My good friend John Duffy, PT recently posted the following picture and comment on his blog:
Hang this on your fridge and around your house….what a gruesome reminder of how much sugar is in that stuff.
Tuesday, Duffy alerted his readers to Steve Kamb’s factually accurate and highly entertaining Nerd Fitness blog post on “Why Sugar is Worse Than Darth Vader.” Kamb tells it like it is:
Sugar.
Highly addictive, horribly debilitating, unfortunately pervasive, and freaking delicious.
If I had to point to ONE culprit to our country’s expanding waistlines and rapidly deteriorating health, it would be sugar. The amount of havoc sugar and sugar substitutes have wreaked on our nation is horribly depressing. Fear not, as I’ve come up with the perfect solution!
Eat less sugar if you want to live longer.
The end.
Eating less sugar may be easier said than done because sugar is everywhere, most stealthily in highly processed “foods”:
This might be the most telling statistic relating to sugar, especially when that close to 70% of America is overweight with a THIRD of the nation obese:
1822: Americans consume 45 grams of sugar every five days, or the amount of sugar in a can of coke.
2012: Americans consume 756 grams of sugar every five days, or 130 POUNDS of sugar a year.
As we have grown as a country (in more ways than one), sugar has continued to play an increasingly more prominent role in our food. It’s not just sugary foods like candy and cookies either, but sugar has made its way into practically EVERYTHING we eat.
Kamb includes the video below as well as a very funny (and very inappropriate for this blog) Louis CK bit:
To give you an idea of how distorted our thinking of eating and obesity has become in this country, I recently read a comment from a prominent bariatric surgeon who stated that his patients were “cursed with bad metabolism.” Yes, only in a country where food is abundant and cheap, and where people are eating themselves, literally, to death, is bad metabolism is a “curse.” For most of Earth’s population, the truth today (as well as throughout human history) is that bad metabolism is a blessing! “Good” metabolism may be the worst thing for a person to have in times of food scarcity.
We’ve talked about sugar and the obesity epidemic in the United States on The PediaBlog here and here. Read the rest of Steve Kamb’s Nerd Fitness blog here.