That Old Devil Sugar

It is surely no secret that the United States, and, increasingly, the rest of the world, is wallowing in an epidemic of diabetes (the CDC says that one of every four American teenagers has type 2 diabetes, with the expectation that by 2040, it will one in three.Teenagers!), and that many doctors and other healthcare providers consider sugar to be at least one culprit. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Gary Taubes, in his latest book, The Case Against Sugar(Knopf: 2016), takes the position that there is a serious debate, if not a war, raging about this, and that he must therefore prosecute sugar as responsible for just about every major ill we have, including cancer and Alzheimer’s. For my purposes, though, I’d just like to see agreement that sugar is clearly responsible for a few: diabetes, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, and hypertension (high blood pressure). That’s because I have been diagnosed late in life with two of those at least: type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. I have both more or less under control, but anything that can bring clarity to what causes either or both is welcome. 

            For Taubes, the case is crystal clear. The culprit is sugar, especially the refined sugar called sucrose (half glucose, half fructose) andthe ingredient that seems to be in just about every prepared food one buys these days, high-fructose corn syrup(55% fructose, 45% glucose). These are the empty calories that Americans and inhabitants of all advanced industrial countries have been consuming in ever greater amounts for a few hundred years (Americans in 1999 were consuming an average of 158 pounds of sugar per year). And according to several studies that Taubes cites, it is this major dietary change that accounts for the damage wrought to our bodies. Humans have simply not had time to evolve fast enough for our bodies and organs (particularly the liver and pancreas) to handle the huge increase in refined sugars we now consume. This evolutionary argument is one of the best Taubes makes. For example, he notes that yearly per capita consumption of sugar “more than quadrupled in England in the eighteenth century, from four pounds to eighteen pounds, and then more than quadrupled again in the nineteenth,” while in the United States “sugar consumption increased sixteen-fold over that same century” (42). But the real argument comes in studies done more recently on indigenous populations like American Indians and Africans who have changed to Western-style living more recently and more rapidly. Among the Indians of Arizona, for example, the Pima, along with other Native Americans, have seen diabetes rates explode from almost nothing when eating their native diet to over 50% and more now, after changing to a Western diet laced with sugar and immense quantities of soda. Another major study, Western Diseases(1981) by Denis Burkitt and Hugh Trowell on indigenous populations in Africa, saw tooth decay, gout, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension skyrocket with Westernization (229). Another study of natives from Tokenau, an island near New Zealand, saw the same phenomenon: from a diet of coconut, fish, pork, chicken, and breadfruit (a high-fat diet, Taubes notes), the Tokenau people shifted to western ways in the 1970s. Some migrated to the big island of New Zealand, while some simply stayed on Tokenau, but both adopted western ways and foods. Diabetes shot up to engulf almost 20% of the women and 11% of the men, with corresponding increases in hypertension, heart disease, and obesity. To sum up, Taubes quotes one of his heroes, John Yudkin, a University of London nutritionist, who wrote in 1963: “We now eat in two weeks the amount of sugar our ancestors of two-hundred years ago ate in a whole year” (154). 

            But many of us have heard these stories and statistics before. What is surprising and even shocking in Taubes’s arguments are the supportive and historical facts. As one might guess from his argumentative title, not everyone agrees with Taubes. In fact, for the major arbiters of American eating policy like the FDA and the NIH (National Institutes of Health), sugar has remained a kind of untouchable, on the list of GRAS (generally recognized as safe) foods until virtually the present day (a quick Google search revealed that the latest FDA recommendations concerning sugar only warn that sugar can cause tooth decay!). This contrasts with FDA decisions on the sugar substitutes saccharin and cyclamates, which, with urging from scientists sponsored by the sugar industry, have been listed as possibly carcinogenic. But the major thrust of the scientists like Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota and Fred Stare of Harvard (both funded handsomely by the sugar industry, Taubes points out) has been twofold: first, that it is the fats in our diets that kill us prematurely in the West, via heart disease and diabetes; and second, that “we get obese or overweight because we take in more calories than we expend or excrete” (107-9). Taubes calls this “the gift that keeps on giving,” because it essentially exonerates sugar from any role in obesity or diabetes or the host of other diseases plaguing Western societies. It doesn’t make any difference what you eat, goes this mantra, because “a calorie is a calorie.” Eat too much food (too many calories), and exercise too little, and you get fat, which causes you to get diabetes and die early. Period. End of discussion. Forget about the impact of refined foods (white flour, white sugar) on one’s metabolism. 

