As I lie out in the sunshine in my shorts, I am more conscious than normal of my scars. One that runs some six or so inches straight up my chest, and another that runs the length of my left leg, from ankle to groin. I tell my boys I was attacked by a shark.
It is now three years since I had my heart attack, and a brilliant surgeon had to take a vein out of my leg and use it to replace the ones servicing my heart. But that quadruple heart bypass did nothing to address the underlying condition: obesity and diabetes. I didn’t do anything to address them either. Until the fear of coronavirus made me.
We need glucose for energy, but too much of that good thing rots us from the inside. Not that I took much notice. Sometimes my eyesight would lose focus and I couldn’t read a newspaper. But generally, there weren’t any obvious day-to-day symptoms, so it’s easy to just go on as if it’s not really there. And in the West, and also in places like China, type 2 diabetes has been growing fast.
According to the WHO, the number of people with diabetes globally nearly quadrupled between 1980 and 2014 — from 108 million to 422 million. It’s a disease of affluence. Bodies schooled by evolution to store energy to survive periods of famine are badly adapted to manage extended periods of plenty. Type 2 is nature’s way of saying we have had enough. Our prosperity is killing us.
So, since lockdown began, I have been on a mission. No bread, no pasta, no rice, no potatoes. And I have been pretty religious about it. I have allowed myself the breadcrumbs around a fish finger and the body of Christ, but apart from these I have cut out bread and those other foods completely. I have lost over three stone. Where low fat diets have never worked for me, low sugar (ie low carbs) really makes a difference.
Yesterday, I received a letter from my GP which said that my blood sugar average over the past three months has been 6 — compared with the 12 it was this time last year. I have dramatically reduced my diabetes medications. And, hopefully, I am getting close to pushing it into permanent state of remission.
Before lockdown, I was too scared even to verbalise the fear that I might not be around to see my youngest children into their teenage years. Now I can watch my little one learning to walk without feeling guilty. The relief feels wonderful.
I used to find it so reassuring when other people would fail at their diets, thus justifying my own repeated failure. There is nothing quite so comforting as the thought that deep change is impossible because, well, I am the way I am. Change is scary, failure a relief. So there’s no need to try too hard. I’m glad I was forced to confront that.
Because there is a deeper question of moral philosophy about the management of what we eat, and that involves our whole approach to limit and privation. If diabetes is the disease of over-supply, then to address it we need to think very hard about our attitude towards the very idea of having enough, to limit.
In what has to be one of the most American things I have ever read, the megachurch pastor Rick Warren promoted his own wellness eating plan as: “it’s about abundance, not deprivation, and this is why the plan is both transformational and sustainable.”
No, that is why the plan is a lie. Only a church that has sacrificed a belief in respecting limits to the capitalist gods of unlimited growth could so laughably badge up their own diet plan as having nothing to do with deprivation. Type 2 diabetes is the disease you get when you no longer believe that there is such a thing as having enough.
But although Type 2 is recognisably a disease of affluence, of over-supply, what makes the socio-economics of diabetes complicated is that it is the poor and those with African or South East Asian backgrounds who disproportionately suffer from it the most. This does not contradict the thesis that diabetes is a disease of affluence; rather it highlights the fact that in the West, the victims of our philosophy of endless growth are often those at the bottom of the pile. And this should also make us wary to moralise type 2 diabetes too quickly. For although I cannot help but do so in my own case — after all, my own diabetes was caused by too many long lunches — we should be extremely uncomfortable about pointing the finger at others. This can too easily become a version of blaming people for their poverty. Or indeed for their ethnicity.
Yet for me, my own diabetes is a symbolic disease that perfectly embodies the moral failures of free market fundamentalism. The metaphors that dominate our economic body politic continually emphasise the importance of growth, as if the purpose of life were somehow to take up more space. “I hope you are not going to disappear” people tell me, jokingly. And I wonder whether behind this well-meaning quip may lie deep seated fear: less is a threat, it represents our extinction, an intimation of our eventual translation into nothingness.
But it’s not just the need for more and bigger that is being triggered by our desire for a larger share of the pie. Sugar itself seems to have played a continual role in our moral degradation long before capitalism reached its modern form.
“I OWN I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves, And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves; What I hear of their hardships, their tortures, and groans, Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum, For how could we do without sugar and rum?”
(William Cowper, Pity for Poor Africans)
Wilberforce and his group helped force a debate on the morality of slavery by boycotting the ‘big sugar’ of his day. Our developing sweet tooth, as much as our economic greed, was responsible for the growth of the slave trade, with human beings trafficked from Africa to work on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil. Our excessive love for sugar led us to treat other human beings as objects whose only purpose in life was to service our greed. So sugar has, from the very get go, eaten away at us from the inside — morally and now literally.
