'Sugar High' has become an uncomfortable phrase.

I apologize for the ranting nature of this post but I’ve been kind of holding this in my head and I kind of need to just spit it out now, so here’s a bunch of stuff I’ve learned recently that I’m really kind of... very pissed about. Ready? Here we go:

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This really all started due to a documentary called ‘Fed Up’ on Netflix (and then one called 'Hungry for Change', both of which are good and you may want to watch them if you're at all interested in this type of thing).

'Fed Up' sort of walks you through how all the sugar in our 'food-products' - like, not even food anymore honestly - is the main cause of obesity and the diseases you typically associate with it in the U.S. and around the world today, due to the standard American diet being exported around the world.

This is basically because sugar, when ingested in large quantities, overloads the liver. When the liver is overloaded, it triggers the pancreas to produce insulin, which causes fat storage. It’s sugar, not fat or calories (though those are still important), that contributes the most to America’s struggling with weight and health.

Let's take a simple example: When you eat 160 calories of, say, almonds, everything in them is absorbed slowly, so your blood sugar rises slower and for longer, meaning you don’t need nearly as much insulin to bring it back down. You’re also getting dietary fiber and healthy fats and a bunch of other things. On the flip side, 160 calories of soda is pure sugar, and so it’s absorbed through the portal system to the liver - which means it hits the liver all at once, which causes blood sugar spikes, which causes rapid insulin production, which is essentially why we have almost 60 thousand cases of type 2 diabetes in children in this country.

For a little more context, type 2 diabetes used to be called ‘adult onset diabetes’, because there were no cases in children. Not anymore. We have medically obese six-month-olds, mostly because of this crap. Even the people who look skinny and ‘healthy’ usually have fat collected around their internal organs because of all this overdosing on sugar, which of course can cause the exact same health issues as someone who is visibly overweight.

So, how did this happen?

Well, essentially, back in 1977, there was this thing called ‘The McGovern Report’, which was a nutrition report that basically said that Americans should limit their intake of beef, sugar, and dairy products for optimal health. Of course, the beef, sugar, and dairy industries went nuts and pushed them to change the report. They did. And the recommendations to ‘reduce intake’ of anything were scratched from the final version in favor of encouraging Americans to buy more 'lean' products. When the skim milk (milk without the fat) idea really took hold in the 80s, all that milk fat had to go somewhere. Well, the easiest thing for them to do was to make it into cheese. The problem was that soon enough, they had more cheese than they really knew what to do with, but instead of pushing the dairy industry to cut back, they just said ‘Hey, why don’t we help them sell more cheese?’

So they did. Now the cheese section in almost any grocery story is overstuffed with all manner of cheese and cheese-food product.

A similar thing happened between the World Health Organization and the Bush Administration where they recommenced that no more than 10% of daily calories should come from sugar. And what basically happened was that the administration threatened to pull all of their funding from the WHO if the report was not revised. They extorted the WHO. And now the report states that no more than 25% of daily calories should come from sugar - 2.5x the WHO’s recommendation. That’s why you never see a percentage listed beside sugar on the label of any food in the U.S. You’d be seeing 150% or 225% of your daily value.

And what gets me the most is that this is in everything.

80% of all foods in almost any grocery store have added sugar in them and why? Because when we as a nation realized that we were, to put it simply, ‘getting fat’, we decided that fat was the enemy. So we had it reduced or removed. Everything is ‘fat-free’ or ‘reduced fat’. But here’s the problem: when you remove fat from food, it tastes awful. It tastes like cardboard. So what to we do? We pour in some sugar to cover the taste. Kid’s cereals, soft drinks, candy, vitamin water, salad dressing - damn near everything that didn’t come directly or almost directly from a plant.

And these overabundances of sugar are, most obviously, also found in candies. Candy which is marketed directly to children primarily because of the addictive qualities of the sugar it contains. A child who is well and truly addicted to sugar is likely to be a customer for life.

What people need to understand is that sugar is a concentrated substance, like high fructose corn syrup - and cocaine. When you concentrate a substance like this, you remove all the nutritional buffers that the plant naturally has to help you digest things and not get sick. Cocaine comes from the leaves of the Coca plant which is widely used in tea, as an herbal remedy. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with drinking that tea - there’s no ‘high’ or adverse affects associated with it. And there is a safe threshold for sugar, under 25 grams a day, just like it’s safe to drink the tea. Am I worried about fruit sugar, which you naturally get from eating an apple? No. Am I worried about apple juice? Yes.

Studies involving lab mice have shown that sugar is around 8 times more addictive than cocaine. One study consisted of 43 cocaine-addicted lab mice. These 43 mice were given the choice between cocaine and sugar-water over a period of fifteen days. 40 out of the 43 chose the sugar-water.

And there will industry-funded study after industry-funded study claiming that there’s no link or that the science isn’t there when we’ve all had this knowledge since at least 1977 and no one in power has done anything about it. Which is exactly what the tobacco industries did when cigarettes were linked to cancer.

And honestly, I’m just somewhere between pissed off and a bit scared about the whole thing. This was a little like taking the red pill, I think. I’m sorry to potentially drag you along like that, I just really needed to get this all down and out of my head...

Regardless of any of this, I have been about two or three days without getting over 25 grams of added sugar a day. I'm actually tying to limit added sugar as much as reasonably possible and honestly? I'm feeling very good right now. I feel lighter and much more focused and just... better.

So here's hoping that life continues this recent trend.