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As a kid, I used to watch Saturday night live.  There was one skit I remember, and it had something to do with the sugar addictions in breakfast cereal.  There was some sort of spoof with something called “Sugar Smack”.  I can’t find the exact picture used, but I thought it was strung out dude with one of those tubes around his arm.  However, I found this which will illustrate my point.

Every day I’m more and more convinced that sugar is an addictive drug.  I don’t want to put a tin foil hat on, but if anyone wants to go down a rabbit hole for a few minutes, I want to lay out a case.

This idea first dawned on me when I became “fat adapted”.  I just feel so much different.  Better.  Rested.  Relaxed.  I feel like when I’m on sugar, I’m more “emotional”.  Not that I’m a robot when not on sugar, but I feel like when I’m on sugar, I felt things “extra hard”.  This led me to seeking out things to make me feel better – smokes, bad food, booze, etc.  I also don’t have any lulls in my day, no sugar spikes which want me to take a nap.

There’s also the lack of hunger and easily controllable hunger.  I noticed before that I needed to eat every 4-6 hours, then if I didn’t, I might get a bit cranky.  I might obsessively focus on a particular food for dinner based on cravings.  Today, I stopped eating breakfast or lunch 5 days a week for the last month.  On the way home on my 90 minute commute, I have hunger…but it’s gentle.  There’s no food I’m being directed to.  Sometimes I come home when hungry and work out or walk the dog before making up a 30-60 minute meal.  In my previous life, it was a race home and I needed to eat within 5 minutes of coming in the door.

So – this is personal observation which got me thinking about it.

Recently, I have been influenced a lot by the “thought leaders” of Taubes, etc.  In his lecture, “The case against sugar”, he makes a very, very convincing case about sugar actually being a drug.  I have heard some comparisons and it got me thinking.

With cocaine, you are dealing with a relatively harmless cocoa leaf and refining it into a white powder which is super concentrated.  It hits reward centers in your brain, is highly addictive, and is a schedule 1 drug.  Sugar in its natural state with sugar cane is harmless  – but this is also refined into a super concentrated form.  It, too, hits reward centers of your brain, and, as it turns out, is also super addictive.  Don’t take my word for it – actually look this one up on your own independent searches, this can get you started.

What’s of most interest for me now is that added sugar is in 85% of the 600,000 products you see in the supermarket shelves.  Jason Wittrock has been having a “war against sugar” and swearing off all forms of sugar, and not surprisingly, has had a terrible time trying to find products without sugar in its dozens of forms.

But it’s addictive.  So what, right?

Well, we give it to our kids from birth.  My boy has only ever really had one tantrum with me, and it was in a Giant when I was food shopping.  I don’t give him juice, sugary drinks, or really sugar of any type.  Yeah, he does have complex carbs with breads and some pastas (mac and cheese anyone?), but SUGAR in the pure form…no.  Get this – I can’t get him to eat chocolate, ice cream, etc.  Seriously, he doesn’t WANT it.  His grandmom tries spoiling him on Halloween/easter and he simply gives his candy to his sisters.  No interest.

But I digress – most of the rest of us were brought up on sugar.  Cokes, ice cream, candy, etc.

And, we are fighting the words obesity epidemic in the history of the world.

What has been coming out from the low carb community has been this idea that sugar is not a natural substance we put in our body.  They do recommend some natural fruit sugars in the form of berries, but limited in quantity.  One thing that hooked me in the first 3 minutes of any of my research was….

• There are essential amino acids our body needs to eat to live, we cannot make them ourselves
• There are essential lipids/fats our body needs to eat to live, we cannot make them ourselves
• There are no such things as essential carbohydrates to live.  Our body doesn’t need them and can do just fine without them.

This was the first time I heard this.  You mean in the last so many hundreds of thousands of years, we have never NEEDED sugar?

In fact, the dose the American Heart Association recommends is 37g of added sugar per day.  This healthline website also has an article comparing junk food to addictive drugs.

One thing of interest – apparently, fluoride is added to our water to protect our teeth.  Look up what happens to our teeth with the American diet without fluoride in our water.  Teeth apparently look like the teeth of a meth addict.

So get this.  Sugar in large quantities gets you insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, then leads to….

1. Obesity
2. Type 2 diabetes
3. Cancer
4. Heart disease
5. Alzheimers
6. Many other bad, bad things.

However, 90% of all food companies are owned by like 10 companies.  Again, 85% of all food products have added sugar.  If, indeed, sugar is a drug, these companies have a vested interest in keeping you addicted to their products, no?

So, to recap:

• American Heart Association recommends no more than 37g of added sugar per day
• 85% of all American products contain added sugars
• Sugar is listed as one of the most addictive substances on the planet
• Sugar causes insulin resistance and metabolic diseases, including the diseases listed above
• We give sugar to our kids in droves

One stat that really has stood out to me was that 100 years ago, 1 in 30 people got cancer.  Now, it’s one in 3.  Heart disease numbers are ridiculously higher than 40 years ago, when we adopted the food pyramid.

And – when I tell people I’m doing keto, the FIRST thing anyone says is:

• Saturated fats will kill you
• what about all of the cholesterol?

Unfortunately, these two pieces of information are believed by everyone.  Even myself up until I did my research.  Well, these things are unfortunately not exactly true.

