Dr. Dodge: Passion for Health

Trick or Treat! This time-honored Halloween demand is usually rewarded by giving children candy or some kind of sugary snack. After completing their “hallowed” rounds, the kids gleefully take home a treasure-trove for their sweet tooth. 

It’s not only children who enjoy sweets. A “sweet tooth” is a fairly universal trait, found in most people in virtually all cultures. For most of human history, the only way to satisfy a sweet tooth was to eat something naturally sweet, such as fruit or honey. 

Sugar began to be commercially produced in the middle ages, but became affordable to most people only around 1900. Since then, average sugar consumption per person has sky-rocketed from fifteen pounds to one hundred and fifty pounds a year per person. Today sugar is cheap, but consequences of its over-consumption are hugely expensive.

Human bodies are well equipped to process fifteen pounds of sugar a year, but we are not able to healthfully handle the large amounts of sugar we consume today. Scientists calculate that most of us can handle thirty pounds of sugar a year (about ten teaspoons of sugar a day,) without a problem, but most people consume five times that much!

You don’t ladle fifty teaspoons of sugar into your food every day, so where does it come from? Most of it is hidden in soft drinks, pies, cakes, cookies, and other processed foods that we like to eat. Few people know the true extent of their sugar intake.

Does the excess sugar load we consume cause problems? Yes, but often so subtly that most people are not aware of them for many years. Even then, they may not associate those problems with their sugar intake. How does sugar cause problems?

First, sugar has been stripped of all nutritional value except calories. When sugar intake is low, this doesn’t make much difference, but as sugar consumption climbs, it begins to displace healthier foods, which is not good. This effect is compounded when sugar is added to many processed foods that would not taste good without sugar. The net result: much of the food many people eat is of inferior nutritional quality, partly due to sugar.

Finally, sugar overload in the human body has an inflammatory effect on internal tissues and organs, and may be a factor in many chronic diseases. In 2003, an expert report by the World Health Organization (WHO) linked excess sugar intake to the immense global burden of chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, dental caries, and others. It advised limiting sugar intake to less than ten percent of total calories. 

The sugar industry vigorously disputed this, but the comprehensive WHO report by top world experts is more credible than the self-serving protests by the sugar industry.

So, is sugar a treat or a trick? Actually, it is both. In small quantities it is a treat for most people. However, in the larger quantities most people consume, its sweet seductiveness plays nasty tricks, betraying long-term good health for its sweet taste. That is not a price worth paying. In spite of my “sweet tooth,” I have cut down my sugar intake greatly over the past forty years. Am I a martyr? No! I enjoy my food (and my health) more than ever.