Honestly, I just don't know what took me so long. How could I have not known? I'm a smart fellow; at least I like to think so, although no doubt many would quibble.
But how could I honestly have gorged on so much sugar all my life and
not known that it was completely unnatural, that human beings were just not designed to ingest so much of this potent chemical? I mean, would I feed my cat chocolate, put sugar in his milk, force-feed him gummy bears? Of course not! Most people would blanch at the thought—it would be animal cruelty!
So why was I so ready to do it to myself?
It's plainly something I had no control over. The mere fact that it's behaviour that is not only completely legal, but actually
encouraged, is a quick explanation as to how this parlous state of affairs could have come to pass.
Again, I
hate the idea that I'm coming across as some sort of "born-again" do-gooder who has miraculously "seen the light"—I
hate that idea—but nevertheless, I feel the need to just slap up people I know, and point out to them this incredible truth which has
never hidden itself. It was there all along—I just chose not to see it.
Think about it. Think how unnatural it is to even ingest
one teaspoon of sugar per day. Just two thousand years ago, the chance than any human being alive at the time—anywhere on earth—had access to, let alone the privilege of eating
any sugar at all, be it in a fruit, or an incredible cache of natural honey, was
vanishingly small.
It must have been so rare to be able to eat sugar back then that one might have gone through
decades without it. Yet that was the natural state of being.
Mind you, people were dying of rickets and other vitamin deficiencies like flies, so I'm definitely not advocating the Middle Ages Diet, but you see where I'm going here. Sugar ingestion is just not a natural state for human beings;
we just weren't designed to ingest so much sugar.
If you think of sugar as being just another abundant chemical, which today it is, and then imagine ingesting
forty teaspoons of salt per day, you can see how quickly you would be poisoned to death. Yet that is the amount of sugar that many, many human beings happily put away per day.
It's not hard at all. Two Cokes, two glasses of orange juice and
a hearty pasta dinner
and it's all over. Forty teaspoons of sugar.
Can you imagine drinking
four cups of soy sauce per day?
I rest my case.
It is plain that sugar is a powerful, mind-altering chemical. Over time, the ingestion of sugar at the pace I was ingesting it would have stripped twenty layers of paint off a Soviet-era apartment block. I distinctly recall a hilarious experiment we children used to do: when we lost a tooth naturally, we would put it in a glass of Coke overnight to see how brown it would get. I kid you not—even at that age we understood the corrosive nature of sugar.
The world is slowly—very slowly—waking up to the corrosive nature this plague is having on it. Forget climate change. We're all going to go via diabetes-related illnesses.
Already, my old sugar ways are carving deep inroads in my lifestyle. While I'm a comparatively svelte 155 lbs. at age 57, looks are deceiving. Inside, my lifelong sugar bingeing has wrought incredible havoc.
Both my feet are completely numb due to diabetic neuropathy. On the walks I belatedly conduct as many times as I can, they feel like two bricks at the end of my legs.
This condition is irreversible. I will
never feel my feet again. The doctors just shrug. They've seen this too many times before. This is
normal to them.
It's definitely not normal to me.
Is it too late?
I don't know. I have cut my sugar consumption to a personal low. No more pasta, my favourite food, next to rice. Next to potatoes. Next to chocolate. All gone. All of it
deleted,
do not pass go, most certainly, go to jail.
The next teaspoon of sugar I ingest could just be my last; I just can't risk it any more.
It may be too late for people like me, who bought the massive food industry lies—abetted by our own government's so-called "dietary guidelines" of the "low fat" way to health, while shamelessly encouraging the consumption of "healthy" carbohydrates, but maybe it's not too late for you.
I think a good measure of "how much is too much" would be: would I feed this to my cat? If the answer is no, then I don't think it's a good idea for you to be feeding it to yourself.
