Aging has many disadvantages, but some advantages, too! For example, when I was younger I could eat nearly everything, good or bad, sometimes overeating, suffering few or no consequences. When we are young our body is strong and can take almost anything, but as we age we become weaker and more sensitive, at least I have become more sensitive and this is good. Now if I drink more than half a glass of wine or beer, if I eat too much sweet food, especially chocolate, or too much salt, crisps for example, I get a headache, which I interpret as a signal from the body saying ‘This is not good for you, watch out!’ I never drank much, but when I was younger I did sometimes eat food with too much sugar or salt and didn’t have any negative reactions. In spite of this, there is a cumulative effect, and some of the physical problems, luckily not serious, I have now may be the result of that unhealthy eating in the past. Perhaps even my enlarged prostate or other small problems I suffer from every now and then may be due to that. Of course, many other factors may be involved, too, such as pollution and the consumption of meat. However, partly because my cholesterol is a little above norm, I avoid red meat now (and eat little meat anyway). In any case, if my body didn’t warn me through these headaches that too much sugar, salt or alcohol are not good for me, I believe my health would be much worse now!

Alcohol, salt and sugar are ubiquitous. However, whereas alcohol is mostly found in alcoholic drinks and it is easy to identify (as is red meat), salt and sugar are found everywhere, even in the most unsuspicious food. Sugar, for example, seems to be the cause of plenty of problems, such as weight gain, heart diseases, acne, diabetes, cancer, depression, skin and cellular aging, lack of energy, a fatty liver and many others (see for example https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/too-much-sugar). The other day I watched again the excellent documentary ‘That sugar film’ by Damon Gameau (2014), which reminded me of how harmful sugar is, partly thanks to its addictive nature. The documentary showed that as much as 80% of the products we find in a supermarket contain some amount of sugar! Not just sweets and canned drinks, but even tomato and bean tins, bread, pasta, and so on and so forth. It is very difficult then to keep the amount of sugar we ingest low… There wasn’t so much sugar in food and drinks until the 1950s, and then the industry started increasingly adding it everywhere to attract more consumers, endangering their health and increasing these industries’ profit. It seems to me that wild animals are much healthier than human beings, and two of the reasons may be that they do a lot of physical exercise and eat mostly natural products with little sugar… For example, I observe the monkeys – small macaques – that live in the patches of forest in the university campus where I work here in Malaysia. Whatever their age they all look so strong and healthy! And I’ve never seen even one with a tooth missing, all looking white and strong!

There should be more health education and governments should require the food and drink industry to reduce drastically the amount of sugar they use, for the sake of their citizens’ health… But this industry seems to be much more powerful than governments. Probably many more people have died because of abuse of alcohol, salt and sugar in the last couple of years than because of COVID. And I believe it is much cheaper to have a healthy lifestyle and ban dangerous food and drinks, than providing millions of people with costly vaccinations (which does not mean that the COVID vaccinations have not saved many lives, which they have!).

All I suggest here is to listen to your body and check the label on the food and drinks you are buying, trying to avoid those that contain too much sugar or salt, even when they might look healthy, like fruit juice or yogurt. A small jar of yogurt can contain as much as 18 grams of sugar (4.5 teaspoons), and a small bottle of fruit juice at least 14 grams (3.5 teaspoons)! Less than the 35 grams (9 teaspoons!) found in a can of Coke, but still…

So whether you get headaches like me or not, just watch out and be healthy!