Thirty Grams of Sugar.

The news of the day, at least, in Scotland, was that the nation’s obesity could be cured by limiting everybody’s sugar intake to 30 grams: the amount that many people would use in two cups of tea. The suggested remedy is to put a tax on sugar. When I first heard of this measure, I was quite indignant, even though I eat very little of the stuff; then I realized that it isn’t taxed because it is classed as a food and decided that it is really a luxury and not an essential commodity – suddenly, it became a sensible measure in my mind. Not a suggested cure for being overweight was exercise, the other side of the equation.  Weight increase is due to the calorific intake being greater than the expenditure: the law of conservation of energy, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the first physicist to kick the idea into reasonable shape back in the 1670s and ‘80s, yet the concept is still largely ignored in this context.
 
I would refer you to my grandfather, who died in the mid-1970s, as an  example: he thrived on a high energy diet, including a lot of animal fat, and eventually succumbed to a heart attack when he was on the high side of his ninetieth birthday. His life style included cycling to and from his work as a carpenter then, after tea, cycling down to his allotment where he provided most of the vegetables that his household needed. He worked until he was seventy so that he qualified for a higher pension. Ten years later at the age of eighty, while living with my parents, some waste land at the back of the house way purchased, because it was used by yobs for various unsavoury practices, and added to the garden. It was Grandfather who did the bulk of the work bringing it under cultivation. I wish I had his health and fitness
 

Was he unusual, I doubt it. There are many stories of people who, by modern standards, were extremely fit and strong: Grace Darling famously held a heavy twenty-one foot long rowing boat steady in rough seas while her father rescued four men and a woman from a shipwreck. I can't imagine that she didn't take a pair of oars to help her father on the 1.5 km journey to the wreck. Grace died of tuberculosis four years later aged 27. She was a lighthouse keeper’s daughter living on a small island lighthouse, a visit to the mainland meant rowing the boat 5 km each way. She, like the rest of her family, was used to helping her father, on that boat and rowing significant distances.