Your co-worker brings in brownies, your daughter makes cookies for a holiday party and candy is arriving from far-flung relatives. Sugar appears on almost all joyful occasions. It is celebration, festivity and family love. It’s also dangerous. Sugar, perhaps more than salt, contributes to the development of cardiovascular disease. Evidence is growing that eating an undue amount of sugar can lead to fatty liver disease, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, obesity and kidney disease.
Yet people can’t resist it. And the reason for that is pretty simple. People just can’t resist it. And we don’t mean disability to resist it in the way that people talk about delicious foods. We mean the weakness, literally, in a similar way of drugs due to the fact that the sugar manufacturers are doing everything they can to keep us hooked.
Just a few hundred years ago, concentrated sugars were essentially absent from the human diet. Sugar was a rare source of energy in the environment, and strong longings for it benefited humans for living on. Sugar longings initiated searches for sweet foods, the kinds that help us layer on fat for times of scarcity.
Today concentrated sugar is everywhere, used in approximately 75 percent of packaged foods purchased in the United States. The average American consumes anywhere from a quarter to a half pound of sugar a day. If you consider that the concentrated sugar in a single can of soda might be more than what most people would have consumed in an entire year just a few hundred years ago, you get a sense of how dramatically our environment has changed. The sweet longing that once offered an advantage now works against us.
A better approach to sugar rehab (康复) is to promote the consumption of whole, natural foods. Substituting whole foods for sweet industrial synthetic foods may be a hard sell, but in the face of an industry that is exploiting our biological nature to keep us addicted, it may be the best solution for those who need that sugar fix.
