Deadly sugar-filled diet choices mean slow suicide for millions

As I walked Lucy through the neighborhood a couple of nights ago, I waved at a neighbor who was sitting on his front porch and smoking a cigarette. I like this guy a lot, but my immediate reaction was judgment.

“He knows that’s deadly,” I thought. “Why in the world would he keep doing something that’s going to kill him?”

And then my inner observer laughed at me mockingly.

“And why do you keep eating things that you know will kill you?” the voice teased. “Do you think you’re better than he is?”

I’m a hypocrite. You probably are, too. We all love to judge others harshly while we create excuses for behaviors in ourselves which are just as bad — and sometimes worse. My deadly diet is among my worst habits — and it makes me a hypocrite to criticize anyone else who’s making unhealthful choices.

I fear that the modern American diet is going to kill me. Nobody is forcing it on me, but I feel trapped in a deadly pattern — and there are many millions on the same path of slow suicide with me.

Many of those people are completely oblivious to what’s happening to them, because our health-care professionals are mostly treating the symptoms, not the causes.

For most of my adult life, I struggled with my weight, but I usually kept the problem under control. I often needed to shed 20 to 40 pounds. It annoyed me, but I never felt as though things were really out of control.

About 12 years ago, though, things suddenly got worse. I had always used food like a narcotic to soothe myself when I was unhappy. Then when I went through a difficult breakup — one which stretched out and got complicated — I ate everything in sight. I gained a hundred pounds.

After another five or six years, I fell in love again. Because I was happy and felt as though I had a future to live for once again, I spontaneously changed the way I ate. I stopped craving sugar and the other starches that had fueled my descent into something of a comatose depression.

The weight started dropping off. I shed 40 pounds — maybe a bit more — within a few months. But then that relationship came to a screeching halt and the inner demon was back. All of my bad habits were back, too, and the fat roared back with a vengeance.

When I was a kid, there weren’t that many fat people. As late as the mid 1980s, no more than about 14 percent of the fattest U.S. states were obese (and there weren’t many of those states). By 2010, there was no U.S. state in which fewer than 20 percent of the population was obese — and more than 30 percent of the people of a dozen or so states were obese. (See a short video illustrating the trend over those years here.)

When I was young, we rarely ate our meals away from home. Fast food was an exotic treat that was mostly reserved for traveling or special situations. Today, I almost never eat at home — and I know many people who do the same thing.

We eat in restaurants — sometimes casual dining and sometimes fast food — which have learned to cater to our appetites by loading their menus with food that’s stuffed with sugar. The food we eat is further and further away from the more simple and common foods — things with little industrial processing — which we used to eat at home.

Even things which you wouldn’t think of as sweets — hamburger buns, for instance — are loaded with sugar. In fact, American bread is so full of sugar that the Subway sandwich chain in Ireland isn’t allowed to legally consider its rolls as “bread.” Ireland’s Supreme Court ruled that Subway’s bread had too much sugar to qualify to be taxed as bread instead of as a sweet instead.

Most people just eat what tastes good and don’t worry too much about it. In the meantime, a higher and higher percentage of the people around us are getting more and more unhealthy. Look around you in a grocery store. How many are objectively overweight? Can you remember how much different the picture was 30 years ago?

Today, more and more obese and unhealthy people are riding around Walmart on motorized carts — as they load up on cheap cookies and cakes and ice cream. I’m not riding around on such a cart, but if I keep acting like a hypocritical fool, I might not be too far behind them.

This is an individual problem for many of us and it’s a systemic problem for a society which values nothing so highly as what feels good in the moment.

If enough of us make healthier choices, there will be a market for those healthier choices. Right now, it’s fairly difficult to eat out every day and avoid doing deadly things to your body.

For decades, the U.S. government and medical establishment co-operated with the packaged foods industry to sell us the lie that eating fat would kill us and that we should increase our intake of processed carbohydrates. Today, more and more doctors are concluding that the evidence clearly says that sugar is killing us, not dietary fat.

But because we live in a society which is steeped in the anti-fat and pro-sugar ethos, we have more people than ever who suffer from “metabolic syndrome” and end up being given deadly drugs for diabetes. Doctors who have seen different evidence — and tested the idea in their own practices — have proven that eliminating sugar and almost all carbs will reverse diabetes and cure all sorts of problems.

Even things which most people would never connect to sugar — such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) — has been shown to be directly linked, but much of the medical establishment is slow to accept the research.

One of my worst flaws is my tendency to believe I know how things ought to be. In something I recently read about my Type 1 personality (on the Enneagram system), it said, “A major feature of your personality is to become convinced that you know the way everything ought to be.”

Ouch. That’s so close to home that it hurts, because it’s true.

I do think I know “the way things ought to be” when it comes to our diets. Mostly, though, I know without any question the way things ought to be for my own diet. I know how I should eat. I know what I shouldn’t eat. I just haven’t been able to get myself into a place — emotionally and psychologically — that I’m able to do what I know I ought to do.

I know that sugar, tobacco and alcohol are deadly, but I live in a society where the desire for pleasure is so ingrained that we continue doing what we know will kill us. When it comes to sugar, I’m right there with the worse of them.

I feel very strongly about all sorts of lifestyle changes that we ought to make. I really think I’m right about those things, based on the evidence I’ve found. But I can’t speak too loudly, because the reality of my own life right now shows that I’m still a hypocrite.

That has to change — or else I’m going to die an early death. And many millions of you are on similarly deadly paths.

We have to find a way to fix a lot of things which have gone monstrously wrong in our dysfunctional culture, including how we eat.