The Sugar Craze And Its Effects On Society 's Health

I grew up playing the game “Candyland”, and I dreamed of finding the golden ticket and living in Willie Wonka’s factory. I was also given a Gatorade after every sporting event I ever played in so what could be so bad about sugar? Sugar, real and artificial, can be found in almost every product we consume and although sugar is a simple carbohydrate that the body uses for energy, its impact on our body is far from simple. The consumption of sugar has been linked to a host of chronic health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The addictive nature of sugar is also a significant problem that leads to the other detrimental effects listed above. Sugar has also been useful to help preserve goods, fuel fermentation, balance acidity, and add flavor to other foods. Whether it’s cereal, spaghetti sauce, or yogurt, sugar is everywhere and has become unavoidable in our daily diets. As Americans, we have become accustomed to the sweet addictive taste of sugar, and our dependence on excessive amounts of sugar in its different forms has become alarming to many health experts. In analyzing preference and dependency with sugar, I will trace the addictive nature and major risks sugar has placed on society.

Before I could focus on the sugar regulation, I first need to learn more about sugar and how sugar affects public health. I started by reading a scholarly article “Dangerous Sweet: The True Impacts of Sugar on Your Health,” from Rodale News, to give me a basic understanding of this problem. The author Isaac Eliaz, MD is an integrative medicine expert and the founder of the

In the eighteen hundreds, Americans used to eat around eighteen pounds of sugar a year. That may seem like a lot, but that’s just a fraction of what we eat today. The main reason they ate so little was because sugar cost absurd amounts

One of the first discussions about sugar similar to ours today occurred in the 1670s. Thomas Willis, the medical advisor to the duke of York and King Charles noticed an increase in diabetes at a time when drinking sugared tea was newly common. In those days, people believed sugar good for you and fine to give babies. Today, this seems obviously wrong. People used sugar as a medicine in the past, but as its price dropped its use shifted to an additive for food as a sweetener. With the industrial revolution, sugar production improved and sugar as a result cheapened. For a poor person, sugar provides a cheap luxury. During the Great Depression, the annual per capita sugar consumption was 16 pounds higher than in 1920. Come World War II, the government stated that you do not need sugar in a healthy diet to take the sting away from the rationing of it. After that, sugar's popularity soared, although many think differently about sugar today.

It’s in the food, the beverages, almost everything sweet. It has not only influenced Americans’ lifestyle, but is responsible for acute and chronic health problems that plague America as a whole. The consumption of added sugars has skyrocketed in the last few decades and has literally become a part of our lives, responsible for our deadly addiction, before you know it, you may become another suspect of this killer. In Nanci Hellmich, of USA Today, “Eating too much added sugar may be killing you”, Hellmich attributes sugar is not only causing us to become fat, but also is slowing killing us from within. Sugar is killing people because it is responsible for increasing the risk of health complications, growing prominence, and America’s obesity epidemic.

Sugar can turn your liver into scar tissue if you have too much. Sugar can also lead to obesity. You can put yourself at risk of a heart disease, diabetes and mood swings and so much more. Dr. Robert Lusting (2014) claims sugar is ''poison'' for the human body. California students eat 160 fewer calories a day than other students in other states because we have labels on fast food menus (Brownnell, 2011). "The California Senate recently passed a bill designed to do just that, and it may soon become a law (Lloyd, 2014, p. 18). Americans deserve the right to know what can make them

Obesity and its subsequent ailments are regarded as the leading cause(s) of death in the United States and many other parts of the world. As such, much deserved attention and controversy has been brought worldwide. Many people place blame for this relatively recent epidemic on the shoulders of high-fructose corn syrup, an artificial sweetener whose use has increased for many years alongside the rates of childhood and adult obesity. While they are not entirely incorrect in assuming a widespread increase in added sugars would result in more calories per product, more calories consumed, and therefore more calories stored in bodily tissue, high-fructose corn syrup alone is not solely to blame for this phenomenon.