            Taubes goes into most of the studies and white papers that chart this, to him, massive fraud, but it’s not necessary to repeat that here. Suffice it to say that the sugar industry has used its massive profits and political clout to pretty much cloud the issue of sugar’s deadly effects in much the same way the tobacco industry clouded, for years, the dangers of tobacco smoke. Indeed, one of the really surprising roles of the sugar devil is in flavoring tobacco. Yes, that’s right. Tobacco growers and cigarette makers learned around the turn of the twentieth century that tobacco in cigars and pipes wasn’t really selling enough product (getting enough people hooked). So, in 1914, R.J. Reynolds introduced Camels, “the first brand of cigarettes made of multiple tobacco types (basically flue-cured Virginia, and Burley tobacco) blended together” (64). Sugar entered in two ways. First, flue-curing the Virginia tobacco turned a natural sugar content of about 3% to one of 22% sugar. That higher sugar content makes the tobacco more inhalable, because the smoke becomes acidic, not alkaline (alkaline smoke irritates the mucous membranes and stimulates coughing, which is why pipe smokers rarely inhale). Second, the nicotine-rich Burley tobacco was “sauced” with sugars from honey, molasses, licorice and so on. This was first done for chewing tobacco, but Reynolds put it in Camels, and this really did the trick. Why? Because by blending “sauced” Burley tobacco with already-sweetened flue-cured Virginia, Camels were able to deliver a sweet-tasting and -smelling cigarette that was easier to inhale, and thus “maximized the delivery of nicotine—and carcinogens—to the human lungs” (69). Most other tobacco companies and brands wasted no time following Camels to the point that “by 1929, U.S. tobacco growers were saucing Burley tobacco with 50 million pounds of sugar a year” (69). That this is not fiction is evidenced by Taubes’s quoting of a 2006 report from the Netherlands: “Consumer acceptance of cigarette mainstream smoke [what’s directly inhaled] is proportional to the sugar level of the tobacco” (70). In other words, sugar’s key role in making cigarettes palatable (inhalable) to both men and women worldwide contributed in a major way to the epidemic of lung cancers that are still with us. 

            Taubes has endless data on the role of sugar in diseases, but a couple stand out. First, he cites studies showing that sugar may well be addictive (as anyone with children knows). It elicits a response in the brain’s “reward center,” e.g. the nucleus accumbens, that closely resembles the response from nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. This may help explain why its rise has been so spectacular in every society where it was introduced. More important, to me at least, is the connection Taubes tries to make between sugar and what is now generally conceded to be a key factor in diabetes and a host of other diseases that cluster with it—insulin resistance. Insulin, of course, is the hormone produced in the pancreas that acts to combat high blood sugar. Basically, when blood sugar (glucose) levels rise, the pancreas responds by secreting insulin, which “signals the muscle cells to take up and burn more glucose.” Insulin also induces cells to store some of the glucose as fat (insulin is said to be “lipogenic” or fat-forming). Then, when blood glucose falls, the insulin level falls too, and the stored fat can be burned instead of glucose. The problem is that some people (and increasing numbers in Western societies) exhibit a condition known as “insulin resistance”: their cells do not accept the insulin, and hence the glucose levels in the blood, and the levels of insulin, remain high or get higher. 

The question is: what causes insulin resistance in the first place? 

