If just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down what, I wonder, will take away the taste of the bitter pills that will inevitably be needed to counteract the effect of too much sugar?

Apart from its disastrous effect on our teeth and more and more of our young being diagnosed as obese (not to mention the ever increasing adult numbers), it is encouraging to see Wiltshire Council taking the matter seriously and working towards a healthier outlook.

Our work at Kandu has taken us into many schools and sectors of society, in particular, an intensive 18-month intervention programme where we worked alongside Barnardos in a potentially failing school in Wiltshire. We were involved as there were many contributing factors inside and out of the school, which were aggravating its situation. One of the contributing factors was diet.

This was in the time before Jamie Oliver and the like brought the turkey twizzler to the nation’s attention.

Not only were the school meals a concern but also the number of sugar-filled vending machines around the school campus. No doubt the school would have generated some much-needed revenue from the sugary sales but the negative returns with regard to concentration and behaviour, we advised, would ultimately deem the machines counterproductive.

Thankfully, there seems to be much more awareness of the necessity of healthy food, to encourage healthy minds and bodies, but more work is still needed. It may be a good time for us to take a good hard look at our unhealthy reliance on sugar. When we consider the history of its infestation into our daily lives and its dubious ethical foundations, it is a wonder it’s not classed as an illegal substance.

I have been banging on about sugar being a gateway drug for years now; it’s one of the pacifiers we introduce to our children from infancy, which starts an ultimately unhealthy reliance on stimulants. The West Country, particularly Bristol, has a long and often fraught relationship, with not only the trading of sugar as a commodity, but also the forced displacement of countless people, enslaved in order, to enable its production. Many fortunes have been amassed, essentially fuelled by the blood, sweat and tears of the thousands of wretched souls, torn from their homelands, to be put to work on the plantations. The plantations were no better than forced labour camps, whose inhabitants were stripped of all vestiges of their humanity and cultural inheritance. Beaten and abused in order that the ‘polite’ society which valued a sweet palette more highly than human dignity, could sip its tea.

Bizarrely, even when the conscience of the so-called Great and Good of the day fought for the abolition of slavery, to enable the law to be changed, the sugar/slave traders were paid fortunes in compensation to make up for their projected losses.

The ex-slaves were ungraciously given their freedom, without so much as a thank you, let alone reparation for the appalling abuse they had suffered. It is perhaps time that those individuals, companies and countries that benefited from this abhorrent trade should finally compensate the communities whose forebears were enslaved.

It is not an acceptable argument that it ‘happened too long ago’, as the negative effects have continued to blight those communities to this day. Money should never be valued more than humanity.

Meanwhile, if you want your children to stand a better chance of thriving and reduce their chances of becoming stimulant addicts, cut out the excess of sugar in their diet.