Many have asked the question should sugar be a controlled substance? Monitoring sugar similarly to alcohol or cigarettes, Whitney and I are in full agreement with this!
You’re not the only one incapacitated morning after too many late night sweets! A possum broke into a bakery & ate so many pastries it couldn’t move. This is how they found him!
Freebies. The amount of sugar the average American eats a day is scary, and we’re often wholly unaware when we’re consuming it. Most breakfast cereals contain at least 15g sugar per serving, most of which serving size is less volume than a cup. Frozen coffee drinks at Starbucks or Coffee Bean can contain up to a whopping 50g of sugar in a single drink. Sugar in your burger? How is that possible? Grab a bacon cheeseburger at McDonald’s and get 13g sugar for free! Even so called “healthy” places such as Jamba Juice hide huge amounts of sugar in their smoothies. How do you squeeze 95g of sugar in a supposed “all fruit smoothie?” That’s almost 25 teaspoons! For shock value, go to your cabinet, measure out 25 teaspoons of sugar and actually get a visual idea of how much sugar that actually is. Scary, right?
Be Natural. Don’t Be Fake! There’s a huge difference between naturally occurring sugar in food like fruit, found in the form of fructose and combined with high fiber content, as opposed to manmade sugar in the form of sucrose or glucose. Our bodies easily process the simple sugar fructose and utilize it for energy. Sucrose (a compound of fructose and glucose) is a compound sugar, which is far harder for our liver to process. Over time this increases strain throughout the body, climaxing in our body’s major toxin filtration organ, resulting in the condition “fatty liver.” Fatty Liver leads to insulin resistance, which is the major underlying cause of Diabetes. Unfortunately, replacing sugar with calorie-free sugar alcohols isn’t the answer either as these lab created toxins also wreak internal havoc on more than just your digestive system.
Children Deserve Knowledge Not Obesity & Type II Diabetes. Despite sugar hiding in many non-sugary foods, children are still the biggest consumers of sugar. Could there be a connection to our nation’s major childhood obesity problem? Or the drastic rise in Type 2 Diabetes? Type 2 Diabetes is typically referred to as adult-onset Diabetes as it was generally accepted that this disease only affected people over 40. Sadly, doctors are diagnosing Type II in increasing numbers of inactive children with poor diets. Clearly, like nearly every disease, genetics predispose some of us to developing Diabetes. However, bet your lazy butt that dining, exercise and lifestyle choices largely impact odds of developing Diabetes. As an adult, you know this! Unfortunately, children who take their lessons from the parents, teachers and commonly mass media don’t necessarily get that message, and are developing diabetes after far fewer years of poor diet and lack of exercise.
Rising Cost of Health Care. In addition to the pain this causes the individuals, this epidemic costs the country billions of dollars a year in healthcare. I’m sympathetic, but why should I have to pay for a lifetime of someone else’s poor choices? Every man has free will. We can’t control what someone else chooses to eat or not. So, why should taxpayers be forced to pay for expensive treatment and medication for the Diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, erectile dysfunction and other afflictions resulting from treating your body like a garbage can?
Guess We Gotta Get Political. This frighteningly sad outcome is largely preventable! If the average American is too ignorant to acknowledge the long term effects of a highly-processed sugary diet and take an active role reading food labels, planning meals around nutritional content versus merely cost, convenience and impulse, then let’s simplify it on a dollars and cents level. It’s time for the amount of sugar in products to be more strictly controlled. Like other addictive toxic products such as cigarettes and alcohol, let’s place an additional tax to any product that contains added sugar and institute a minimum age requirement to purchase items with added sugar. Such policies would motivate shoppers to limit buying and consuming sugar, as well as manufacturers to improve the nutritional value of our food.
See links below for more on regulating sugar, and let your voice be heard!
