Column: My Point of View, by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

My genes help me fit into my blue jeans. In snapshots of my paternal grandmother as a young woman, I see the source of my long limbs. I was only as svelte as she was for about 10 minutes at the age of 15, but the heredity is unmistakable.

Alas, I’m not entirely immune to the effects of an unbalanced diet. By the time I was in college, too many late-night breadsticks and never-ending soft-serve ice cream at the dining hall had sheathed me in a protective layer of fat that would have been handy had I needed to survive winter camping in Antarctica.

In my junior year, I shed most of the blubber while abstaining from desserts and sweets during the 40 days of Lent. I didn’t give up other food or feel hungry once, though my sugar cravings made me feel cantankerous at first. The experience always made me wonder, what is different about sugar?

For my whole life, the “low-fat diet” has been the basis of government guidelines on how to eat healthfully. Sugar content isn’t supposed to matter as long as the total daily calories we consume add up to the right amount. “Low fat!” and “No fat!” labels splash the packaging of sugary snack foods, advertising their supposed conformity to nutritional standards.

My body tells me a different story. I’m a sugar addict, going off and on the wagon ever since college. It’s my most abused drug, way above caffeine and alcohol. I manage to radically reduce my consumption sometimes, but it’s difficult to sustain. Once I slip up again (and sugar is available everywhere), I binge. The main difference between my addiction and others is I hide candy packaging rather than empty liquor bottles or used needles. I feel disgusting, but nobody ships me to detox or rehab, because the FDA considers sugar a benign substance. Both table sugar and high fructose corn syrup have GRAS status — “generally regarded as safe.”

What if sugar really is bad for me, and the substance lives up to John Yudkin’s 1972 assessment of it as “pure, white and deadly?”

A recent book by Dr. Robert Lustig called “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Foods, Obesity and Disease” connects all these dots. Lustig turns much conventional wisdom about dieting on its head: A calorie is not a calorie. We can’t control our eating behavior. Exercise doesn’t make us lose weight (but it does make us healthier), and any number of diet approaches can work as long as they slash sugar.

Lustig confirms what I suspected but had hoped wasn’t true: Behind its sweet facade, sugar (specifically fructose) is a villain. It is one of the main causes of metabolic syndrome, which is often linked to obesity but also affects 40 percent of normal weight people. Metabolic syndrome is a suspected forerunner to a host of serious health problems including Type II diabetes, heart disease and stroke. It is even possible to pickle ones liver with excess sugar, and the resulting damage is known as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

The health costs for these chronic diseases are mounting at an alarming rate, costing the government billions of dollars, yet Washington has done little to curtail the exorbitant amount of sugar in our diets. The scapegoats in the crisis are mainly individuals who have made the “wrong eating choices” and are obese. They are soft, slow-moving targets.

In the meantime, food companies are making a killing (figuratively and literally) on formulating many of their products with added sugar to induce people to eat as much of them as possible. The food industry swiftly attacks proposals like soda taxes, denouncing government intervention (at least, that which is not in their favor) as “the nanny state.” They spend millions on congressional lobbying and campaign donations.

But do we really have much of a choice about eating healthy foods when 80 percent of the food products on grocery shelves are laced with added sugar?

Government will always be a factor in our diets, because one of its greatest interests is the safety and reliability of our food supply. Thus it’s the nanny state either way, but government could be promoting more healthy options instead of idly allowing food companies to reap tremendous profits from providing a steady diet of uber-processed food to the American people.

Look around you in any public space. What we have now is the fanny state. The “global industrial diet” has veritably shaped us. People are losing years off their lives, and the precious time they have is often complicated by decades of chronic illnesses. It doesn’t have to be this way. It won’t improve, though, if we only point fingers at individuals for making bad decisions and ignore the hard targets — the larger forces defining our food choices.

 

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.