This would appear to be the 64-million-dollar question (the fight over this is quite active even today, with one side blaming the “drop in insulin sensitivity” on a fat, “intramyocellular lipid” said to block cell receptors from accepting insulin; and another blaming insulin resistance on excess carbohydrate [especially sugar] consumption and too much insulin production). Oddly, Taubes himself does not give a conclusive answer. He strongly suggests that insulin resistance is caused by too much sugar consumption, but he hedges. He says that in contrast to the sugar industry’s old mantra that insulin resistance and diabetes are caused by obesity, i.e. eating too much or consuming too many calories, another possibility 

is that these elevated levels of insulin and the insulin resistance itself were caused by the carbohydrate content of our diets, and perhaps sugar in particular. Insulin is secreted in response to rising blood sugar, and rising blood sugar is a response to a carbohydrate-rich meal. That somehow this system could be dysregulated such that too much insulin was being secreted and that this was causing excessive lipogenesis—fat formation—was a simple hypothesis to explain a simple observation. (120-1). 

But because insulin resistance is so important as a causal factor in diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, and so on, we would like something firmer. Taubes doesn’t give it to us, partly, he explains, because the NIH decided long ago not to fund long-term studies on the effects of sugar in the American diet because it would cost too much. It would also take a long time, since diabetes does not manifest overnight; like tobacco, sugar’s effects usually take years to manifest. But still, we want more. And Taubes does cite one study from Switzerland that seems to provide some scientific proof. Luc Tappy of the University of Lausanne studied fructose (fructose is metabolized without the need of insulin) in the mid-1980s. What his study found is crucial, even though it was short-term:

When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day—a “pretty high dose” as he says—their livers would start to become insulin-resistant and their triglycerides would elevate in just a few days. With lower doses, the same effects would appear but only if the experiment ran for a month or more (205). 

This would seem to be a sound study, indicating insulin resistance and elevated triglycerides, both key markers for diabetes and for heart disease, from excess sugar. But again, its effects derived only from the use of fructose—though that is the main ingredient in most sugared drinks and lots more, via that demon invention, high-fructose corn syrup. 

            Unfortunately, this is as much as Taubes provides concerning insulin resistance. And that is a shame. 

            Still, Taubes’s book is well worth reading, if only for the disgraceful history it unfolds, a history of sugar that has scarred this nation from its very beginnings (slavery and sugar are intimately intertwined) and which still, in 2018, thanks to the power of the sugar industry in shielding its product from blame, continues its devilish work. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Salt, Sugar, Fat

I am grateful I grew up when I did, just prior to WWII, with an Italian immigrant for a father. He simply refused to allow most “American” foods to cross our threshold. We never had ready-to-eat cereals like Wheaties or Corn Flakes (both the epitome of health by today’s standards), nor sliced white bread, nor any processed foods, or even those that came in cans (with the possible exception of canned peas, used for a low-cost and not very enticing dish called ‘peas and pasta’.) We ate pasta a lot—we called it spaghetti or macaroni in those days—with various kinds of sauces. We ate meat sparingly, and usually cuts that today are found only in specialty shops: kidneys, liver, tripe. We ate chicken bought fresh from a chicken shop that had them live in wooden cages, and stew meats in nutritious stews my mother made from fresh ingredients. And we regularly ate fish, including calamari, smelt, shiners (now known as ‘white bait’ and used mainly by fishermen to catch larger varieties) and various kinds of shellfish. My father called fish “brain food,” and he was right. We also ate real (i.e. aged) cheeses, the most memorable being a type of provolone that had actual milk worms oozing from its flesh, and which my father attributed to its being “real” and alive—which was accurate, though it was banned by a squeamish FDA long ago. With five children there was never quite enough food, so we grew up hungry but healthy. And we always ate together as a family.