During lockdown I have had the chance to reconsider my priorities. The emergent philosophy has been for a much simpler life. Work less, cuddle my children more. Do the little things well. Be content with less. And it terrifies me that as more places open up, I will be sucked back into the sort of self-destructive lifestyle I had before. But I will continue to test my blood sugar every day. And if it starts to rise again, it won’t just be medical questions I will be asking myself.
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SubscribeI think you are confusing several things here.
Carbs do contain natural sugars, so unless you sprinkle you rice with castor sugar, they is no connection with the slave trade. You have just been eating too much of them.
Whilst the brilliant success of the free market has stopped famine in the west, it does not force you to eat too much – that is your choice.
I do find slavery disgusting, I blame the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Africans, Turks, Vikings etc. as well as the British.
But, there is one thing about slavery that you should be proud of – the British used their power to largely stop slavery.
So, by all means be proud that you have reduced your blood sugar levels, but also be proud of the role that the British played in stopping the slave trade, and the role the free market plays in stopping famine.
Yes, the British, and the rest of the world too, can be proud and happy about the role the nation played in stopping slavery. Bravo. But two of your assertions are dead wrong: (1) your admonition to Giles about his eating habits and (2) your unbridled enthusiasm for the free market as rescuing the West from famine.
Giles alerts us all to important suppressed news: it’s not how much one eats, but whether or not one eats carbohydrate-intense food. For a summary and citations for peer-reviewed studies just google “Fat: The New Health Paradigm” posted by Credit Suisse Research Institute. For a smart medical practitioner’s perspective on diabetes check out the YouTubes posted by Dr. Sarah Hallberg. Please note carb consumtion doesn’t just cause diabetes, it causes heart disease too.
Those championing unbridled free market in the US have allowed corporations, in pursuit of easy profit, to co-opt the FDA (see the years of ridiculous food pyramids with huge amounts of carbs) and health publishing and health industries (who still advocate for low-fat high-carb diets when the new studies recommend the opposite). Need some proof that something’s gone awry and just maybe the Free Market’s road to avoid famine is a road taking many of us to early death: the obesity rate in the US now exceeds 40% of the population.
Sugars are carbohydrates, not all carbohydrates are sugars.
Rice and other foods have their own sad histories to tell.
That’s a British Empire version of history sure enough. To say we were brilliant for stopping slavery after almost 400 years of persecuting africans is a little disingenious.
Plus, the slave owners were compensated to the tune of approximately 40% of GDP – most of which was invested in what became our industrial revolution. The slaves, of course, received nothing, nor have their ancestors – some of whom became the Windrush generation and suffer(ed) continued racism here despite fighting for Britain in the war and propping up our health service and transport industry.
I’d also beg to differ about the free market stopping famine. A free and fair market might, but a free market is rarely fair since to be fair there needs to be some regulation. As the Irish and the people of Bengal found out, the British were never very fair with food markets and caused famines when they wished to divert food, produced in other countries they controlled, to the British people.
Finally, Giles’ point about sugar is valid. It’s added to most of our foods, and our sweet tooth is due largely because of the supply of sugar since the days of slavery – which as he points out – meant that so many people ignored the brutality being done in our ancestors’ names. Sugar consumption – pushed on us by the food industry – turns into addiction for many (the new tobacco). So, is it really his choice?
This is where your free market comes in again – giving us an obesogenic consumer environment which means avoiding sugar is pretty difficult for most of us.
Oh dear, Lesley, I’m afraid you won’t make me feel guilty for something my ancestors stopped doing two centuries ago. Of course the slave owners were compensated, otherwise abolition would not have happened. And they weren’t compensated with fairy dust, they were compensated with money borrowed by the British Government and paid back by generations of British taxpayers, to our financial detriment and moral credit.
There is nothing objectionable about the idea of compensation. Remember, the medical profession had to be compensated for the creation of the NHS – as Bevan said, “I stuffed their mouths with gold” – but does this invalidate the NHS in your eyes?
The former slaves didn’t need compensation since they had simply swapped being enslaved by a tribal warlord in Africa for, eventually, being emancipated in the West Indies. Something of an improvement in their situation, I think you’ll agree.
You also have a strange conception of the origins of the Bengal famine. Have you forgotten there was a war on?
Remember the Atkins diet? A low card solution to weight gain, much derided by the medical profession (still) yet shown to reverse Type 2 diabetes.
