Sugar, the new Death Dust.

Sugar is toxic now. Only refined sugar, of course. Sugar in plants is okay, it's only the White Powder of Death that will kill you.

This does sound somewhat familiar. Where have I heard this magical transformation before? Oh yes. Nicotine in tobacco is deadly but nicotine in patches and gum (at far higher concentrations) is good for you.

It. Is. Exactly. The. Bloody. Same.

Sugar is extracted from sugar cane, usually. It's a natural product. It's only bad for you if you eat far too much of it. When I was about seven I had a fixation on sugar sandwiches. Yes, that image in your head is right. Two slices of bread and butter (white bread and real butter) with a layer of sugar in between.

I wasn't fat and while I have a bit of an overbelt bulge now, I'm still not fat. 'Fat' was the kid at school whose arse hung over both sides of the seat. I fit easily into seats. Anyway, I went off those sandwiches when I discovered rhubarb and blackcurrant sandwiches, with sugar of course, and could never eat one now. Tastes change and kids will eat stuff that horrifies adults. Speaking for myself, that was probably the main reason.

Oh, but sugar is actually toxic. Yes, the stuff your brain runs on is poisoning you.

Writing in Nature, experts from the University of California San Francisco say that sugar does far more harm than simply expanding waistlines, and at the level consumed by most Americans it changes metabolism, raises blood pressure and damages the liver. 

Nature? Nature? NATURE? The journal that regards itself as the pinnacle of science? The journal that published a paper saying it was a good thing to produce nitrous oxide in the mouth because it killed bacteria (and nobody mentioned pernicious anaemia)? The journal that published 'memory of water'? That hack-rag?

Oh, but it's in Nature so it must be right. It comes from California so it can't be utterly deranged. These people are Experts.

They have white coats and everything. For the record, my lab coats are green. The reason is simple. When I ordered them, it had not occurred to me that they might come in different colours. If only I had known. I could have had some black ones with stars and moons all over them, and a pointy hat.

Liver damage is the Great Thing of the moment. We had a bout of pancreas ailments after Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer but we're back to liver damage now. Don't try dodging it by opting for sugar-free, that gets you just the same. Something is damaging livers and someone is looking to shift the blame. It will be affecting non-boozers too and that means someone might work out what's really doing it.

As I said, these Californian hippie scientists with beards full of cannabis dog-ends and sandals on their stinky feet and lab coats with flowers on them are Experts, man. Look how clever they are.

The health hazards mirror those of alcohol - which they point out is made from distilling sugar.

Experts indeed. This is the real truth behind 'Experts'. This is how much they really know. They believe you distil sugar to make alcohol, whereas anyone who's ever made any knows that the best stuff has almost no sugar left in it at all and that's before you go anywhere near distillation, which would in any case remove any residual sugar from the finished product. I repeat, these are Experts. These are the people the drongos we elected are listening to because those we elected are even dimmer.

I propose a simple solution. Anyone who expresses any interest in standing for any Government post should be sectioned and incarcerated forever. They are evidently insane.

So, what techniques can we expect to see applied to this new Deadly Thing?

Dr Brindis said that the public needed to be better informed about the dangers of sugar with a wide approach similar to that seen with tobacco and alcohol. 

Yep. The same one again.All those who supported the tobacco control template are responsible for every vicious control imposed on everything else because it is the same game, every time. Do they see it yet?

Nope. In the comments -


Tooth decay, obesity, diabetes and hence, hardening of the arteries, candiasis, hypoglycemia, headaches and irritability. It is also known that cancer cells thrive in the presence of sugar. As in the now old book,'The Sugar Blues' it is a shame the white evil was ever discovered. - karen, tonbridge, 1/2/2012 21:38 

Sigh. Candidiasis is as likely to be caused by sugar as middle ear infections are likely to be caused by second hand smoke. They are infections, in this case caused by a yeast called Candida (I know, people call their kids that now, it cracks me up every time because it's also the yeast that causes thrush) and cannot be spontaneously generated by sugar.

