2042 Sweet Lies

I read an interesting article in National Geographic about the perils of the poison we know as sugar. Yes poison. It used to be a spoonful of sugar helped the medicine go down. Now it causes you to take medicine. Science has more or less concluded that the chief culprit in obesity is none other than sugar.

And not just obesity either. It's also thought to be the ingredient largely behind cholesterol buildup. Because the refined sugar that we consume is about one-half glucose and one-half fructose. The fructose part gets processed by your liver, and converted to fat. A lot-fat high-sugar diet will get you high fat results.

You'll get hypertension too. Which can cause heart attacks. Which lead the American Heart Association in years past to encourage a minimum level of salt in your dietary intake. Which means on all your food products you see a category for salt, which will have a recommended daily value for consumption.

But no such allowance existed for sugar until recently. Aha, you say, what does the AHA say now? They recommend no more than 20 grams of sugar a day. 5 teaspoons. The average American currently consumes 22 teaspoons a day. 88 grams.

Um...Major OD.

One cause? Here's what I noticed on a package of Cornuts. For that dread poison salt, it said 120 mg. Recommended daily value 1500 mg or 1 and 1/2 grams. But for the sugar it just said "less than a gram". And no recommended daily value. "Less than a gram" could mean 99/100 of a gram. So if I ate more than one small pack of Cornuts I'd be on my way to a couple of grams of sugar.

I'm just saying. If they can measure salt in milligrams, how about sugar?

That would be supercalifragilisticexpiallidocius.

 America, ya gotta love it.