Human beings, in facts all mammals, seek tasty food.

I don’t think this is true in the way you mean it. It is probably a fact that once an animal (mammal or not) eats sugar it wants more. But that is Evolution. Fruits are seasonal and for most of the millions of years that there have been mammals there’d be a short period of fruit prior to winter. When you eat fruit it rapidly turns to fat and that helps you through the winter when there’s not much food about and you use more energy to find it. It is logical to think that once your brain registers high glucose it is going to seek as much as possible for the winter it thinks is coming, remember this is how it was for hundreds of thousands of human years. But that winter never comes these days, the starvation never comes, but the brain doesn’t know that. It has evolved to respond to sugar, but it is a 365 day a year bonanza that never ends. We are on a sort of autopilot to seek more and more sugar.

On the subject of animals, they can’t count calories and they have no idea about calories in/calories out, but they never get obese unless it is us feeding them. Wild animals maintain ideal weight with no trouble.

Food manufacturers, cost every ingredient that goes into their food, particularly if it is mass produced.
We buy their food on the basis of taste.
Even if we choose low fat, low sugar, low salt foods,etc.....within this constraint, we still go for the tastiest food.

To blame the food manufacturers is absolutely ridiculous, they operate by the laws of supply and demand.
It is us which is the problem, not them.

just my own opinion.

You can't argue against someone and his cat.

You can't argue against someone and his cat.

Some excellent posts on this thread from FlowerMyth, particularly the posts at 00:13 and 00:47.

Cancers sweet tooth

http://www.mercola.com/article/sugar/sugar_cancer.htm

No different to the govt. giving you advice to stop smoking.

If they were really concerned about your health, they'd ban it, but losing millions in tax is not what they want. And now they want to start taxing e-ciggies as well.

Yes, cmat, it's all about money unfortunately.

Very true.

Human beings are born with a sweet tooth you know
Have you not noticed how children prefer sweet things...we have to wean them off it

But all our problems are now been the fault of the food companies
How about as an experiment
WE eat less
WE exercise more

I have diabetes 2...but I accept it is my own responsibility
I have no intention of pinning it on somebody else

http://www.macmillan.org.uk/Aboutus/HowWeRaiseAndSpendOurMoney/RaiseAndSpend.aspx

Although there is no slice on the expenses colourful graph for it; the largest slice of expenses is Fundraising at £58.1m (as per the text on the right) and then next highest is Healthcare £48.8m. So more money spent on fundraising then healthcare.

Their biggest income is from legacies.

interesting stuff olias, can you recommend any websites where I can find out more about a "proper" healthy diet - particularly with regard to wheat/grains? tia

If doctors treat your diabetes first and foremost with drugs rather than take the time to examine the root cause and try to get YOU to take responsibility for the root causes then people will assume that disease is inevitable and the only course of action is a bag full of meds

Actually Doctors do make great effort to try get people on a healthy diet and do more exercise,
if we have Diabetes 2, but they know people are quite weak though, so they prescribe meds

I am a diabetes 2 sufferer, and high cholesterol
but I admit it is self inflicted,
Of course if I will power I can beat it, but frankly at my age
there is not a lot of point, I make some effort though, just not a lot
I like cream cakes

Since I was a kid I've eaten more than 100,000 weetabix.

How long have I got left?

Badger there are two books you should read

Wheat Belly
Against the grain

Just passed a man jogging...he was white (face and hair) about 80+ -  conspiracy advice regarding excercise put about to kill off old people. Thought it was a ghost - he already looked dead.

Agree with the 'what' you eat bit - just keep moving - can't see the point in killing yoursef!

Just passed a man jogging...he was white (face and hair) about 80+ -  conspiracy advice regarding excercise put about to kill off old people

Well it’s obviously not working then if he’s 80+.

No, if you wanted to deliberately kill the people off prematurely after you’ve wrung every last penny out of them, you’d be better off telling them that something that’s very bad for them should be eaten in 5 portions a day. But if that doesn’t work, increase it to, um, I don’t know – 7 portions a day, perhaps? At the same time, tell them something that makes them slim and protects their hearts from lesions and their brains from inflammation is very very bad for them and will kill them stone dead, so it will, i they so much look at it. Make sure they are absolutely terrified of this essential macro nutrient, and make sure they are absolutely convinced that the other nutrient that they don’t need in any quantity at all is vital to their health, and then... oh, hang on……

Groundhog day Flower :)

What that shows is that there will always be exceptions. Diet for most cancers is a factor, in about 10-15% it is not.

There’s a group of people in Quito, Ecuador, who never get cancer despite smoking and drinking too much. The are all short because they lack or have very low amounts of a hormone called insulin-like growth factor-1. When protein is consumed, this hormone is switched on and you get a proliferation of new cells. When you do not eat it, your existing cells get repaired - which is an evolutionary safeguard. But when new cells are being made via protein consumption, the old ones are not being repaired. Cells in this condition are the ones that can become cancerous. This is why the dwarf people of Quito never get it, their existing cells are always repaired because they have little or none of the aforementioned growth hormone.

The Western diet is high in protein - it is eaten every day often in excessive amounts. For most people, who have fully functioning growth hormone, they are constantly creating new cells when the old ones need repairing. That’s why a fast makes you feel well, your body repairs what it has, it is not leaving cells in a damaged state, with all the implications that can have for developing cancer.

So you can say such-n-such doesn’t fair badly on such-n-such a diet, maybe he’s lucky, but that doesn’t mean you will be or that you can’t take steps to limit your chances of getting a serious illness by taking appropriate steps. Yes it is an illusion of control, but not an entirely forlorn one because there is more rulebook than no rulebook at all. For instance, it's a rule that cancer uses (like us) glucose to give it its daily energy needs, but unlike 'us' it is metabolically inflexible. We can derive our energy needs from fat, cancer cannot. If you are unlucky enough to get cancer you can at least feed yourself without feeding the cancer quite so ravenously.