Tooth decay and obesity are not caused by sugar, but by too much sugar. Hypoglycaemia is caused by too little sugar in the bloodstream, not by too much.

All body cells thrive in the presence of sugar. It's what they use for energy unless you are on the Atkins diet in which case your cells burn protein and your breath smells like acetone. Get some bloody sugar in there.

Note that it is now 'the white evil'. I bet Tate and Lyle will soon be accused of funding the BNP too.In fact, I might drop that suggestion in front of one of the nutters myself..

Maybe this one -

I've been reading literature on how bad sugar is for you for 20 years, something that a lot of friends just don't want to believe....I must admit that this one will be hard to give up and I'm sure the sugar industry won't go down without a fight. And, by the way a lot of sweeteners are not that good for you either.. - Brigitte, Somewhere in Oz, 1/2/2012 23:09

Australia, eh? Once home to the hardest people on the planet, fast becoming the centre of the feeblest. Yes, it's all about Big Sugar, people, and 'friends don't want to believe' that the hyped up nonsense she tells them about is true.

When I first started out as a mere PhD student, I remember a discussion with another student after we had both published papers. The gist of it was 'It looks so much more credible in print'. It does. All those hungover days of mindlessly running samples through automated machinery, and when it was in print we looked like we had some idea what we were doing. No we didn't. We thought we did but we were students. Not qualified yet.

So Brigitte has 'read literature'. I can produce 'literature' on UFO's, telepathy and reincarnation. Not in magazines but in journals. I could dig up those papers published in Nature on the memory of water, 'make yourself anaemic but with good teeth', or cold fusion. Just because it's in print doesn't mean it's true.

I have, so far -
Thirty-one refereed papers.
Three review articles.
Thirty-five conference proceedings.
Fifteen book chapters, technical notes and popular articles.
Thirty-two abstracts of conference presentations.
ight invited lectures.
Over thirty confidential reports to industrial sponsors.

Does that make me an expert? I don't think so. The number of papers published says nothing of their quality. There are a host of newspaper articles on the science application of farming too. Internal reports I never bothered to list. So what? I could still be wrong.

That's the real nature of science. There might be someone starting a Ph. D. now who will, in ten or twenty years, prove that everything I said was wrong because he or she has access to better, more precise equipment.Science used to recognise that. It doesn't any more. The collective memory is gone. Just as the newspapers go into a frenzy when half an inch of snow falls in January, science no longer remembers what it had for breakfast.

Oh, I also have -

Jessica’s Trap, a novel, by H. K. Hillman. Publishedby Eternal Press, April 2011.
Fears of the Old and the New, by H. K. Hillman – A collection of previously published short stories.
Dark Thoughts and Demons, by H. K. Hillman – A collection of short stories
Ghosthunting for the Sensible Investigator, by Romulus Crowe (two editions)
Nineteen short stories published since July 2003. (17 are in Fears of the Old and the New)
Forty-six articles on horror-writing between November 2003 and July 2010.

These are also in print. Does that make them true? Of course not, they are entirely made up apart from the demons who are all real. Oh I should have said - don't read the spells aloud. I didn't make up magic like JKR, I nicked it all from Crowley. They probably don't work but I don't want to be sued from Hell because they have all the lawyers.

Most of these ideas came out of a bottle. None of your cheap bottles mind, they came out of good single-malts because that's where the 'wake up screaming then write it down' dreams come from.

So you want to believe stuff in print that scares you, Brigitte? I have stuff in print that's designed to scare you. Just like the University of California (Welcome to the Uni California is gestating in my whisky-fuelled brain. Yours runs on sugar, mine runs on four-star. Don't put sugar in my tank) I can make up stuff to scare people for fun and profit.

It was inevitable and most smokers knew it. We were just the start. Can you imagine any government passing up the chance of a new tax escalator? Salt and sugar were on the long list from the beginning. So was meat. The smoking ban was a test run and they won. They proved that politicians are idiots but we all knew that anyway.

So now, the food your brain requires is toxic. Just as the fats it requires to insulate nerves are now deadly..

This year I might plant sugar-beet too.