"I would like a double cheeseburger, large fries with cheese and bacon, cinnamon bites with dipping sauce, and ummm, oh yeah, a diet coke of course", ordered the customer. This dietary conflict of interest happens constantly in the United States. I have either been cooking professionally, or teaching cooking, for the last 35 years, and some of what I have seen has amazed me. We always shake our heads seeing that huge food order come in and knowing the person actually thinks the diet soda will make it all ok. Working in the restaurant industry is sometimes a study into the psychology of people. Watching the way people eat, not just the customers, but also the people you work with is eye opening. We all have our bad habits or poor food choices/vices, but for some it is a literal life and death struggle. The gluttony I have witnessed on buffets or cocktail hours is astonishing. One thing is for certain though, as a country we are hooked on sugar and carbs. They are everywhere.
Obesity in the U.S. is what we talk about in school as the silent crisis unfolding right before our eyes. As a nation we are absolutely addicted to sugar. It is in almost everything. Sure, we know sugar is in candy, ice cream, soda, and cookies, but are we watching how much is in our BBQ sauce, tomato sauce, salad dressing, cereal and even yogurt? Do we realize that the pasta, rice, potatoes and breads we eat are turning into sugar in our body? To keep it simple sugar is a carb, but not all carbs are sugar until our body works hard to turn them into sugar. The majority of people don't seem to be aware of the relationship of the two and the damage it is doing to our bodies. I assume this from the amount of obese people I see walking the city where I teach. I assume they don't know because if they did, wouldn't they change their habits? I wonder....
Clinical research studies have shown scary similarities in brain activity between sugar consumption and heroin use. The dopamine and opioids released by sugar being digested by our bodies puts it in the same addictive arena as drugs like heroin. But the access to sugar is way easier than such a hardcore drug. It is available to us all everyday wherever we go. Moms send their kids to school with it. Hospitals feed it to sick people. Many of our medicines have it. Sugar has even been added as an ingredient to some cigarettes to help make them even more addictive. The average American adult is eating about 77 grams of sugar a day, or 13 teaspoons a day, or 60 pounds a year. For American children the number goes up to 81 grams a day. Seeing these numbers, it is no surprise that we have such problems with obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Another big factor in our diets is what form the sugar we are eating is in. High fructose corn syrup is about as evil as it gets. This is a product that should have been banned long ago. It's connection to the biggest diseases impacting society is massive, even being linked to all sorts of issues with cancer. Added sugar in general is a big problem. Once you see that on your ingredient label you need to rethink what you are about to buy. Natural sugars is the way to go, but you still have to be careful. I had one student tell me she only drinks an all natural orange juice. But when we added up the sugar in the 32 oz she consumed daily, she was already way over her daily consumption based on her size. Artificial anything usually makes me want to run, but especially when it comes to artificial sweeteners. Rumors about Aspartame are all over the place and there are many studies that show many things about it. In fact, there was so much out there about Aspartame, it would have to be another whole article. Let's just leave it at the fact that most doctors feel these artificial sweeteners actually cause stronger cravings for carbs leading to weight gain.
Teaching high school aged students can be very rewarding at times, but also very frustrating. So many have told me they understand the foods that are bad for them after we cover this material, but that won't stop them from continuing to eat and drink them. That is the power of addiction. We created a project taking the students top 10 favorite drinks and putting them on a poster with bags of actual sugar underneath each to show exactly how much sugar they contain. After two days of hanging in the cafeteria we had to redo it with bags of flour because students had ripped the sugar off the poster board to eat it. It was disheartening, to say the least, but I still carry on and bring this subject up to many different people I come across. Hopefully I can change a few people's minds into taking better care of their bodies and lives through better eating.
