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Government's sugar addiction is making us fat, sick and dead
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AP Photo/ Evan Vucci
Our elected representatives like to pretend that they are looking out for our wellbeing, pompously touting their commitment to universal healthcare, affordable health insurance and prescription medications. In reality, they are killing us with government policies promoting sugar, which is a major cause of obesity and skyrocketing healthcare costs. But they can’t help themselves. They are sugar addicts of the worse sort.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2008 election cycle, the sugar cane and sugar beet industry contributed over $4.2 million dollars to federal candidates and political parties. In addition, the industry spent almost $7 million just in 2008 for lobbying. Might they be expecting something in return for their “investment” in government?
What the sugar industry gets is a federal program that guarantees a minimum price for their product and a system of quotas and tariffs limiting the importation of cheaper foreign sugar. What consumers get is sugar that costs about 3 times the market price and diabetes.
Although the industry, of course, denies any link between sugar and diabetes, research published in The Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages increases the risk of type 2 diabetes. Nancy Appleton, Ph.D. has documented 146 ways sugar ruins your health. Diabetes is only one way.
The American Diabetes Association estimates that the total cost of dealing with diabetes alone in 2007 was $174 billion, including diabetes medical care, chronic diabetes-related complications, excess general medical costs, and indirect costs of absenteeism, lost productivity, unemployment disability, and early mortality. This represents the costs of caring for the 23.6 million Americans with diabetes but not the 57 million with pre-diabetes who are likely to get the disease unless they make lifestyle changes.
What’s so important about refined sugar that the government has to insure not only its availability to the public but the financial health of its producers? It could disappear tomorrow, and lots of unhealthy processed foods with it, and we’d all survive and in fact thrive. We could easily satisfy our national sweet tooth with unprocessed sugars naturally occurring in grains, vegetables and fruit.
Instead of pouring more taxpayers’ dollars into the promotion of sugar, Congress should be subsidizing whole organic foods. But that would mean breaking their addiction to the sweet deal they have with the sugar industry.
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