Eating fats make you fat. It seems so obvious, right? Well actually, it turns out that fat might not deserve its bad reputation.

We are taught from an early age that fats are an essential part of our diet, remember that food pyramid? We need it for lots of reasons, nerve cell development, cell growth, the production of hormones, and as an energy store, just to name to name a few. It is vital part of our diet, always has been, always will be. So, what has changed? Why are many countries now facing a dangerous rise in obesity rates? It turns out it may be that sweet tooth you have!

In the wild, sugars are far less common than you might expect. You may stumble upon a fruit tree on your travels, but that is nothing in comparison to the amounts we now find in most of our diets. Many everyday foods have lots of sugar added. Think about the amount of sugar you had yesterday. Was it less than 50g? That’s the recommended daily amount. To place that 50g into context, there are about 52g of sugar in a 500ml soft-drink bottle.

So, what’s the big issue?  Well we all know that sugars are not good for your teeth but eating more sugar than you need is also a problem for the rest of you. This extra sugar is transported to your liver, where it is transformed into fat. This rise in the amount of sugar in the average diet supports the idea that heart disease and obesity are caused by excess sugar, rather than the fat in your diet.

So next time you are looking at the nutritional information on your food, you might want to take a second look at the sugar content.