Sugar should be treated like an illicit drug, a kind of legal form of heroin, a dark force to be avoided, and a substance whose use leads to physical ruin.
“My God! It’s everywhere!” I almost blurted out while scanning the food section in a supermarket in an attempt to find at least one product which didn’t have sugar in it.
If you thought that sugar is mostly in candies and desserts, you are too naive. Tomato sauce, yogurt, dry fruits, corn flakes, and bread – sugar is added in all of these. I realized that it’s difficult to find any processed food item which doesn’t contain sugar.
I suspect that even the shampoos and the soaps have sugar in it. You know, just in case it goes in your mouth while bathing, they don’t want to miss that one chance to feed you sugar.
And do you know the biggest disguise used by processed food industry to hide sugar is the term – low fat. Products labelled “low-fat” could still contain, and usually do contain, a lot of sugar. And remember, it’s not just fat that makes your fat. Sugar is the biggest culprit in making obesity an epidemic.
Am I complaining too much? Let me change the mood for a bit. Time for some fun trivia.
Did you know that until few hundred year ago, sugar used to be a very expensive item? In fact, it was considered a fine spice and was only available to rich. But from about the year 1500, technological improvements turned sugar into a much cheaper bulk commodity.
Ironically, sugar was imported by Greeks and Romans for its medicinal properties. When it was scarce and expensive, it was a fine spice. Now when it is abundant and cheap, it has turned into a fine poison.
Sugar is slower to impact our health (as we don’t die from an overdose right away), and it’s that slow destructive process that is the most dangerous. Unfortunately, most people don’t know the damage until it has already been done (diabetes for example).
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