If you filled trucks with all the candy American kids eat in one year, they would line up bumper to bumper from San Diego to San Francisco.
Sugar is highly addictive. Some have said it’s more addictive than cocaine. Speaking of cocaine, some have said that overcoming an addition to sugar is even more difficult than an addition to cocaine.
Sugar is strongly implicated in numerous scientific studies covering a wide range of diseases from high blood pressure to cancer and especially diabetes.
The number of children and young adults afflicted with diabetes and blood pressure has skyrocketed since the increase of sugar in the standard American diet.
Starchy foods aren’t much better. If you eat bread, pies, cake or anything of that sort, your digestive process converts it to sugar.
Soft drinks have an amazing 10 or more teaspoons of sugar dissolved in every can.
What about fruit juice? Nope, not good either. Although natural juices don’t contain sucrose – table sugar – fruit sugars without their roughage are nearly as deadly.
Yeah, deadly. The problem is most people don’t recognize sugar as deadly because it isn’t a quick acting poison. People don’t eat a fudge brownie and fall over dead. It’s insidious because the death cames slowly yet painfully, usually, but not always after 40 or more years.
How about sugar substitutes? Things like corn syrup or honey have the same effect as other types of sugar.
However, there are two products that can satisfy in the same way as sugar, yet they are not sugars and contain no calories. Those are stevia and monk fruit.
You’ll find stevia often served in little packets in restaurants and cafes where the management is trying to think of their patrons’ health. If you read the small print on the packets of stevia, you may be shocked to discover the actual amount of stevia is slight. The packet mostly contains fillers such as Erythritol. Some manufacturers even mix their stevia with dextrose or sucrose – sugar.
Why would they do that? Because stevia is 200 to 300 times sweeter than table sugar. Although rare, you can buy pure stevia on Amazon and elsewhere. You would be amazed at how little is needed to sweeten a food or beverage.
The taste of stevia or monk fruit is so close to sugar that if you use it as a sugar substitute, children will not detect the difference, but they are likely to live longer and healthier.
As one who has overcome a sugar addiction, it wasn’t as hard as they say, I have noticed that I have more consistent energy. I used to get suddenly tired, sometimes even dizzy after short bursts of exertion. For instance, I might have to sit out every other game of pickleball. Now, I can play for hours at a time with no sugar bonk.
