Wednesday, April 05, 2017

New Reduced Sugar Kit Kat Bars And The Risks of Overly Simplistic Dietary Demons

One of the things that proponents of low-carb high-fat diets rage against, and probably rightly so, is how the overly simplistic demonization of dietary fats led to the rise of an ultra-processed market place of low-fat (but often high sugar) packaged foods.

And yet many of those same folks spend much of their time beating another overly simplistic drum these days - sugar.

While there's no argument from me that society's excessive consumption of sugar is a large raindrop in our flood of calories and chronic non-communicable diseases, if it becomes a singular focus, we may wind up with products like this new Kit Kat bar.

Nestlé is promoting their new bar on the basis of its reduced sugar content, and its packaging also infers it's "healthier" than before with it's large shout out to having "extra milk and cocoa".

As to the bar itself?

It contains 4 fewer calories than the Kit Kat bar it's replacing along with 0.7g less sugar.

At the end of the day there's a world of difference between "inconsequentially less awful" and "healthier", but that's a distinction that will likely be lost as new lines of ultra-processed foods are launched under the banner of lower sugars.