By Joachim Ng
It’s time for Ipoh to ride on Visit Perak Year 2024’s triumphant campaign that is claimed to have brought in a truly astonishing 8.4 million visitors, with Kinta as the top performing district recording some 3 million visitors last year. Travellers came from Australia, China, India, and Europe, besides the Asean countries.
Kinta is the biggest attraction – and not because of Ipoh’s tasty dishes as commonly assumed by locals. Kinta Valley is a national geopark with alluring limestone karst landscape spread over 2,000 sq km. Magnetic draws pulling in foreign tourists include Gunung Lang, Tambun Cave, Gua Tempurung, and Naga Mas Cave. Perak’s other lures are high-profile adventure, sports and cultural events.
All that the silver city needs is just one more ingredient so it can snatch the most glittering crown of all as the world’s “best city” destination. Consider this tagline for 2025: Ipoh the World’s Healthiest City.
The primary ingredient for best health is nutritious daily food. Ipoh dishes are missing this ingredient, although they are certainly the tastiest in all our cities. What has Ipoh given to the nation in terms of health? It has contributed patients to government health facilities, as 7 in 10 diabetic people in Malaysia seek treatment in public hospitals.
Nearly five million Malaysians are pre-diabetic, figures released by the Health Ministry last year indicate, and diabetic treatments cost taxpayers more than RM4 billion annually.
Malaysians are dosed with a high intake of added sugar in their daily diet. As discovered by the Malaysian Adult Nutrition Survey (MANS) conducted in 2003 and 2014 by the Health Ministry, refined white sugar is consistently ranked among the top 10 food items consumed daily by adults.
The average Malaysian takes 26 teaspoons of refined white sugar per day – more than 4 times the recommended maximum of 25gm per day or 6 tsp. An average of 12 teaspoons of sugar daily comes from condensed milk or creamer and sugary beverages such as cordials, carbonated drinks, and sugar-sweetened ready-to-drink packaged drinks.
Dieticians have also raised concerns about the long-term health effects of using artificial sweeteners. These effects could increase metabolic disorders and raise the tolerance level for sweet foods. More than 1,000 food and beverage products contain artificial sweeteners. Some variants, such as sucralose and saccharin, are 100 times sweeter than refined sugar.
If this isn’t enough to scare you, a study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco last year found that high levels of added sugars worsened metabolic health and brought on early disease, as well as contributed to premature death by accelerating epigenetic ageing.
Let’s stop throwing public money and diabetic lives down the ICU tube by depending on voluntary efforts to reduce sugar consumption. It should be done by law. That’s what lawmakers should do – enact laws to eliminate this silent killer known as diabetes.
The Federal Government has already tasted a small victory in mandating a 50% reduction in the added sugar content of beverages served in all its programmes including meetings. Did anybody skip a government programme or meeting in protest?
Apply the ruling to all sectors of society and raise the 50% bar to 100%. Stop pandering to anyone’s death wish. If you’re a traffic cop and daily you see one motorcyclist always beating the red lights, do you give him one year to slowly wind down his bad habit? For the first month, go through red only 90% of the time. The second month, reduce it to 80%. By the 10th month, he would be stopping at all red lights. The remaining two months is the usual extra time. But he could be dead long before the 10th month.
Towards the end of 2024, a University of Washington study found that 50% of lower-income households and 18% of higher-income households readily cut their purchases of sweetened beverages when incentivised to do so by higher costs. This means that refined white sugar is totally unnecessary for nutrition.
So what’s holding back Ipoh city council? Just do it! Since refined white sugar is completely unnecessary for nutrition, use the law to severely restrict it. Require all eateries including roadside stalls to stop adding sugar to foods and drinks. They should do so only upon customer request, as is the standard practice in countries such as Australia. The gourmet law throughout Malaysia is for eateries to automatically add sugar or condensed milk to whatever dish is being cooked or drink served.
From now on, make it an offence with a penalty of one week’s closure for the first infringement, two weeks closure for repeating the offence, and three weeks closure for a third infringement. Guaranteed there won’t be a fourth.
What about bottled and canned drinks already sweetened at the factory? Ban them. Manufacturers will quickly adapt and remove all sugar or sweeteners from their drinks.You can hear the screams now. What about my ais kacang and teh tarik? Try them without the sugar, and you will love it just as much.
The welcome truth is that you can switch off your craving for sweets with just one flick. This is because natural sugars can be found in most unrefined foods. All fruits contain sugar known as fructose that is slowly broken down in the body and does not cause the same wild fluctuations in blood sugar levels as refined white sugar or table sugar (known as sucrose).
Whole fruits are also a rich source of vitamins, minerals, fibre and antioxidants. This is how much natural sugar you get in a 10-day package of 10 raw fruits totalling 1,000gm: mangoes, bananas, grapes, apples, blueberries, apricots, plums, peaches, melons, papayas. Total: 104 gm of fructose, with grapes the highest at 15.48 gm and papaya the lowest at 5.90gm. If you eat just one fruit a day, you get a daily average of 10 gm.
Remember that fresh is best, and one whole fruit is a natural way to limit your sugar intake. Limit your intake of dried fruit or fruit juice as the sugar is concentrated with no water (in the case of dried fruit) or no fibre (in the case of juice). A raw peach contains 8.39 gm while a dried peach contains a staggering 41.74gm. Avoid sweetened canned fruits packed in syrup, even if given to you for free. It’s really a free ride to the hospital. Why are these cans not included in the list of banned goods?
Don’t stop there. Go on to white rice and white bread. Made from white flour, they are missing healthy fibre, vitamins, and minerals. Refined grains quickly convert to sugar, which causes belly fat that is linked to heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Do you know the reason why Malaysians shy away from brown rice? It’s because of its association with poverty, being the grain historically produced in fields by poor farmers. In contrast, white rice gets high demand because of its association with mills owned by the rich.
Compel all eateries – again including roadside stalls – to offer white rice or brown rice, and white bread or whole grain bread. Before serving, they must by law ask the customer: “White rice or brown rice? White bread or wholegrain bread?”
As most white rice is imported, a switch to brown will incentivise the local rice production chain from field to mill to gear up supply. The surge in demand will lower the price of brown to below that of white, making it highly affordable.
Will this radical all-out switch away from refined white sugar devastate Ipoh? No, it certainly will not, because creative eateries can adjust and produce dishes and drinks without added sugar. Sugar-free cakes, cookies, yoghurt, and waffles have long been available. A dozen eateries with health fans as their owners have also stayed off sugar.
Furthermore, it will put us on the world map as nutritionists and dieticians across the globe will help promote Ipoh as the World’s Healthiest City. Don’t you want that accolade?
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Ipoh Echo