The moral failure in the diabetes crises is not you. The American medical research community have put out a big fat lie. The lie is that saturated fat causes heart disease.
Maybe diabetes is mainly caused by an addicting substance which is sugar and the hormone insulin plays a much bigger roll than you think. Maybe diabetics, CVD and all the modern metabolic diseases are associated with insulin and are not associated with your moral character. Google insulin resistant and find the doctors that can put your diabetes into remission and will also stop or slow down your heart diseases before you go blind or they cut your legs off. Maybe start at dietdoctor.com
On the topic of slavery one has only to follow the money. Once slavery became not economical in Great Briton it was stopped. No morality here. The Irish were cheaper than the slaves so Great Britain switched their source of labour. For the Americans the plantation economy allowed the use of the chain gang which made slavery very profitable.
You don’t sound confused to me at all. You are saying the things that need to be said–clearly & directly. Too much glucose causes diabetes, and sugar exacerbates this process. Sucrose (table sugar) is made of a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule. Fructose is primarily processed by the liver. In many of us this creates metabolic issues (e.e. fatty liver, gout & increased insulin levels). So from a biochemistry perspective, you are hitting the nail on the head: decreasing your glucose & fructose consumption is helping you get healthy again. Nice job 🙂
Congratulations on tackling your diabetes! It’s a daunting task. I would like to gently suggest you do some research on the keto diet? (Cue comments on how it’s just a silly fad 😅)
I started cutting out carbs and increasing fat and protein due to a gestational diabetes scare and haven’t looked back. I don’t see it as a diet, but a lifestyle. I don’t go hungry and I don’t miss carbs (hmmm maybe apart from dark chocolate – but I even managed to give that up for lent). Everything we eat is now home cooked and I have more energy and mental clarity. I used to have great sugar lows after a bowl of apparently healthy porridge, but don’t suffer those anymore, which makes me much easier to live with 😄 You’ve done the hard bit by cutting out the carbs, hopefully this might be a way to make it sustainable for you long term without it feeling like a chore 🙂
Congratulations Giles at losing weight.
Do you like a bit of self-flagellation Giles? I don’t mean this unkindly, but there is no good reason to blame either yourself or affluence for the scourge of that most insidious of drugs – sugar (and its related hand-maiden ““ starch). Obesity and diabetes are more prevalent amongst the poor than the wealthy. After all, I’m pretty sure that you get more calories to the pound (sterling) from bread and potatoes than you do from meat and butter. Nor is there any good reason to feel deprived (and certainly not hungry), on a low-carbohydrate diet, unless of course, at the same time, you are also restricting your fat intake? If you are looking for a culprit for the global obesity/diabetes epidemic, look no further than official diet guidelines, which are (I suspect) generously supported by Big Grain and Big Pharma.
So it’s OK to moralise about diabetes when it affects white people but not others? And if it was ‘our’ love of sugar that led to the Atlantic slave trade what was the cause oof the much longer lasting and even more deadly Islamic/Arabic slave trade fro Africa? Or the longest lasting of all, the indigenous African internal slave trade? Not to mention the slavery that has occurred in every single continent and human civilisation?
“This does not contradict the thesis that diabetes is a disease of affluence.”
Indeed it does not, Giles. It emphasises that the poor in the UK are, in fact, affluent by any objective standard and, frankly, need to take responsibility for their choice of diet.
Thank you for this. You explain something which has puzzled me for years: why do we in Britain seem to treat American culture as if it were part of our own culture? Why is our news so dominated by American news and American language, when, as you point out, how life is actually lived in the UK is very different. You also help to explain why even a very IT friendly old ‘un like me finds it hard to understand why our young people felt they had to risk spreading Covid 19 to show their support for Black Lives. I admire them for doing so but feel that Britain has many more pressing problems. The same applies to Trans Rights, conspiracy theories and other similar US obsessions.
