It’s the nutritional tragedy of our age. When you eat - or drink! - refined carbohydrates, your bloodstream is flooded with glucose, the high-octane energy source your body uses to fuel strenuous activity. The problem is, most of us participate in strenuous activity about as often as we win the lottery. Like, never. So if you don’t burn off the glucose, your body expends the hormone insulin to mop up the excess energy and store it in your cells for future use. That works fine for a while, until the gallons of extra glucose start to exhaust your poor insulin-producing pancreas, and the sweetness starts to linger in your bloodstream. That’s bad, because sweet blood is bad for small blood vessels, like the ones in your eyes, your genitals, and your extremities. Hence the rotting toes in the anti-sugar ad.
I see those toes and I see tragedy. My heart goes out to the poor victim who earned his or her spot in the limelight while losing the use of their feet. But my glucose-lite blood boils at the thought of the major food manufacturers who are inflicting their unhealthy products on a vulnerable population. In fact, we’re hard-wired to seek out sweet foods; to our ancestors, who encountered sweet treats in their foraging, they were the healthiest foods around. Think fruits and berries. Now, however, the food manufacturers feed our sweet instincts by leveling a sugar smart-bombs at our vulnerable appetites.
When they explode, our waistlines and health risks do, too.
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