FED UP with Sugar

1. Eighty percent of the 600,000 items sold in this country have added sugar. I don’t think people know that when they buy salad dressing and spaghetti sauce, or ‘healthy granola bars,’ that they’re eating added sugars. Supermarkets are booby trapped. 

2. Between 1980 and 2000, the obesity rate doubled in the United States. During that same time, fitness club memberships more than doubled, too. It’s, unfortunately, all about conventional wisdom being wrong. You hear it from everyone: it’s all about energy balance and about people not exercising enough. This may be true, but really: it’s about the sugar.

3. The government knew we were getting fat. Before the soft drink and energy drink explosion, and even before fruit yogurt 6.5 teaspoons of sugar in a serving—they knew we were eating and consuming too much sugar. We've all been misled over the past 30 years.

Yoplait has as much sugar as a pack of Gushers?! (Photos: Radius-TWC)

4. Trendy low-fat foods of the 1980s really effed with our sugar intake. In 1977, Senator George McGovern was warned that obesity would soon be the number one form of malnutrition in the U.S. He tried to issue a set of dietary goals advising Americans to reduce their fat and sugar intakes, but the food industry fought back. Instead, consumers were encouraged to buy foods low in fat. When you take the fat out of the food, it tastes nasty. The food industry knew that, so they had to do something to make the food palatable. What did they do? Dumped in the sugar.

5. By our current rate, 1 in 3 Americans will have diabetes by 2015. Currently, nearly 32 percent of the nation is obese, and in two decades 95 percent of Americans will be overweight or obese.

6. The food industry is acting just like the tobacco industry. Junk food companies are acting very much like tobacco companies did 30 years ago; the marketing tactics are the same and sugar is more addictive than tobacco.

Sugar triggers a similar dopamine “reward” response in the brain as cocaine. (Photos: Radius-TWC)

7. Sugar is more addictive than cocaine?! In a 2007 study, 43 cocaine-addicted laboratory rats were given the choice of cocaine or sugar water over a 15-day period: 93 percent chose sugar. You can stay away from drugs, but everyone has to eat.

8. This is the first generation of kids expected to lead shorter lives than their parents. “We’re in a food fog and it’s time to snap out of it. We haven’t noticed how brazen these companies have gotten. I’m fed up. Hopefully everyone else will be, too.” 

~Thanks to Molly Gallagher