            Not so today’s kids, especially those who live in urban “food deserts” which, abandoned by supermarkets, survive on “convenience stores” purveying mostly snack foods and sodas and junk like Hot Pockets and Lunchables loaded with the Salt, Sugar and Fat that gives Michael Moss’s book its name. I mourn for these kids, whose parents have to thread their way through the American food minefield in hopes of finding real, nutritious foods. Mostly, though, they are barraged with TV ads touting the latest chemical concoction that food companies have spawned to make more profits, and to habituate their future customers, the children, to addictive substances like salt (leading to high blood pressure and strokes), sugar (leading to obesity and diabetes and swollen hospital rolls) and fat (leading to clogged arteries and heart attacks). Mostly, they are fed on “convenience” foods that can be popped into the microwave and eaten on the run. Mostly, they are left to their own devices when it comes to foods, and that means, as I noticed recently when I was getting gas at a Chevron station with a “Food Mart,” Hispanic high-schoolers lined up several deep, their hands bursting not with books but with huge sodas to wash down plastic packs of potato or corn chips or ready-to-eat junk like Hot Pockets. These “snacks” (called “crack snacks” in a Philadelphia neighborhood that has been trying to boycott the ubiquitous convenience stores strategically located near schools) are time bombs, condemning several generations to the misery of hospital care before their time. And the food industry knows it, the USDA and the FDA and the FTC know it, the Congress knows it, and yet it goes on, greased by the money that these huge food corporations like General Foods and Nestlè and Cargill donate to the “people’s” representatives who are supposed to be giving voice to the voiceless.

            Moss’s book tells this whole story by dividing it into three sections: one for sugar, one for fat, and one for salt. It’s enough to make you sick. Though it’s far too detailed to do justice to, a few segments will give you the flavor. Consider, first, a core idea: that these “foods” (in quotes because many people have observed that they are not “real” foods, having been processed to the extent that they resemble, and taste like—without their sugar, fat, and salt disguises—cardboard or plastic) are addictive in the same way that drugs or alcohol are. Take sugar. Kids naturally prefer sugar and reject bitter more than adults; but they are also being taught—by what they eat and what they see on TV—that all food is supposed to be sweet. What’s worse, testing at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia has shown that sugar is an analgesic like aspirin that will “reduce crying in a newborn baby.” So children not only prefer sweet, many of them are medicating themselves with sugar, which food companies know and therefore add to everything. Karen Teff, a food scientist who has found that sweet liquids (the kind in most processed foods) can circumvent the body’s natural controls, sums it up this way:

            “I’m still shocked at what goes on in this country. Where every single food has some sweetened component that wasn’t normally supposed to be sweetened. Honey wheat bread, honey mustard. Foods that were associated with non-sweet or that had slightly bitter components have now been made sweeter. There is absolutely no tolerance now for foods that are not sweet” (Moss, p. 21)

But what food companies have been doing for years is investing millions in research to find what is called the “bliss point” for their products—the optimum point at which the brain’s pleasure centers are rewarded. Nor is this simply research into appetite or taste buds; it also investigates the emotional component in responses to food. One of the primary food researchers and consultants, Howard Moskowitz, for example, did research on craving. He found that hunger is a poor driver of cravings, and that we are driven to eat by other forces like emotional needs, and then taste, aroma, appearance and texture; and that one ingredient, sugar, can satisfy them all. Food companies have known this for a long time, and as early as 1949 came out with Sugar Frosted Flakes—a sugar coated “cereal” that was so successful that the Post company followed with Sugar Krisps, Krinkles, Corn-fetti and a host of others that kids went nuts over. Other food companies followed suit so that today, the cereal aisle in supermarkets has more varieties (over 200) than any other. More alarming, when sugar added to dog chow was found to prevent bacteria from forming, sugar became a major way to preserve processed foods (and Gaines Burgers for dogs, also afflicted with obesity), allowing them to sit on the shelf almost indefinitely.

