Why 5%? The sugar guidelines revisited

Looking at those sugar guidelines for Spectator Health...

Earlier this week I suggested that the ‘extremely worrying’ news that children are eating twice as much sugar as the government recommends might have something to do with the government halving the recommendation. The change was made in 2015 based on advice given by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) as part of its evidence review of carbohydrates. It recommended that people consume no more than five per cent of their calories from ‘free sugars’ (which includes sugar in honey and fruit juice). This was a significant change to the previous advice to consume no more than ten per cent of calories from ‘non-milk extrinsic sugars’ (which excludes honey and fruit juice).

In calorie terms, this implies daily limits of around 100 calories, down from the previous 200 calories. In layman’s terms, this means five or six sugar cubes for children under the age of 11 and seven sugar cubes for adults. The new guidelines are the lowest in the world and have been a boon for Action on Sugar who have issued press release after press release complaining that various everyday food products contain more than a day’s sugar.

The implication is that there is something inherently unsafe about consuming more than 30 grams of sugar in a day, but what? What harm will come to a 10 year old who consumes the recommended 2,000 calories a day but gets 200 of those from sugar rather than the recommended 100? Given that Britain’s food supply is being taxed, regulated and reformulated on the pretext of meeting this target, this is a question that should be asked more often. The answer, incredibly, is ‘nothing’.

Do read the rest.