We loooooooooove it, we haaaaaaaaaate it. Yesterday my friend said she ate three Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and she was still moaning, a day later, over how she felt. I told her it’s easy to eat three because if you condensed them they would be one square inch, each. What to do, WHAT TO DO? America is swimming in sugar. Author Yuval Noah Harari gives us this startling statistic:

“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”

We don’t think of sugar as a dangerous substance that can kill people. 

I remember reading The Little House House on the Prairie when I was little and wondering about the orange Laura got for Christmas and the 1/3 cup   of sugar Ma used to make  special Christmas cakes. My eight year-old self couldn’t believe that was  all the sugar they had for Christmas. That was the extent of human’s sugar intake for hundreds of years. Fruit in season and honey, until the 1800’s, when Ma could afford a tiny bit of refined sugar. Very little to none. Things have really changed for us.

• September 2016: My son said that there were two German exchange students in one of his classes at his high school. He asked them what differences they noticed from Germany and America. One of the exchange students said, “All the food is sweeter.” 
• February 2017: Two Swedish teenagers come over to Utah for a week. My daughter was serving as a missionary in their branch. She said, “Please have them for dinner!” We are enjoying dinner and peppering them with questions. My son,  asked them, “What do you think are some of the biggest differences between Sweden and the US?” One of their answers was,”Your food tastes too sweet.”
• August 2018: We are boating with our children and their friends. Cameron’s roommate was dating a girl from Portugal, named Ines. She has been going to BYU for a year. She was talking about food differences and she said, “Everything here is so sweet! I have gained 16 lbs!”
• September 2018: At a family cookout at my sister-in-law’s, an exchange student from Norway was saying she couldn’t get used to how sweet everything is. She said, “Even your milk tastes sweet!” Her host mother (my niece, Aimee) went with her to the store to find food like how she eats in Norway. She said, “We found my cereal but it still had 7 grams of sugar, we found my dark wheat bread but it still had sugar added. ” She added, “I make sure there is absolutely no sugar in the cereal I am eating because I can’t take the taste of both the cereal and the milk having sugar added.”

We ended the night with all-American s’mores!

I am ok with treats. A “s’more” is gooey, chocolate-y goodness. A treat through and through. Let’s have treats on holidays, birthdays,  and a nice dessert for Sunday dinner. What I have issue with is sneaking sugar into everything from ketchup to milk, to bread.

I recently heard a doctor say, that eating sugar suppresses our immune system for 8 hours. That means our bodies can’t fight off germs that can make us sick. Another reason to limit the treats and sweets as we are fighting to stay healthy in 2022. How can we do that with sugar everywhere and it being so addictive?

Part 2: The Plagues of Prosperity and how we can manage our sugar intake.