            None of this sugar mania went without criticism. In 1969, Dr. Jean Mayer of Harvard and an advisor to President Nixon, organized a White House Conference of Food Nutrition and Health. His pioneering research on obesity, which he called a “disease of civilization,” led to the discovery of how the desire to eat is controlled by the amount of glucose in the blood and brain, greatly influenced by sugar in food. Mayer contended that “cereals containing over 50% sugar should be labeled imitation cereal or cereal confections” and should be sold in the candy section. This scared the food industry to death, but as usual, the changes it made were mostly cosmetic. Kellogg’s said it could live with the designation “breakfast foods” instead of cereal, while Post changed the name of its iconic Sugar Frosted Flakes to “Frosted Flakes.” But more alarming news was to come with President Carter’s appointee to head the FTC, Michael Pertschuk. Pertschuk recommended a ban on all advertising to children. But with $600 million in annual revenues at stake for media companies (food manufacturers were spending twice as much advertising their cereals as on the ingredients that went into them!), the lobbyists struck back. They got the Washington Post in an editorial to ridicule Pertschuk as “the national Nanny,” and blamed the FTC for trying to “protect children from the weakness of their parents” (this is hauntingly like a current TV message, which insists that government has no business advising kids what to eat, which is the job of parents; it’s also reminiscent of the furor that broke over New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg trying to limit the size of sugared drinks.) The lobbying worked: Pertschuk was ousted as FTC chairman, and the new head said “we’re not going to engage in social engineering.” As if protecting the health of children were some kind of Commie plot. As if 20,000 commercials a year watched by children between the ages of two and eleven, more than half of them pitching sweetened cereals, candies, snacks, and soft drinks four times every half hour, were some kind of sacred corporate right to be protected. As if these devils—in 2008, the cereal industry began touting sugar as a kind of brain food that increased attentiveness: “a clinical study showed kids who had a filling breakfast of Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved their attentiveness by nearly 20 percent”—deserved to be protected in order to hook children on what has become a drug (Coke executives spoke, around 1995, of their “heavy users,” meaning those who drank two or more cans a day; even average Americans were drinking 40 gallons of sugared soda, on average, each year, for 60,000 calories and 3,700 teaspoons of sugar each). As if the food execs weren’t still scheming night and day and funding scientific studies to tell them how to get even more soda and sweet drinks like Kool Aid—with no nutritional value at all—into its already addicted consumers!

            I tell you, this stuff gets me so enraged I can hardly write about it.

            So perhaps I should just end with Lunchables—trayed bologna and cheese and crackers put together on an assembly line for a kid’s instant lunch; ramped up a year later to become the Fun Pack that added a Snickers bar, and a sugary drink. Or Hot Pockets (see below). Or Oreos—now being marketed in India to teach millions of Indian kids the “Twist, Lick and Dunk” ritual; just imagine a billion Indians hooked on Oreos! Or pink slime. Yes. pink slime has been in the news fairly recently, and Michael Moss was the journalist who broke the story, so it’s appropriate. The stuff was invented, ironically, because of the public demand for leaner cuts of beef to reduce those dangerous saturated fats. The problem is that leaner cuts are tough without the fat, so the industry sought technological solutions as usual: tenderize these course cuts either by piercing the meat with steel needles; or by taking beef scraps that used to be used for pet food and putting them through a high-speed centrifuge to spin off all but 10 percent of the fat. This latter process leaves a mush that is then formed into 30-pound blocks, frozen, and shipped to meat plants where it’s combined with other beef trimmings to make hamburger. Great. It’s cheap after all; cheaper than lean meat from South America; so cheap that even the USDA used it for school lunch programs for poor kids. 

            Enter Beef Products, Inc. of South Dakota. Given that the “defatted” material in the meat blocks derived from parts of the cow carcass most exposed to feces (you can imagine where those parts are)—which harbor the bacteria E. Coli that can cause stomach poisoning—Beef Products figured something had to be done to kill those feces pathogens that sometimes got smeared (ugh!) on the meat. So they fumigated the meat with ammonia, whose smell sometimes lingered on the “hamburger” sold to places like McDonald’s. Not good. Besides the smell, though, there arose the question of whether this “meat” should even be called “meat;” as USDA microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein noted: “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling” (228). Zirnstein gave it the name “pink slime,” and Michael Moss published his story on pink slime in 2009. The response, of course, was rapid: McDonald’s, sensing a public relations disaster, discontinued using it. Yet even with all the bad publicity, the USDA and Barack Obama’s Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, were undaunted. In March 2012 Vilsack continued to promote the low-fat benefits of pink slime:

            “That’s one of the reasons we have made it a staple of the school lunch program. We are concerned about obesity levels, and this is an opportunity for us to ensure that youngsters are receiving a product that is lean and contains less fat” (229).

