Sugar industry denies links between sugars and obesity

Sunday, October 24, 2004 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: sugar industry, Big Sugar, added sugars

Given everything we now know to be true about sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, I find it absolutely stunning that the sugar industry continues to deny any link whatsoever between the consumption of sugar and chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes. The sugar industry says that sugar is a completely healthy food, that there's no such thing as an unhealthy food, and that sugar can be part of a healthy diet. I disagree strongly with that.

Saying that sugar is part of a healthy diet is sort of like saying that crack cocaine should be part of your medicine chest. It's not that far-fetched, actually: Coca-Cola contained cocaine for decades following its introduction in the 1800's. Not surprisingly, patients got hooked on the product rather easily. Today, Coca-Cola still uses coca leaves, which are imported into the United States from South America, and which are subjected to a process that removes their cocaine content. The big question in my mind is, frankly, what is Coca-Cola doing with all this extra cocaine produced as a by-product of manufacturing its soft drinks? Is there some sort of cocaine recycling program being run by Coca-Cola that we haven't heard about yet?

The way I see it, there are some foods that bring you into balance, and there are other foods and food ingredients that take you out of balance. Sugar is quite obviously one of the ingredients that takes you out of balance. Even one teaspoon of sugar a day or one teaspoon a week takes you out of balance from what would have otherwise been a perfectly healthy day or week. The sugar industry says there's no such thing an unhealthy food... I say there's no such thing as a healthy person who eats any amount of sugar, because consuming sugar in any form, in any quantity, takes you away from the health you could otherwise experience.

What will future historians think of all this?

I think someday the history books will look back with great curiosity at our modern society. They will wonder how we could have been so blind to the massive chronic disease we have given ourselves by switching from home-gardened and home-cooked foods at the turn of the 20th century to a system of processed, refined foods, where all the nutrition is essentially stripped away and processed carbohydrates are packaged, flavored up, and enhanced with chemicals like MSG, aspartame and sodium nitrite in order to convince consumers to buy them.

Our generation, I think, will be judged harshly. What we're doing today will be looked at as a form of insanity, and someday it will be obvious to everyone that all the problems we have with violence and crime and ADHD and overcrowded prisons and mental disorders is mostly due to the consumption of sugars. This will be obvious. This will be common sense. Heck, even doctors may figure it out someday.

Doctors and scientists of the future will throw up their hands in wonder at how our modern society could have pursued this dietary path for so long, and yet remained so blind to the widespread damage we were causing to ourselves and to each other. And once those future historians learned that we actually installed vending machines in public schools that would allow students to buy soft drinks so that they could go into class and disrupt our learning institutions with aggressive behavior and exhibit learning disabilities and mental disorders like ADHD, these future historians will just shake their heads in disbelief. They might even assign our present-day era a name like "The Madness Ages."

See, we had the Dark Ages, and we had the Industrial Revolution, and now today we have the Madness Ages, where basically the whole population is nutritionally depleted and people are going mad in record numbers, and two-thirds of the nation is overweight, and yet all we do is dose each other up with prescription drugs rather than looking at the fundamental problem of sugar, nutrition, processed foods, fast foods, junk foods, and the need of the human body to have fresh, living foods on a daily basis as part of its diet. If that's not madness, nothing is.

Welcome to the Madness Ages.