TEMPLE OF SWEET TREATS RISES ABOVE SUGAR FEARS
Added sugar in everyday foods target of Health Canada campaign
It’s a trickster of a treat — and the top seller in a store devoted to the most beloved sweets of the past half-century.
“It looks like a little penguin, black and white,” Jessie Smyth explains of the chewy confection. “When you bite into it, though, it tastes like peach.”
For the past 15 years, Freak Lunchbox, a candy store on a busy strip of 17 Avenue S.W., has been a go-to for kids wanting lollipops, teens from nearby Western Canada High School looking for a lunchtime fix and adults feeling nostalgic for Lucky Elephant pink candy popcorn, Love Hearts rolls and a sugary drink from The Pop Shoppe.
There’s no mistaking what you’re in for the moment you walk into the store that has Tootsie Roll and Jelly Belly boxes glued to the ceiling, a giant Pez dispenser wall and clear bins of candy everywhere.
“They don’t really need to have the word candy in the name,” says Smyth with a laugh about the Nova Scotia-based candy retailer that employs her.
“I don’t think you could confuse this with any other kind of store — you’re coming in for a sugar hit.”
Sadly, it’s outside of this candycentric shop that one really needs to be wary of how much sugar you’re consuming.
For decades now, grocery stores have lined their shelves with packaged products filled with all kinds of sugars, those health-harming ingredients either difficult to decipher or near impossible to weed out on the side nutrition labels.
Just how hard? A recent study conducted by the University of Toronto on more than 15,000 grocery items discovered that free sugar, also known as added sugar, contributed to 20 per cent of total calories in pre-packaged foods and beverages; it also accounted for 70 per cent in many beverages.
Current guidelines recommend no more than five to 10 per cent of calories come from free sugar in a healthy diet, a discrepancy that partly explains the current epidemic in obesity rates.
It’s in food products many people wouldn’t associate with a sweet, like bread, spaghetti sauce and even salad dressings touted as weight-loss aids; and get this, the U of T researchers found there are more than 150 terms used to describe sugars that aren’t naturally occurring.
It’s not surprising then to hear federal Health Minister Jane Philpott announce on Monday that Health Canada is attacking the issue of unhealthy food and its link to disease and obesity.
First, it will revise the Canada Food Guide to better reflect up-to-date scientific evidence on food and its impact on health. It will create new labelling for certain products, to better identify the different types of sugars it may have, along with new restrictions on the marketing of such products to children.
Also not surprising has been the reaction from various quarters: the Dietitians of Canada, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, the Canadian Cancer Society and charities that serve the nutritional needs of school kids, which have all given Philpott’s announcement the thumbs up.
About the only surprising thing, then, is, why did it take so long?
Chalk it up to decades upon decades of inaction based on a variety of pressures, says Jacob Shelley.
“There are a lot of reasons why it didn’t happen,” says Shelley, an assistant professor in the faculty of law and the school of health studies at Western University in London, Ont. “But it would be fair to say industry pressure has played a significant role.”
Shelley, who has worked for years with the Alberta Policy Coalition for Chronic Disease Prevention — an initiative he says played an influential part in helping the federal government formulate its new policies — refers to such influencers as the American sugar industry paying Harvard scientists in the 1960s to publish reviews downplaying sugar’s role in coronary heart disease, as well as industry involvement over the years with the Canada Food Guide implementations.
“There are multiple prongs of intervention needed,” says Shelley, who acknowledges such measures as restricting marketing to children has become more challenging in the face of websites like YouTube and other media outside of traditional advertising.
“It’s eliminating some of the noise,” says the father of three girls. “It might be able to provide some relief from the constant bombardment.”
Still, even the healthiest diets allow for the rare moment of indulgence in the form of a sweet. On this day, though, the chewy penguins that taste like peach aren’t on the menu at Freak Lunchbox.
“We’re sold out,” says Smyth in the store that makes no bones about being all about the sugar.
“They’re hard to keep in stock, but you might like the blueberry yogurt pretzels.”