            This gets to what is the heart of the matter for me. The food that increasing numbers of Americans rely on (Frito Lay early on saw baby boomers as a growth industry because of their lifestyle habits: having “abandoned the traditional concept of breakfast, lunch and dinner…they replaced them with convenient snacks—pulled from cupboards, convenience stores, or the office vending machine”) is less and less derived from the farm, and more and more from the factory. It is “processed food,” and it is invented in huge laboratories (Nestle, the world’s largest food company, has a research center employing 700, including 350 “scientists”) that all large food companies now use to invent new ways to deliver machine-created food necessarily drowning in sugar, fat and salt to disguise the horrid taste it would otherwise have (one of these bad tastes is WOF, “warmed-over flavor,” the wet-dog-hair taste of meat that has to be heated again, after first being cooked). And to make it last virtually forever. Machines were first used to make comparatively benign cereals like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Today, they are used to make Doritos 3D, a puffy spherical version of the flat potato chip that increases the ‘surprise factor,’ which is said to be “good for consumption.” Or to fabricate Cheetos, an almost perfect food (for profit) that gives no signal to the brain about its high calories or fat, and so induces unlimited craving. Or to create Hot Pockets, whose 8-ounce Pepperoni and 3-Cheese Calzone (Americans now get most of their saturated fat from “cheese”, which is of course not real cheese with beneficial bacteria in it, but “imitation cheddar” and “imitation mozzarella” made with machine-fractured “milk protein concentrate”) delivers 10 grams of saturated fat and 1,500 milligrams of sodium, both close to the recommended daily limits. In addition, this Hot Pocket delivers 6 teaspoons of sugar (nearly as much as a can of Coke!) and enough chemical preservatives among its more than 100 ingredients to keep it on the shelf for 420 days, at least.

            Does such “food” have anything to do with real food? Even Nestlè knows what a disaster it is. Because although it claims that Hot Pockets “meet the needs of millenials,” Nestlè has also bought Novartis, a company that specializes in gastric surgery. You know what this is: gastric bypass surgery literally closes off a portion of the stomach for those who can’t seem to lose the weight they know is killing them. The trouble with gastric surgery, though, is that it doesn’t always work, and never works to reduce the craving for food. Indeed, some people keep eating to the degree that they burst the surgical bands the surgery has implanted, and require care in emergency rooms. Regrettable. But Nestlè, like a good profit-craving corporation, has found opportunity in this as well. It has begun to market yet another line of foods, liquid foods like Peptamen, or Optifat, that are ingested through a tube, so gastric surgery patients can cope more easily with their smaller stomachs.

            As Moss comments: this leads us to the image of “teenagers gorging on Hot Pockets, only to end up drinking Peptamen through a tube for the rest of their lives” (337). But Nestlè? Not to worry; it’s covered no matter what.

            There’s much more to this rich, disturbing book, and I would urge anyone with an interest in food, or children, or the perils of corporate capitalism to read it. It will disturb you, enrage you (not least because of the collusion Moss documents between the U.S. Government and Big Food that has allowed the corporate criminality involved in processed food to continue and expand for a half-century and more), and enlighten you. My hope is that it will also ignite a fire that will force the government, finally, to regulate American food production and stop the perversion of America’s eating habits that are now threatening to engulf the entire planet.          

Before that happens though, the American people have to wake up to what everyone is born knowing: real food is a gift of the earth. It does not come out of a tube, or a soda can, or a plastic container, or a machine.

