Here is the story:

I was talking to a group of people about health and we were discussing the nature of sugar and how, when you try to avoid it, it acts like a magnet. As soon as you put a piece of something sweet in your mouth, more wants to follow. It is as if the first piece of sugar was a magnet, pulling more sugar into your body. I was struggling with a way to suggest that sugar this sugar magnet meant that sugar had addictive qualities. But it wasn’t enough to stop there, because consuming sugar in the amount that we all do has health consequences. The problem with the health consequences of sugar is that they don’t happen soon, but slowly over time.

Then it came to me: sugar is exactly like cigarettes.

Let’s take a look and see how similar sugar and cigarettes are:

• Cigarettes are addictive… so is sugar
• Cigarettes cause harm… so does sugar
• Cigarettes give you a boost of energy… so does sugar
• The harm that cigarettes does happens slowly over time… exactly the same as sugar

The more that I looked into the addictive qualities and the harm that sugar does, the more it became apparent to me that cigarettes and sugar are almost identical. Like twins separated at birth, these two non-foods have strong addictive grips on us that won’t let us go (ask anyone who has ever tried to stop smoking or eating carbohydrates) and are they both do damage to our health that is subtle, but end up being profound.

Sugar’s Harm

You may well know that cigarettes are very harmful to your lungs, but you may not know how harmful sugar is to your blood vessels. While I cover this topic with other blog posts, let me briefly let you know what scientists are discovering about what harm sugar can do:

• Sugar causes you to gain weight
• Sugar, despite what many doctors will tell you, is responsible for diabetes
• Sugar may also be responsible for much of the heart disease we see
• Sugar is toxic to blood vessels it will destroy them (you can especially see this in diabetics)
• Sugar is just as addictive as cigarettes, alcohol and other hard drugs

Sugarettes is the perfect name to give you the mental picture of why sugar is such a problem in our diets. You don’t notice the destruction because it happens slowly over time. Your health can be greatly improved by avoiding both sugar and foods that act like sugar in your body.

The reasons why no one is sounding the alarm are complex and they start with our view of our food.

Meal Time

When you sit down to a meal, you assume (as we all do) that the food that is in front of us is the same food that humans have always eaten. This is simply not true. When you look over your meal and think back at the food that your parents and grandparent chose, they ate pretty much the same foods as you see on your plate today. But the problem is that our memories are short and you are looking back over the last, maybe, 100 years or so, you don’t really know what your ancestors at even 200 years ago.

To find out the foods that humans should be eating, you need to go back even further. The fact is that, over the last 7,000 years, humans have slowly changed the foods that they eat in a dramatic way. We have gone from eating mostly fresh foods to eating almost 100 percent processed foods.

We have gone from eating almost no grains and, certainly no sugars, to making these foods a dominant part of our diet. Take a look at your plate next time you are eating and notice how many of the food that you eat are carbohydrates, and then notice how many of those foods are simple carbohydrates or sugars.

Why I wrote Sugarettes

I wrote Sugarettes because no one is telling you that eating that many grains and sugars is harmful. In fact, you may notice that the advice you are getting from the medical community and government is just the opposite: grains and carbohydrates should make up a bulk of the food that you are eating.

Does their dietary advice work? Look around you. Do we look all that healthy?

We are not healthy. We are overweight and sick. We have changed from a society where only 5 or 10 percent of us were overweight to now approaching 50 percent or higher. With added weight comes an increase in the number of people with metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers and other diseases. In fact, there are real chances that life expectancy may be slipping backwards for the first time in 100 years. The next generation may not live as long as the generation before it. Why? Because we are eating so many processed foods, sugars, and simple carbohydrates.

I wrote Sugarettes because there is a health-related Titanic racing towards an iceberg at full speed and yet the captain of the boat, oblivious to the danger, is calmly sipping tea on the back deck. This needs to change.

It is time you hopped in your own personal lifeboat and got off that ship. The only way to do that is to change the way that you are eating. It can be a struggle to change what you are eating, but the payoff is great. You can expect to have more energy, feel better, sleep better and avoid many of the painful diseases that come with following traditional medical advice about the foods you should be eating.