 |
Editor's ViewpointMeditations Of A Minnesota Mossback |
Getting Back To Our Root (Vegetables) The average American ate 20 pounds of sugar in 1990.
Twenty years later, that number has surged to 156 pounds, an article in To Your Health magazine said last month1. That’s just shy of 7 ounces each day, or roughly half a pound of sugar.
That sugar is not creeping in through the average American’s skin pores.
No, it’s entering in the usual way—and fouling up the body’s chemistry on its journey through our digestive systems.
We need sugar. Our bodies require it in moderation. We can also manufacture it from other things we eat.
But added weight and a marked increase in the incidence of diet-related diseases are just some of the indicators of too much of a good thing.
What is more, it seems that too much sugar can contribute to financial ruin.
A Business- Week article published last year reported that medical problems caused 62% of all bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007 (and 78% of those filers had medical insurance).
It goes without saying, we like the taste of sugar.
Processed food manufacturers— bless their little hearts—have found that Americans listen to their taste buds more they listened to their mothers.
No surprise there.
Consider, “Brand X breakfast cereal tastes good, and has 11 added nutrients and 50 percent of your daily fiber requirement!” vs. “Eat your broccoli!”
Brand X has a lot of advertising power behind it.
Your mother, bless her heart, was just right.
To me, though, the real surprise is that the artificial sweetener—that modern miracle of chemistry that some of us assumed would permit the consumption of diet soft drinks without the ensuing weight gain—isn’t the answer we were looking for.
In fact, studies consistently show that people who use artificial sweeteners gain more weight than do people who avoid sweeteners entirely.
No, in this high-paced world, the answer is … drumroll please … reading labels.
You simply must. Various forms of sugar have leaked into many of the prepared foods we purchase at the grocery store.
Don’t believe me?
I just turned around and opened my refrigerator.
Those who know me well know that I like to cook from scratch: homemade bread, soups, casseroles— lasagna.
Yum.
I grabbed three manufactured food items: canned vegetarian refried beans, my favorite pickle relish and a well-known brand of ranch salad dressing that my youngest son prefers.
My favorite refried beans listed sugar as one of the ingredients.
(That was a shock.)
The pickle relish listed high fructose corn syrup as the second ingredient, right after cucumbers.
And the salad dressing listed sugar as the fourth ingredient after soybean oil, water and egg yolk.
To be fair, Americanmade foods could be prepared in California, trucked thousands of miles in the summer’s heat to Minnesota, and boxed in a warehouse for several weeks before being stocked at the local supermarket.
Then, they could likely take a roundabout ride home in your warm trunk via a stop at the cleaners and your kids’ school.
Additives help keep our prepared foods looking great when we finally get around to eating them. But those additives often involve sugar.
My mother-in-law, Marie, had a problem with arthritis pain. Through experimenting with her diet, she found that the elimination of all sugar additives—and I mean all, even in breads— eliminated the pain.
Completely.
Until the day she used some purchased, pre-shredded cheese. The pain came back. Since this was before Google, she called the cheese manufacturer.
“What is ‘powdered cellulose to prevent caking’?” she asked, reading off the label.
Of course, you probably know the answer already: powdered sugar.
Aft er that, my motherin- law resumed buying brick cheese, grating it herself, and freezing it for later use.
Don’t let the fancy labeling on the “Brand X” packaging fool you.
“Enriched white flour,” for example, is flour that has had two dozen natural vitamins and minerals stripped out in processing, with a few B vitamins and a bit of iron added back in to compensate.
(That’s why it’s called enriched rather than fortified.) White flour is also bleached.
The processing gives the flour a finer texture, increases its shelf life—and ensures that any bugs that try to live in it will die from hunger.
Kinda whets your appetite, doesn’t it?
Thanks to Dr. Bill Barrett of Hugo, who broached the subject of Americans and their sugar habits in a recent speech at the Hugo Toastmasters Club.