(Note: As Scott DeSmit prepares to go to the fair to indulge in massive amounts of fried dough with cinnamon and sugar, he leaves you with this from 2016.)
I was born with a silver spoon, which I promptly filled with sugar and poured down my gullet.
It wasn’t enough that I chewed wads of Bazooka gum. No, once the flavor disappeared, and it disappeared quickly, I would pinch the wad from my mouth and dip it in sugar, rolling it so it was evenly coated. Sometimes I would mush the sugar in, folding the gum and sticking it back in my mouth.
A nice wad of Bazooka would last me all day.
Halloween? Forget it. We used pillow cases and would hit every house for as far as our parents would let us go. Twice.
Then, once home, I would dump the loot onto the bed, sort through and toss the lousy stuff like apples, pennies and pencils and wolf down a half pound of confections before bed.
Yes, I lost a few teeth but it was worth it. I still have intense cravings for sugar, especially in chocolate form.
Sugar is good for you. You can’t get enough sugar. Sugar runs through our veins.
Saturated fats? Evil.
That’s why the first time I ever went on a “diet” it was the low-fat diet, which was all the rage in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And boy, the products they came up with, the best being the new Entenmann’s fat-free raspberry danish.
A fat-free danish? Died and went to heaven, I did. Of course, I gained 20 pounds doing so. I didn’t blame the danish, though. It was no-fat. Must be something else I was eating at the time.
Because sugar, we all knew, was as pure as the driven snow. Sugar was not the culprit. Fat was. Even the government said so.
Remember those nutrition pyramids? Sugar was at the top.
All those books touting a low-fat diet? All those news stories? Television shows? Magazine ads? We was duped. Lied to.
In case you missed it, this week the revelation came: The sugar industry lied to us. The Harvard professors lied to us. The government lied to us.
Documents uncovered and published in medical journals this week revealed that the sugar industry bribed Harvard researchers to publish studies that minimized the link between sugar and heart health and, instead, blame fats.
The result? That research led the government to downplay those links in their nutritional guidelines.
And, we got fat. Really, really fat. Most experts blame the 1980s low-fat diet craze and, now, sugar.
Fat? Seems that it could actually be beneficial, or, at the least, not as harmful as we suspected.
The sugar industry aren’t the only liars out there, of course. Pretty much every study ever put out has been tainted. Think cigarettes, soda, pharmaceuticals, and on and on.
Bribes. The product manufacturers fund the studies and the established medical journals publish them and we follow them. Just think of the power the sugar industry wields. As much, if not more, than oil.
We just don’t think about it. We think big oil is evil. The tobacco industry is evil. Drug companies are evil.
We don’t think about the sugar industry. Sugar is sweet and good. Can’t be bad.
It is also the one thing that every person in our country eats. The USDA estimates that we eat 150 to 170 pounds of sugar a year. Each person.
Think Exxon controls the world? I’m thinking the sugar industry does.
Sugar, some have said for so long, is poison.
It’s not, of course. It’s just making us fat and sick because we are pigs and because we believed for so long that it was everything else that was bad for us. Certainly not sugar.
Eat everything in moderation and get some exercise. That is the only truth.
Other than that, believe nothing, is my motto.
Scott DeSmit is a general assignment reporter. He can be reached at desmitmail@yahoo.com.