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[title]If I had to describe my relationship with sugar, I’d use words like ‘obsessive’, ‘intimate’ and ‘fanatical’. I associate it with love – with my big sister buying me Freddo Frogs on the 159 bus to nursery school, with my grandma treating me to penny sweets on the bus home again. Then, later, with finding a blissful release from stress by methodically chewing my way through a Chinatown bubble tea, or with fending off geese to eat wedges of cake in Victoria Park café, the buttercream melting on my tongue as the sun sets sweetly over the sparkling lake. If this all sounds saccharine, forgive me – my critical faculties (and teeth!) have no doubt been eroded by an endless, pastel-tinted succession of sweet treats.
So all things considered, I should be positively thrilled that, at this moment in time, dessert bars and bubble-tea shops are springing up on every London high street, like sprinkles on a doughnut. A 2019 study found that overall numbers of ice-cream parlours and cake shops in the UK were rising, just as numbers of pubs and restaurants fell. This whole city is in love with sugar, too, and you can’t walk two steps without passing an opportunity for consummation. Bring on the glucose-fuelled bacchanal!
But I’m starting to question my three-decade-long relationship with the white stuff. I’ve suffered from debilitating headaches for years, and always used to think that eating sugar was a great way to (temporarily) fend off the pain. But what if the cure was actually the cause? Research has increasingly linked sharp fluctuations in your blood sugar levels to migraines.
So I chat to Dr Jen Unwin, who works with her GP husband on reducing people’s sugar intake. As she explains, it’s pretty essential work. A high-sugar diet can indeed trigger migraines. But there are other, more serious health concerns. ‘The rise in type two diabetes is really worrying,’ she says. ‘There’s a lot of research looking at alzheimer’s as a metabolic disease, too: some people are calling it “type three diabetes”. And there's also quite a lot of evidence now that people with high-sugar diets are much more likely to have mental health problems like depression and anxiety.’
This is the kind of warning I’d normally shrug off, a bitter aperitif before cheerily eating apple crumble and custard for dinner. But even my happy-go-lucky approach to my own health can’t cloak the fact that I’m missing out on stuff I want to do because of migraines: everyone else is off having fun while I’m lying on the sofa in a darkened room, an ice pack on my head.
Something has to change. But is it possible to quit sugar in a city as sweet as London?
Constant craving
I’ve always known sugar isn’t good for you. Always! That knowledge was consistently sprinkled over my upbringing (although admittedly my childhood dentist did somewhat confuse her message by also sprinkling a handful of hundreds-of-thousands into my fist, to eat on the way home).
‘When you look at the brain of a sugar addict, you’ll see the brain reacts to sugar much as it would to alcohol or drugs.’
But quitting isn’t easy. As Unwin tells me, ‘When you look at the brain of a sugar addict, you’ll see the brain reacts to sugar much as it would to alcohol or drugs. You get boosts in dopamine, which is about reward and motivation, serotonin, which is the feelgood happy hormone, and oxytocin, which is related to closeness and comfort.’
As well as being emotional, people’s relationships with sugar are also very individual. ‘Not everyone who drinks alcohol becomes an alcoholic’, says Unwin. ‘It’s a similar profile for sugar. We’re all exposed to it, but not everyone’s going to develop an addiction.’
Alcoholics have to find new ways to socialise, away from pubs and old drinking buddies. But if sugar is an addiction, avoiding temptation in London’s treat-filled streets is pretty much impossible.
The rise and rise of dessert bars
One of the joys of city life under capitalism is that you can eat anything, at any time. London’s streets are clogged with Uber Eats or Deliveroo drivers catering to bizarrely specific cravings (when I was self-isolating with Covid, only Lai Cha’s taro and coconut cake would cut it).
Once, dessert was a time-limited event. Now, the Old Street branch of Creams is open until 5am, every night of the week: the kind of late licence that most nightclubs can only dream of.
Sweet foods are also muscling in on territory once jealously guarded by the savoury, becoming the main event, not an afterthought.
A freshly opened branch of Heavenly Desserts on Baker Street caters to the higher end of the market with rarified items like dessert tapas – Marie Antoinette-worthy little dishes of pastel-tinted macarons or mini doughnuts or pistachio-scattered baklava.
‘It’s a happy product’, says its owner, Yousif Aslam. ‘It gets the endorphins flowing. Customers choose to socialise at our venues because it’s a happy product.’
He tells me that when he first started the chain in 2008 in Birmingham, it primarily catered to Muslim customers, who saw it as a welcome place to socialise: ‘It’s free of alcohol, it’s open till late, and it’s a very different environment to your local boozer.’ But as younger generations turn away from alcohol (almost one in four young adults is now teetotal), his customer base is much wider. ‘The demographic has completely changed. Our typical customer is aged 21 to 28. For them, it’s as mainstream as going to a coffee shop.’
As the cost-of-living crisis bites, you might expect that purveyors of non-essential luxuries like croffles (croissant waffles) would be the first to go. But actually, they’re pretty resilient businesses.
Joe Lutrario, deputy editor of Restaurant Magazine, reckons that they’re appealing to people on a budget: ‘They’re an affordable luxury. If you go out for dessert, it’ll be a lower spend per head than pretty much any restaurant.’
Plus, running a sugar-based business like a bubble-tea shop is cheap. As Lutrario explains, ‘These businesses often need a smaller square footage to operate, so that means lower rents. Their ingredients aren’t that expensive, but their products are sold at quite a premium.’