Lawrence DiStasi

America Diabetica

A segment on the PBS Newshour on June 6 presented some alarming cases and statistics concerning sugar. A 16-yr-old Pueblo Colorado teen was featured as one of millions of American teenagers now exhibiting Type 2 Diabetes—a disease that used to be limited to older adults. This vastly overweight girl was said to be socially isolated (she is homeschooled) and sedentary, with a working mother who cannot be around to monitor her food intake. The result is that she spends her time gorging on typical American junk. Doctors and professionals at the Centers for Disease Control are alarmed, since their projections now show not only that 1 of every 4 American teens already has type 2 diabetes (where insulin is either not sufficient to break down glucose, or the cells ignore the insulin that’s produced); but worse, that 1 of every 3 children born in the year 2000 will develop the disease!  That’s one-third of the country. A Doctor Zeitler laid out the grimmer prospects: whereas in adults with diabetes, the average time from diagnosis to a first major cardiovascular event—heart attack, the need for bypass surgery—is about 15 to 20 years,

Everything that we have seen so far suggests that these kids have a progression rate that's at least as quick, if not a little faster, which means that (for) this kid who has their onset of diabetes at 15, we may be looking at their first major cardiovascular event by the time they're 35. (this PC use of plural pronouns drives me nuts, but that’s what he said. LDS).

Read that again. Kids with diabetes now will be having heart attacks at 35, if they’re lucky. And if the projections are correct, that means 1 of every 3 Americans will be taxing our already overburdened health-care system with more surgeries than ever. Not to mention the other complications from diabetes like loss of toes, limbs, and insulin therapies.

            This trend, of course, has been accelerating since at the least the 1970s and probably since WWII. And the culprit is not hard to find: sugar consumption. One statistic I found showed that since only 1983, the average American consumption of sugar has risen every year to the point in 1999 (the year of the study) where it reached 158 pounds yearly per person—a 30% jump in 16 years. That may be about the time when the geniuses who operate the American food industry discovered that until-then unusable surplus corn could all turn a profit—by being made into high-fructose corn syrup. And what to do with all that corn syrup? Why lace every imaginable American processed food with it—especially our beloved soft drinks. The result is that by 2009, the American Heart Association was noting that average Americans were now consuming 22 teaspoonfuls of added sugar a day (that was average; teenagers 14 to 18 were consuming 34 teaspoonfuls of added sugar per day). Compare this to the recommended average of 9 teaspoons for men and 6 for women. And again, we’re not even counting naturally-occurring sugars such as lactose in milk or fructose in fruit; we’re talking added sugar—“the sweeteners and syrups that are added to foods during processing, preparation or at the table.” As in killer foods like cakes and cookies and puddings, plus the sugar in all our favorite goodies like ketchup and snacks and Thai foods and McDonald’s fries and chicken tenders and those super-sized soft drinks the state of New York has recently tried to limit (to 16 ounces; whereupon, from the outcry by the restaurant industry, you’d think mother’s milk was being rationed), and the city of Richmond CA has recently proposed taxing, with the tax revenues going to fund sports programs for sedentary kids (again with aggressive campaigns by the Beverage Industry to oppose the tax as more “government interference” in American lives.)

            No wonder we’re a nation of sugar-crazed, overweight diabetics.

            This brings to mind the very viability of carbohydrates themselves. Because while it was not long ago that runners and other athletes were recommending “carb loading,” there has more recently emerged a growing chorus of food gurus who insist that ever since humans invented agriculture, the major portion of our diet that comes from grains and other carbohydrates like tubers has led to a plethora of diseases like diabetes and arthritis. I heard one of these guys on the radio the other day, and he was quite convincing. His book, Neanderthin, argues that based on his own experience (and apparently little or no research), the optimum diet for a human is the “paleo” diet: mostly meats, plus tubers that you can dig with a stick, and fruits and veggies that can be eaten raw; all of these being foods that the guts of our hunter-gatherer ancestors allegedly evolved to process. At first glance, this seems reasonable. Grains are indeed inedible in their natural state. They convert quickly to sugars when eaten processed and cooked. And many of them have compounds that can be toxic. But looked at more closely, it appears that the easy notion that hunter-gatherers, like chimpanzees, were natural carnivores who got most of their calories from meats, doesn’t quite compute. It turns out that chimps get more of their calories from fruits and tubers and insects than from meats—a once-a-month rarity, according to Jane Goodall. Humans, similarly, are not naturally-evolved carnivores at all—our teeth are useless for tearing meat from a carcass or bringing down prey, and our jaws are designed for grinding rather than for tearing meat and swallowing hunks whole like carnivores. Nor are our guts designed with enough carnivore-type acids to easily process raw meat.

