Deadly sugar-filled diet choices mean slow suicide for millions

By David McElroy · October 26, 2021

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.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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