WHY ARE SO MANY OF US DIABETIC? COULD IT BE BECAUSE OF OUR DIETS? IS IT BECAUSE WE LIKE SWEETS AND CONSUME SO MANY CARBS?

sity, found that most colas and other bottled drinks in America contained high levels of fructose. Most popular colas got their sweetness from fructose (around 65 per cent). And this was as true of the Sprite-kind of ‘lemon’ drinks.

But fructose is not the only villain. Studies link all sugar consumption to diabetes though the process by which this happens is not fully understood. The statistical evidence however, is compelling. A 2013 study found that whenever sugar became more available in societies, more people got diabetes. The study covered 175 countries and showed that every time another 150 calories of sugar per person per day became available, there was a one per cent increase in the diabetes rate. Another survey showed that sugary drinks increased the risk of diabetes.

So, should we eat less sugar? Of course we should. And do Indians eat too much? I reckon we do. Speak to any Western food critic and they will tell you the same thing: they don’t eat dessert at Indian restaurants because it is just too sweet. Most Western puddings are far less sweet than our desserts.

Mithai is a particular offender; it is loaded with sugar. I have always wondered why it needs to be so sweet and in recent years as places like the Bombay Sweet Shop, which sell less-sweet mithai, have succeeded, I have questioned why our halwais make everything so sweet.

I asked Yash Bhanage, one of the partners at the Bombay Sweet Shop why halwai suse so much sugar. Yash explained that apart from the fact that people seem to like very sweet ladoos (for instance) there were two other reasons.

First of all, have you ever wondered how a boondi ladoo holds together? The answer is that the sugar binds it. Many halwais use sugar in all mithai as a simple binding agent. And secondly, sugar is a natural preservative. Top mithaiwallas will make their sweets fresh every day. But at most places, mithai is expected to last for a few days. So, the sugar content is upped to keep the mithai on the shelves for longer.

Yash and the Bombay Sweet Shop team made a conscious effort to reduce sugar levels. For a start, they refused to keep mithai over a long period. Most of their stuff is made fresh and sold fresh. But they also found that if you made mithai less sweet, people didn’t really mind.

Yash’s view is echoed by Sid Mathur of Khoya, the upmarket mithai company based in Delhi. Sid says that the mithai sold at Khoya is 30 per cent less sweet than the usual mithai you get elsewhere.

So if we can do without so much sugar, why do we consume it? Because we like the idea of sugar and most restaurants are happy to cater to our sweetness fetish.

Sid is also a restaurateur and a restaurant consultant and he says that in most cities (though more in Mumbai than in Delhi) nearly every table orders dessert. And people may waste the main course, but the dessert plates rarely return to the kitchen without everything on them having been gobbled up.

That, by itself, is not particularly significant. The French like having three course meals that include dessert but they don’t have our kind of diabetes problem. So, perhaps it isn’t just that we eat dessert. It is that we eat more sugar than the French and that our mithai and desserts tend to be oversweet. As the mithai experience demonstrates, we could do with less sugar in our sweets: we may not even notice. But chefs and restaurateurs are not willing to take that chance and keeping piling on the sugar.

I don’t accept the new prescription of many health freaks that all sugar is poison. But given how rapidly the number of diabetics is growing in our society and that we don’t really need to over-sweeten mithai and desserts, perhaps it is time to cut back, at least a little.

All good things taste sweeter when they are consumed in moderation.

The views expressed by the columnist

are personal

Recently, places like the Bombay Sweet Shop, which sell lesssweet mithai, have succeeded