            In short, most of us need carbohydrates alright. The only question is, what kind and in what proportion should we eat them. The answer seems fairly simple. We should get about half of our carbs from ‘good’ carbs—the kind with lots of fiber. These are the carbohydrates that get absorbed slowly into our systems, thus avoiding those harmful “sugar spikes.” Sadly, these are the carbohydrates that Americans tend to shun: whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans. But shunned or not, we need carbs that are not processed ahead of time, or refined, carbs that come in their natural garments rather than in glitzy packaging designed to appeal to ignorant children. Because it’s the processing—the bleaching of flour, the polishing of rice, the mass production of easy meals that require only a minute in the microwave or that come in cardboard containers from the take-out counter—this processing is what powers the rapid ‘bad’ carbohydrate train to sugarland. And thus should be avoided. What is wanted are foods that have texture, substance, that require chewing and time digesting: brown rice and whole wheat and leafy vegetables and all the fruits and nuts loaded with the fiber that slows down that sugar train. The benefits being that slow carbs avoid the peaks and valleys in blood sugar levels that lead to diabetes; and, as a side benefit, tend to lower serum cholesterol in the blood. In sum, somewhere between half the calories in good carbs, some fat, and up to 35% protein (from meat, eggs, milk products, etc.) is a generally recommended balance.

            The trouble, of course, is that in our industrial-food marketplace, this is a balance harder to achieve than ever. Practically all food these days is processed (more profit)—if it’s not genetically engineered to be resistant to poisonous pesticides and herbicides (i.e. to allow poisons to be used with abandon). Still, the advantaged among us can still manage to find such a balance—if we can resist the easy fix of the microwave or the takeout counter, that is. For the disadvantaged, though, it’s a different story—and they are the ones most at risk for diabetes. For the disadvantaged, the neighborhoods they inhabit, such as those in Richmond CA, have been stripped of real stores, of supermarkets or even old-style mom-and-pop groceries carrying at least a few fresh fruits and vegetables. Instead, they are left in ‘food deserts’ to rummage among packaged foods in liquor stores or fast-food restaurants peddling the worst fat-laced processed crap American ingenuity can package for them in bright colors fit for TV commercials. Super-sized drinks. Fat-laced, artificially-colored mystery meat stuffed between mushy-soft white-flour buns. Desserts as the logical extension of sweetened and fat-laden French fries. With some of these teens slurping down a super-sized coke with a package of chips for breakfast, and similar junk food all day long. All of it promoted 24-7 on TV and billboards as mom-centered, community-creating, fun-fostering purveyors of patriotic America. When in truth, the whole American food perplex, full of exotic choices, is the essence of the great shill, the great deception, the great epidemic, the logical apotheosis of diseased capitalism we now have and will have even more exclusively in what is to come: our own America Diabetica.

            And lest you hadn’t noticed, it’s all a perfect emblem for the corruption in this increasingly dysfunctional system, where the poor are targeted by the richest corporations on whom to dump their profit-making garbage; and any attempt to rein in this gross exploitation and outright murder is pilloried as “excessive regulation” of the “free” market by an overly intrusive government.  That is, government takes the hit, and corporations reap the profits from this sorry-ass spectacle: the richest society in planetary history mindlessly eating and polluting itself into an early grave.  All the while braying to itself and the world about its precious “freedom.”

Lawrence DiStasi