Big Sugar Versus Your Body
23rd March 2018
The New York Times seems to have a habit of scrounging up conspiracy theorists in order to tell us the many ways in which The Sky Is Falling. And the overlap between these Chicken Littles and Nanny Staters In Training is huge.
They start off with The Enemy, speaking about the sugar industry in terms more suitable to Jimmy Swaggart denouncing the Devil or Jeff Sessions talking about a Mexican Drug cartel:
The sugar industry and its various offshoots, like the soda industry, have spent years trying to trick you.
Big Sugar has paid researchers to conduct misleading — if not false — studies about the health effects of added sweeteners. It has come up with a dizzying array of euphemistic names for those sweeteners. And it has managed to get sugars into a remarkable three-quarters of all packaged foods in American supermarkets.
How dare they try to make their product attractive! It’s a plot, I tell you! This sounds in the standard proglodyte meme that the Common People are too stupid to be able to make their own choices in life, and so must have Cloud People run their lives.
Most of us, as a result, eat a lot of sugar. We are surrounded by it, and it’s delicious. Unfortunately, sugar also encourages overeating and causes health problems. As confusing as the research on diet can often seem, it consistently points to the harms of sugar, including obesity, diabetes and other diseases.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from sucrose. Big Sugar, like a roaring lion, roams the world seeking someone to add pounds to. Resist it, steadfast in the faith.
Virtually the only way to eat a healthy amount of sugar is to make a conscious effort. You can think of it as a political act: resisting the sugar industry’s attempts to profit off your body. Or you can simply think of it as taking care of yourself.
They’d prefer that you think of it as ‘a political act’, of course. Everything is political these days, or ought to be, at least to people who write in the New York Times.
What would these people do if they didn’t spend their days sticking their noses into other people’s business? They’d have to face the fact that everything they do is stuff that the world could get on perfectly well without. Natural Selection can’t be depended on to weed out the Dirt People, so we have to help it along. I keep expecting one of these op-ed pieces to advocate the establishment of re-education camps for everyone who walks out of Walmart with a six-pack of soda.