Tobacco, alcohol and poor diet are the main risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and respiratory disease that kills approximately 35 million per year. Out of the three risk factors, an inadequate diet was found to the culprit of more diseases than smoking and liquor consumption combined. In Aseem Malhorta’s (2014) article “Sugar is now enemy number one in the western diet”, he claims that added sugar should be regulated as it is a health hazard that has caused the increasing prevalence of diabetes and obesity. Malhorta only focuses on sugar being the main causative agent in causing negative health outcomes, he fails to address the fact that there are many other confounding factors associated with each disease

Sugar is, and has always been, unavoidable; conversely, sugar has not always been toxic. Naturally abundant and technically enhanced, this substance has followed in the footsteps of tobacco and alcohol, becoming just as unhealthy and ultimately lethal. And, without the implementation of government

Low-fat food tends to have higher sugar content because the fats are replaced with the high amount of sugar to compensate for the flavor loss. Even worst, sugar is like a drug and the addiction is real, which makes it hard for people to choose healthy food because all the bad food contains more sugar. Sugar is the real culprit for obesity. Sugar is like cocaine and it causes addiction. The government is aware of the problem but does nothing to solve it because of giant food corporation manipulation.

Throughout the years America has started to blame sugar for obesity, heart disease, etc. To an extent we can blame sugar. When someone eats too much or eats the processed chemical filled sugar it could have a negative impact on that person's health. For example: “[..] Chemical makeup enters the bloodstream more quickly than plain sugar.” (Richards). Processed sugar enters into the body and bloodstream much faster than natural sugar does. Which causes too much sugar build up in our bloodstream makes the insulin work harder to process it all out. Until the insulin does its job the sugar just floats around in the blood. We as people can blame sugar for all of our issues when a person eats too much sugar. “I do not support unbelievable amount of GMO high fructose corn syrup” (Konie). That is when heart disease and obesity come into play, when you personally consume too much.

Food consumption that is high in sugar has been linked with obesity rates, so in order to cut obesity rates we must avoid a heavy load of sugar intake. In order to understand why sugar is “trending” as something to avoid in our diet, here are some reasons why: sugar has been found to be poor for our metabolism and harmful to our health (Flegal). It contains no essential nutrients. Sugar is also high in fructose, which can essentially overload your liver. Sugar can also cause insulin resistance. This is something strongly correlated with obesity rates, which can also be associated with diabetes. So with sugars effects to insulin resistance, it can be a contributor to type II diabetes as well as other chronic diseases. A specific note of this diabetes influence sugar has comes for an analysis done on caloric consumption and diabetes. “When people ate 150 calories more every day, the rate of diabetes went up 0.1%. But if those 150 calories came from a can of fizzy drink, the rate went up 1.1%” (Lambert) showing that added sugar is eleven times more harmful within the same calorie

Sugar is a very common thing we can find in our modern world. It’s in the majority of what we eat, drink, and snack on. Convenience is its best friend, because it can be found anywhere we look. We can find it at our corner gas station, our local supermarket, favorite movie theater, and in our own homes. Sugar is so closely related to the obesity crisis, and is believed to be the number one reason obesity exists.

As we hear of more studies exclaiming alarming findings of negative health concerns related to obesity and our continuously growing percentage of obesity in our country, particularly childhood obesity, sugar is in the spotlight. We often hear of dieticians and weight loss experts warning us that we

There are many unique and new uses for sugar at this point in time, but how and why are people coming up with these new uses if sugar is more or less a delicacy? Although, at first it was only attainted by the rich it did not take long for sugar to take off and reach the hands of the poor and alter life all over the world. “Sugar was land consuming, labor intensive, costly to extract, store, and ship (Mintz, 21).” However, sugar does not spoil and this starts off the commercial exchange. The demand for sugar grew steadily and more westerners started to consume it and started to consume it more heavily. English plantations started to make the price of sugar more affordable, which created an even bigger demand that brought about the middle and poor class to upper class consumption habits. There was a fivefold increase in the consumption of sugar and is the most important nutritional change of the British. “In this perspective, sugar was the ideal substance. It served to make a busy life seem less so; in the pause that refreshes, it eased, or seemed to ease, the changes back and forth from work to rest; it provided swifter sensations of fullness or satisfaction than complex carbohydrates did; it combined easily with many other food, in some of which it was also used. And as we have seen, it was symbolically powerful, for its use could be endowed with