• The link between saturated fats and heart disease was first promulgated by Ansel Keys in the 1950s.  The “study of 7” listed 7 countries in a nice line to show correlation.  The problem is, the study was 22 countries and showed zero correlation, especially when you added the inuit who ate 90% fats and had the lowest heart disease of all populations
• High LDL cholesterol now is supposed to be the boogeyman.  You remember just 5-10 years ago that everyone thought eggs were bad?  Well, science.  Now they aren’t bad.  Some thing with LDL.  Turns out, there are BIG (harmless) LDL particles and SMALL (bad) LDL particles.  On a high fat, low carb diet, the LDL that is observed is the BIG LDL and deemed “harmless”.  On a low fat, high carb diet, the LDL observed is SMALL (bad).  Therefore, your LDL count is useless unless you know the particle sizes of the LDL.

Part of this also was research in the 1960s that the food companies essentially bought off the Harvard researchers to point them to FATS as the boogeyman rather than SUGARS.  Did you see the chart above?

So, what then happened was this….

• In the 1970s, the Warren commission got the food pyramid into play, promoting 6-11 servings of grains, starches per day
• Fat was seen as the enemy.  Foods started removing fats, and added sugars in to make them taste better
• The modern metabolic problems started in the early 1980s

Now, I want you to take more leaps….

What if, for one moment, we accept:

• Sugar is addictive
• Sugar causes health problems
• Sugar is in most of the foods  we eat
• Food companies engineer food to get us addicted to their foods

If we accept that premise, then I want you to look at how we treat disease in this country.

How many billions upon billions of dollars do we spend on pharmaceuticals in this country?  Everything has a “treatment” for it.  What about preventing the shit in the first place?  What about reversing damage done to our bodies?

I am now troubled like you are with all of the shootings in the US.  But what if the rash of shootings in the last 20 years in this country are a sign of emotional instability?  They want to talk about mental health, but what if all of these kids today are so doped up on sugar that they are, indeed, acting like heroin addicts?  What if most of our children are addicts in some way, shape, or form – and we expect them to deal with life’s problems as if there are no addictions present?  What if my observation above about feeling “emotional” about issues could be linked to sugar addictions in others with things like depression, bipolar, or worse?

I think my concern here is our entire population is essentially ingesting products daily that:

1. Are not needed to survive.  There is no mechanism in our body that needs this.
2. We are overdosing daily on.  The AHA recommends no more than 37g of sugar daily, yet it appears we might be dwarfing that number.  The body does produce insulin to take care of extra sugars in our bloodstream, but never was capable of handling the sheet volume we are killing it with.
3. Have created innumerable numbers of diseases to the point the UNITED STATES may GO BROKE due to medical costs of these diseases
4. Are hard wired to resist evidence that sugar is causing most of these problems, and our food industry, who owns everything, heavily influence the dollars for research.
5. Are given to children

Now, if someone told you they were going to put small doses of cocaine in all of our products on the shelves, how would you act?  What if I told you that studies are showing that sugar is MORE addictive than cocaine and tobacco, and only less addictive than HEROIN?

To add to my last post – “is keto sustainable?”

I think a better question is, when will everyone else realize they are addicts and join me in breaking their addictions?  It is clear that my chosen style of eating is now looked at by the general population as quackery and voodoo science…but I need you to re-read the above, then fall down the rabbit hole for yourself.

Your food intake, today, has been influenced by those 10 corporations above, and they are vested financially in you continuing to buy their products.  So, go ahead and give those Frosted Flakes to your kid for breakfast with a healthy scoop of cocaine on top of it (wait, not needed to addict them).  Or, take some time and seriously look at the evidence for yourself.

Of interest – I have done the research, created a well-formulated diet used today by more and more athletes, and I’m the one eating an unsustainable diet?  Addiction free?  I feel at the moment like when I was in college.  I was in a fraternity and we binge drank.  All the time.  I’m talking 6 days a week, 12+ hours a day.  I was barely sober for 4 years of college.  Occasionally, I might have wanted to take a night off for a big test or the like, but wanted to go out and see my friends.  Within moments of showing up sober, I’d be relentlessly hazed until I conformed.  Until I took a sip of the nectar of destruction.  And when I did, I was then “part of the group” and…well…I’d be out to 4AM and do something stupid.  I feel at times by eating a diet that’s non-addictive, that people want to pressure me into eating “normal”.  They feel this is not sustainable and I will fail.  That this isn’t healthy.  I feel like the sober guy at the party making the right choice, and no one else even knows the deal.  Hopefully with social media today, we might be able to get the word out quickly.

One last sentiment.  What if a lot of these school shootings can be prevented by….eating real food.   When I was in high school, one of the “coolest things” we found was the anarchist cookbook.  Some of my friends made some explosive stuff.  In college, some of my friends played with oven cleaner and aluminum foil.  Another friend blew up a porta potty and got in trouble.  No one needed a gun to find out ways to blow shit up.  If we took ALL GUNS tomorrow – the problem is the violence is still there and then you will have stabbings, explosives, cars driving into shit, or planes flying into shit.  VIOLENCE is the root issue, and we are all ignoring that all of our children are addicts today.

Instead…we use cartoon marketing and sling our kids more smack in all forms to get them addicted as early as possible.