My last
Substack was on kids and sugar. We might be clear about what kids should be eating now, but what about those of us who are adults that grew up eating sugar?
I was hanging with my cousin yesterday, and he was remembering a time when soda & candy were more expensive, and price was the limiting factor. In the 70's with corn subsidies making corn cheap, When high fructose corn syrup was created, candy prices started going down. And with the creation of lightweight plastic bottles (PET) soda prices also lowered significantly by the early 80's.
I grew up in these times. We always had sodas in a spare fridge in our garage, and a “junk” drawer with candy in our house. My mom, who had a sweet tooth, was good at controlling herself around the stuff but I was not. I was also very active, so a lot of the impacts of drinking coke daily and eating lots of gummy candies when unnoticed for a long time, as they do.
In hindsight I know what my off-the-charts-painful menstrual cramps were partially related to blood sugar balance, as well as mood imbalances in my 20's.
Now that I'm 50, my early bad food habits are making themselves known. My A1C (the marker of longer term blood sugar balance) is teetering on the edge of prediabetes. Despite seven years of eating for blood sugar balance, doing everything in my ability to lower my visceral fat & weight training 3x week, changing my metabolic flexibility has been the hardest thing I've faced in my own health. My insulin receptors are simply fatigued and not working properly from everything I asked of them in my teens and 20's. While my blood sugar doesn't have huge spikes and dips, my insulin is high and my baseline glucose is higher than optimal. This is a sign of the type of insulin resistance I mentioned, where insulin receptors are fatigued and don't allow glucose to pass into the cells as efficiently as they should, which means glucose hangs out in the bloodstream or gets stored in fat cells or the liver instead.
As someone, like 80+% of Americans, who is living with the consequences of cheaper sugar in the 80's, it might make sense why I feel so passionate about kids and sugar. I see these kids eating much worse than I was, with even more access to sugar than I had, and I know what's coming. And this is from someone who makes eating well a top priority, which is not the case for most Americans. We are going to continue to see higher & earlier diabetes. & cancer rates until something changes.
The government has shown it will continually choose profits over health, so it's up to us to band together and make it harder for kids to eat crap.
