Public Comment

A couple of decades ago, diabetes was an unusual disease associated with people who were very skinny and who apparently were born with a genetic defect. In the 1980’s, type I diabetes was the most common, and its cousin, brought on in part by poor and excessive diet, had not yet proliferated to engulf a large portion of the population. 

The epidemic of type II diabetes must surely be a giant moneymaker for the pharmaceutical industry. Physicians who are current on their stuff have agreed to treat type II more aggressively in the name of minimizing the damage wreaked upon the various organs in the body. 

One of the great wonder drugs used to treat type II, called Avandia, turned out to cause heart failure. A relative of mine who took it was preemptively taken off of this medication. When the medications that are supposed to help you in turn create additional health problems, the medical establishment stands to gain huge profits. 

The epidemic of diabetes is worse than average among the mentally ill, who are required to take medications that cause weight gain and that raise blood sugar. And yet, diabetes has become extremely common among the entire population of people in the U.S., and why is this? 

One friend, who is a little bit older than I, commented that you can’t buy any food any more that doesn’t have sugar added. He remarked that you can’t even buy salt without sugar in it. 

Let’s review a few facts that were well-known in the 1970’s during the health food fad: Refined sugar is present in a wide variety of foods sold in the U.S., such as jars of spaghetti sauce, salad dressing, snack crackers, peanut butter, a loaf of bread, lunch meats, so-called “healthy” breakfast cereals, catsup, barbeque sauce… and the list goes on. The fast foods that you get at a drive-through, which tend to be less expensive compared to buying healthy ingredients and cooking, are loaded with refined sugar. 

“Cane sugar” is now being marketed as a supposedly healthy ingredient because it isn’t high fructose corn syrup. This is merely an attempt to mess with your mind: cane sugar is a renaming of refined white sugar, and there has never been evidence that it is good for you. This is an example of more confusion tactics employed by the advertising media. For more confusion, you might have seen the television ad claiming that there is no difference between high fructose corn syrup versus cane sugar. While that could be true, it actually means that you ought to avoid both of these; it doesn’t mean that you should go ahead and shovel it in, as the ad suggests you do. 

The human body wasn’t designed to deal with all of this. Refined, concentrated products can overload the human metabolism, as we can see by the huge numbers of people contracting type II diabetes. The pharmaceutical industry and physicians are making a ton of money on this epidemic, and this might be why there hasn’t been more public outcry from doctors.