One of my
closely guarded personal secrets, to be shared only with my nearest and dearest
and anyone surfing the internet, is that for some time I have been partial to
muesli. Yes, I know, it puts me in the
“health freak” marketing segment.
It all
started as long ago as 1951 when I found myself halfway up a Swiss mountain and
looking at what was on offer at the breakfast table. It was not a meal that I could hope for at
home or at any decent seaside boarding house.
The
“filler” part of it was the mix that was muesli as it was then. It was rarely found in England
It was many
years later before muesli was encountered again and with it the realisation
that you could either buy it or make your own mix. So many kinds were tried and many home mixes
made from time to time.
They would
all have sugar or some equivalent sweetener but then came the day when the
growing man, horizontally rather than vertically, had to cut out the sweet
stuff and resort to other flavours. And
it became back to making your own mix.
This was
because when going to the shops and superstores it was almost impossible to
find a mix without sugar or some equivalent sweetener. The premium brands had fancier and
“healthier” sweeteners but still carrying too great a whack of weight
potential.
Event then
the realisation that a lot more foods, many deemed “healthy” were also carrying
a hefty portion of sugar or sweetener had not dawned. This came only slowly when for other reasons
we had to start checking out the content of all the food products we bought in
detail.
There has
been a good deal of attention paid to this recently as the obesity issue has
become a major health concern. Even
today, the Daily Mail had a large piece in its health section on many items
carrying an unexpected heavy sugar load in content.
This is not
the place to debate all the issues and the problems that have arisen and are
not likely to away quickly. There are
now three generations born to the sweet stuff most of whom possibly cannot like
foods without heavy and sweet flavours.
It was all
so different and we all liked our candy:
There was
once a time when the tea break came up and we sat on the barrows with a pint mug
of strong tea with a good four or five spoonfuls of refined sugar, or better,
the best part of a can of condensed milk.
How times
change.
I like reading food labels. The information is almost always there and often it says you should not be eating this.
ReplyDeleteMy parents made their own muesli which is probably the best thing to do, because as you say, the commercial stuff can be loaded with sugar.