I have enjoyed this article about individual responsibility. Like Giles I have pursued a Low Carb High Fat (LCHF/Keto) lifestyle for a year and have maintained an overall loss of c.25 kilos and in blood sugars am now between 4.5 and 6-5 (i.e normal to pre-diabetic.) after living with diabete-type-2 (D-2) for c.15 years. The diet is easy for me and my drug regime much reduced. Whilst I appreciate Giles’s moral analysis, including slave sugar, he also recognizes that D-2 is not necessarily a disease of the affluent. The great advantage of a keto diet is the concentration of flavour and satisfaction through protein-richer fatty foods rather than starches. However an easy Keto diet is more expensive because normally and throughout the world we bulk out our food cheaply with starches: root vegetables, rice, pasta, wheat etc as well as seeking comfort in sugar addiction. I believe this also partly explains the high-incidence of D-2 in less affluent societies. It is over-reliance on these cheaper products which will kill us with D-2. Despite the slightly increased cost of Keto, one of the great mechanisms of a low-carb diet is that you lose your addiction to starches: so I rarely feel hunger (never have cravings) and my daily intermittent fast (I normally only eat between 18.00 and 23.00) automatically leads to ketosis after c.16 hours of fasting. This is clearly seen because I test my glucose and ketones weekly and can spot deviations from intermittent fasting. Moral superiority is a nice luxury to drive lifestyle changes; for me however it is my new-found respect for my health and life (there is of course a lover involved!) which has warned me how to minimise the risk of Fraser-style heart disease – though we are both a little more smug in the face of Covid-19. (Thinking about my already semi-lockdowned lifestyle a year ago I started taking high-dose Vitamin D to compensate for my mainly indoors life. It would appear, re. Covid-19, that I accidentally made another serendipitous choice!) Another aspect of Giles’s ruminations is that, for those who so wish, it has always been easy since the 18th century to see the connection between sugar (and cotton and tobacco) and slavery but there are many areas in which we are still morally ambivalent e.g. the distinction of the British Empire into “white” dominions and more highly exploited non-white ones, which continues. And there is one area which I hope will be investigated. The UCL studies of the compensation paid to 19th century slave owners on “abolition” suggests that massive amounts of capital moved from government to individuals. I wonder how much of that newly released capital drove the Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century, and especially the boom in railway building, from which we all still benefit.
We have been living under a market distorted by many government actions that create perverse incentives, notably in a direction which conflates finance with the whole economy.
The writer has missed the boat…much of these “protests”, here and abroad, are fueled by the ChiComs (Xi) and Soros. They fund a few criminals (who call themselves activists) to jack up the young (and many old) liberal idiots around the western countries where these “protests” (more accurate to call them what they are-criminal riots) are allowed to take place. In our Constitution we have the right for so-called “protests”. In actuality it says we have the right to “peaceably” assemble to address grievances against our Gub’ment. If they aren’t peaceable then they are criminal and should be dealt with harshly.
The ‘bigger is better’ maxim is certainly a part of Western life, but is it not somewhat arbitrary to apply this to sugar? Could we not just as well apply it to, say, our massively increased consumption of meat and dairy products – might this not in fact be the main contributor to obesity and diabetes? And is this not where the ‘growth’ philosophy is actually at its wildest (think of broiler hens or ‘high-performance’ dairy cows)? If we had an intuitive understanding of what we are supposed to eat (as a species), we wouldn’t need to worry too much about quantity. After all, you never have to tell a horse to stop eating grass, or a monkey to stop eating fruit.
Yes, we eat too much meat and dairy products but overeating isn’t limited to humans, where food is available. Horses can and do eat too much grass (and many suffer from potentially fatal laminitis when they do.) How often do we hear of vets putting domestic cats and dogs on diets because their owners have spoilt them with too many treats?
I recommend https://www.amazon.co.uk/Di….
This is very enlightening and hopefully may make you rethink giving up carbs!
‘I have allowed myself the breadcrumbs around a fish finger and the body of Christ,’
I marvel at the flippancy of this remark. Especially from an Anglican Priest.
I am so relieved to know that the body of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is compatible with a low carb diet. Salvation AND weight loss combined…now there’s a winner!
Why not take it a step further and consecrate the crumbs on a fish finger? You could even freeze one and pop it into a refrigerated monstrance for the adoration of the faithful.
I am sorry that your normal reasoned articles have been binned for this clearly ill informed diatribe about type 2. And to throw in a sop to the slave trade – ridiculous.
At a high level of fitness I was brought up short and bypass needed. The cardiologist stating I had more chance of winning the lottery without a ticket than having a heart problem. One point he made clear was that it was very likely I would develop diabetes 2. I did. I do not like sweet things or recognise your comments. Everyone is an individual. Write your sob story by all means but please try to avoid joining the media circus over the latest fad.
Well said. I’m slim and for the first time ever, when covid reports mentioned BMI, I calculated mine and the blurb told me I was borderline on the low side. I eat carbs (love toast in the morning), fats, meat, fruit, whatever but not a lot of sweeties and puds.
I think Giles trying to blame his own over-indulgence on capitalism and a growth based economy is really pathetic.
FWIW Gerry, my brother is just like you: high level of fitness, slim, doesn’t over-eat and still needed a quadruple by-pass.
Giles, glad you lost weight and faced up to owning your own health issues. But slave trade …… ? Really?