I ask Aslam whether he’s worried that health concerns will turn customers away from his sugar-based product. He’s buoyantly optimistic. ‘It’s no different from having a pizza from a calorie perspective,’ he says.
Quitting carbs is hard to do
I’m bit baffled by the statement that a dessert is no worse for you than a pizza. I feel like it can’t be right.
But there's an element of truth to it. After all, all refined carbs, not just pure sugar, are in the frame for health risks. Dr Unwin says that ‘highly refined carbohydrates turn to sugar very quickly in our bloodstreams. Basically, your body doesn’t know the difference between you eating a Mars bar or half a loaf of processed white bread.’
She reckons that better carb options are less processed, higher-fibre ones: like potatoes with the skin on or brown rice. But that’s not really the kind of food that my fave restaurants serve, bar a few wholefood heroes like Eat of Eden.
Unwin recommends a trip to Marylebone restaurant Caldesi, which now serves low-carb options, after its chef Giancarlo Caldesi reversed his type two diabetes by following a low-carb diet. I’ve got to admit that I can’t summon up much enthusiasm for the advertised ‘white cabbage ribbons’ instead of the delicious pasta featured elsewhere on the menu, even if they do come with a Tuscan ragù. If I eat out, I want it to feel special, not like a chore. I want it to be a treat.
But arguably, my relationship with ‘treats’ has got a little skewed. Mid-pandemic, Imogen West-Knights wrote a Financial Times piece about the emergence of ‘treat brain’, exploring how the misery and boredom of being stuck at home encouraged people to use constant rewards as a coping mechanism.
Just as some people got hooked on delivery takeaways, I got addicted to making chocolatey mug cakes in the microwave, burying my stomach-churning fears about the imminent collapse of society in a comforting sludge of molten chocolate. I knew it wasn’t great. But it was a hard habit to shift. After all, humans evolved in a setting where food was precious and hard to come by, so it’s unsurprising that it’s hard for us to self-regulate in a world where gratification comes at the push of a button.
The unhealthiness of modern life goes beyond the omnipresence of treats. It also extends to lifestyle, and to a culture in which long working days and commutes suck up most of our time, leaving us too exhausted to cook from scratch. During lockdown, I cooked proper food as well as sweet stuff, simmering pots of lentils or creating elaborate mezze spreads.
But as the city opened back up, I fell deep into the kind of hectic office worker existence I never thought I’d return to, one that comes with a diet of snatched sandwiches, Gregg’s vegan sausage rolls and sugar in every possible form. As Unwin puts it, ‘It’s difficult to change our nutrition habits when the environment we’re in isn’t supporting us to do that.’
A sugar-saturated city
Maybe it’s melodramatic to say this, but sometimes I feel like London isn't a city that wants you to be healthy.
This is a city that wants to sell you stuff at every turn. Walking through Covent Garden as I shakily withdraw from sugar feels like a low-rent horror movie, beset by ever-more elaborate monsters: cut-out signs luridly advertising matcha ice cream, crème brûlée pancakes, penis-shaped waffles.
‘It’s difficult to change our nutrition habits when the environment we’re in isn’t supporting us to do that.’
London is also a city that's pretty stressful to live in, especially as the cost of living crisis bites. George Orwell wrote that ‘When you're harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit tasty. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.’ And he was writing back in 1937: imagine what he would have said if exposed to the croffle!
Breaking the cycle of turning to sugary food as an escape from stress has been harder than I imagined. Six weeks in, I still have to actively override my treat-hungry brain on an hourly basis. I still feel my heart race with excitement a little bit when I pass a Chinatown bubble-tea shop. But I can’t deny that scrapping my daily rotation of chocolate bars, cake, and ice cream has made my migraines less frequent and significantly less severe.
Six weeks ago I would have called you a narc for saying it, but it’s true, you really do start to enjoy the natural sweetness in food after a while. Apple and plain yoghurt becomes a treat. Hot chocolate made with cacao, milk and a sprinkling of cinnamon and cardamom is just as comforting as a cup of chocolatey Highlights. And there’s been a deeper change, too. I feel calmer, and have noticed my thoughts are racing less, as I subtly adjust to having a different, less frenzied, less obsessive relationship with food.
From here on, I’ve decided to save sugary foods for fancy meals out or for celebrations, and so far that’s working out for me. Some medical professionals would say that’s not enough, and that we should all be cutting back on bread and pasta too. But that sounds like way more than I can handle right now.
Carb-free keto diets are currently surging in popularity, but so are fears that they lead to nutritional deficiencies, impaired bone health and heart disease. An ultra-low-carb lifestyle is just another deranged product of capitalism, spawning a whole range of energy bars and protein powders that can be sold to people desperate to feel a sense of control over their lifespan – something that’s ultimately in the lap of the gods. Dietary extremism of any kind isn't healthy. I don’t want to live for ever, or to assume the lithe proportions of a Stoke Newington whippet. Instead, I want a chilled-out relationship with what I eat. Less like Gwyneth Paltrow, more like a cow who munches what’s good for it without dwelling on it too much.
I’m starting to fall out of love with sugar, but like any break-up, it’ll be a long process, full of painful reminders of my happy-go-lucky days of existing on Cuppacha bubble teas or daily Pret chocolate croissants. Still, the promise of a clearer, calmer brain is just as sweet. Almost.