and crash landing his ample backside on a hardwood floor. That, I give you, is the primary definition of funny.
In these fact-free days where celebrity chefs assume greater expertise than scientists, we need all the laughs we can get.
Besides, there are a hell of a lot of things worse in this world than obesity. Fat people have far too much dignity to join that burgeoning group of menopausal men who clamber onto bicycles worth more than my car in flagrant breach of one of the most important rules for a good, just and fair society – good friends never let friends wear Lycra.
If you’ve worked in any contemporary office space, you’ll know what I mean. They bounce in with their ultra-lite push bikes under their arms, sweating like Joe Hockey over a curry, sporting a pair of bike shorts so tight you can tell their religious affiliation.
If we’re going to tax anything in order to change behaviour, I’d suggest that’s a damned good place to start.
Seriously, theories on nutrition and health are constantly changing. What was once considered beyond the pale is now promoted as restorative and vice-versa.
Remember carbohydrate loading? Every elite athlete would do it, heave into an enormous plate of pasta on the eve of a sporting contest but dutifully shun a fun-size Mars Bar.
We didn’t notice it then but by the time they got to the last quarter/round/session/chukka, they were buggered, flailing about, perilously out of gas. But the experts maintained it was the way to go, so we did as our sporting heroes did and chowed down on bread, spuds and pasta, whenever we felt we needed a boost.
It transpires that fat equals energy to burn while carbohydrates are the equivalent of consuming lead weights.
Now fat is regarded as good, so good you should sit down in front of an entire plate of bacon and just stick your face right in. Don’t come up for air until you’re done.
Salt is evil, right? As a lover of salt, I’ve discovered the worst thing a person can do in public is grab the condiment shaker marked ‘S’ and give one’s food a good dousing. Health Nazis and the terminally gullible look at me in mouth agape horror as if I’d just bludgeoned a litter of kittens to death with a cricket bat.
Five years ago, the American Journal of Hypertension concluded there was no evidence to indicate reduced consumption of sodium would decrease the instance of heart attack or stroke in people with normal or high blood pressure.
That same a year a group of European cardiologists determined those who excrete less salt in their urine were more likely to suffer heart attack and/or stroke. In other words, the study showed those who consumed less salt ran a greater risk of dying from heart disease.
If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have got a whiff of burning hair and a sharp taste of copper in your mouth before face-planting into your plate of low-fat pasta verde, it may come as some compensation to learn salt was not the culprit. It’s more likely than not genetic. Blame your grandfather, not sodium chloride.
Sadly none of this has prevented our supermarket shelves groaning with bland low-salt, fat-reduced or indeed low-fat, salt-reduced versions of products we have come to know and love but like moths to the flame, we consume these goods in the mistaken knowledge they are good for us.
Let’s face it, left to their own devices, politicians would prefer us all on a steady diet of low-fat gruel. Even if we cheerfully did their bidding, it would not be too long before they started babbling about the benefits of a gruel tax. Meanwhile nutritionists squabble and hector us over what we should and should not put into our bellies only to change their minds ten years on.
In this ocean of confusion and chaos my only advice is salt that bacon, wash it down with a schooner of Fanta and live a little while you still can.