Allen Carr, without whose seminal book about giving up smoking I would have given up a lot sooner, did say one thing about this habit that was amazingly true. Don't - I paraphrase - tell a smoker they're giving themselves cancer. Don't mention illness at all. You will simply frighten the smoker, the smoker will go farther into denial, the last thing the smoker will do is face up to its high risk behaviour, and the very first thing it will do, this capricious creature, is light up again. And again. Until it dies.
Now, nobody loathes an ad hominem statement more than I, but I did find this to be remarkably accurate. The larger the signs on cigarette packets got, the more delightful it was to acknowledge them. The more dire the warnings, the more fun it was to refer to them. (My special friend and I used to swap "smoking causes impotence" for "smoking causes ageing of the skin". Even though, technically, we both should have been equally worried about both of those things.)
It pleases certain new agers to claim that sugar is as addictive as nicotine and heroin, which I personally don't believe for a second, and hey, it's lucky I'm a scientist. The point is not how addictive sugar is, which at some point will be proven one way or the other, but what measures have just been taken on the packaging of chocolate. "Be Treatwise" is the message: "Be active for at least 30 minutes a day." The managing director of Cadbury Trebor Basset, Simon Baldry, said: "Communicating our 'Be Treatwise' message to millions of consumers daily by our packs is the most powerful way we can help people to understand and enjoy our products as part of their diet." Sometimes it's best not to give people time to come up with a statement.
This is almost intolerable. It is one thing being warned on the packaging of a drug that increases your chances of fatal illness by 200 times, it is quite another to be warned on the packaging of something that, calories per gram, is less threatening than olive sodding oil. It's purely cynical - nobody chorfs through a damaging amount of chocolate without knowing it's bad for them. You can tell by the rising nausea and the fact that your teeth are stuck together that this stuff, in excess, is no good. The notion that a health warning might prompt you to think "Hang on ... part of me wants to eat chocs all the time, but now I've read that, I'm only going to eat it in moderation" is patently ludicrous. Smokers don't puff their way to impotence because they don't understand words with more than two syllables. They do it because the more you warn them, the more self-destructive they feel, until you eventually warn them so trenchantly that they cut out the middle man and set fire to themselves.
What bothers me is not that these warnings do not work, and that the people making them are misguided. There is nothing in the least misguided about this - sugar manufacturers don't intend to put us off sugar any more than Rothmans intends to put us off fags. Precisely because they know we can't be put off, they'll print any damn thing they're told to. If the manufacturers of Camel Lights were told to write "your knob will go green and fall off", they would do so, because they know addiction and they know its myopia.
That's the message we should take from the Treatwise campaign. Not that we ought to do 30 minutes of exercise for every choco treat. Not the infantile "treaty" talk that manages to be more nauseating than the treat itself. No, refer back to fags - manufacturers succumb to this warnings game, under no greater duress than a friendly word, because they know it will make no difference to their sales. If it were any other way, they'd be waiting for legislation. So maybe sugar is as addictive as the hippies make out, after all.
