Foundational Health Habit 1: Don’t Eat Sugar
Okay – we know sugar is bad. But until recently, I didn’t understand the scale of how evolutionarily unprecedented the problem is and the science of why it is actually so destructive. Wrapping my head around these two questions has helped me start implementing changes more effectively.
Today’s email will focus on the scale of the problem:
If we eliminated just one ingredient from our diets (added sugar), we would eliminate 70%+ of heart disease (#1 cause of death), many leading forms of cancer (#2 cause of death), stroke (#5 cause of death), Alzheimer’s (#7 cause of death), Type 2 Diabetes (#8 cause of death) and liver disease (#10 cause of death).
Yet our health leadership acts like Americans are genetically wired to eat sugar, and the best we can do is help patients once they are already sick. This is absurd: 150 years ago, sugar consumption was 100 times lower. This is like companies secretly putting heroin in our food supply and then saying it is inevitable that everyone is now addicted. We need to understand – at a starting point – that our situation is not inevitable or irreversible. Something very identifiable happened – and it can be undone.
We can decrease sugar from our diet, but we need to see the substance for what it is: an addictive, dangerous drug that has been added to something that is required for life (food).
Sugar isn’t widely considered to be a harmful drug by our medical system. The CDC encourages it – saying added sugar should make up 10% of a two-year-old’s diet.
But just look around a public space, and it becomes obvious that sugar (and processed grains, which often convert to sugar) is the most destructive drug in America. As we all know, the majority of Americans are obese, which almost guarantees they will die years earlier and suffer more chronic conditions along the way. And, of course, the underlying metabolic dysfunction that shows up physically in the form of obesity is also negatively impacting – interfering with – our brains.
Are Americans systematically trying to shorten and worsen their lives – which is what is manifestly happening on a societal scale? No – Americans are suffering from a mass chemical addiction to the substances that have been added to our food over the past 50 years. This isn’t marginal: When kids drink one bottle of Coke, they are ingesting as much sugar as they did in a year just 150 years ago. Sugary drinks alone are linked to at least 25,000 American deaths per year. This is an addiction problem at its core and should be seen as such. Eliminating sugar subsidies and incentivizing Americans to eat less sugar are possible healthcare policy choices – but we are told that “serious” healthcare interventions only happen after you get sick.
Next, we’ll dive into why sugar is actually bad – a question very few people (particularly doctors) know the answer to.
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Calley Means 