If you watch the AMC show, MadMen, you’ve probably noticed that in nearly every scene, someone is smoking.
Back then, in the 50’s and 60’s, it was cool to smoke. Hip. Gave you something to do while you pondered the Universe.
Since the time of MadMen though, the Surgeon General’s warning label on a package of cigarettes has gone from “Smoking may be hazardous to your health” to “Smoking causes lung cancer”.
And according to Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the national office of the American Cancer Society, tobacco will kill 50% of the people who use it each year.
We have banned smoking in airplanes and have smoke-free environments.
Most people agree that smoking is bad for you. There is no health benefit at any level (unlike, for example, alcohol which appears to have some health benefits at moderate doses).
But there’s another substance that seems almost, and some argue equally, as bad.
Enter Sugar
Sugar, while not offering the “coolness” of smoking, seems to hold the same innocuous position in the mind of the public as smoking did in the 50’s and 60’s.
Sugar is in almost all processed foods, fast foods, and, of course, soft drinks.
And now, the Surgeon General has been asked by 100 health agencies, municipal health organizations and a number of scientists to generate a report on sugared soft drinks much like what was done on tobacco in the original 1964 report.
Whether you agree or not that the Surgeon General should step in, it’s not just soft drinks that are the issue. A sugary soft drink is the easiest to target but the heart of the problem is really sugar.
The Standard American Diet (SAD) has mushroomed into nearly 130 lbs of sugar per year. And sugar is the one substance that correlates directly with the onset of diabetes.
Is Sugar a Significant Health Risk?
In humans, well, no one knows for certain but Robert Lustig, MD says, without a doubt, yes.
In an interview earlier this year with 60 Minutes, he had this to say (and this video is about 20 minutes long but well worth the time):
And for the longer and more detailed look at the toxicity of too much sweet stuff (90 minutes):
And in lab animals, the link between sugar and addiction is clear. ((http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000698)) ((http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17617461))
But, on the other hand, oxygen and water are toxic to humans in high enough doses (acute toxicity). The issue seems to be whether sugar carries a chronic toxicity in humans s cigarette smoking does. In other words, some people may be able to handle a certain amount of sugar without any ill-effects. Others may be much more sensitive to it. Perhaps a better question is, what level of sugar can you consume while avoiding chronic toxicity? Because this is very difficult to know, the safest and easiest answer is to keep your consumption of refined sugar to a minimum.
So What?
Bottom line, there are three things you should know about consuming too much refined sugar.
First, too much sugar ages you faster than the natural aging process. The diseases associated with too much sugar are the diseases of “old age” – high blood pressure, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, arthritis, and obesity.
Second, excessive sugar can completely wreck your health if you’re not careful. It should be the one thing you drastically reduce or, in many cases, eliminate from your diet.
Third, if you do reduce or eliminate sugar from your diet, you will have done your part in lowering the costs of health care for yourself and for society as a whole.
