Sugar is the new cigarette
Likely the cause of more disease, dependence, and healthcare costs than tobacco will ever equal, it appears that sugar has become the new cigarette.
While tobacco products have been relegated to a few square feet behind the customer service desk, you can find sugar in nearly every other inch of the store. The top source for added sugar in the American diet doesn’t come from the candy aisle, the ice cream section, or the bakery - it’s actually found in the beverage aisle.
This is where Zesty comes in.
Food is supposed to give us life, fuel us to do great things. The last 30 years, it’s mainly served to impair insulin sensitivity and increase our waistlines. If you were to walk into a grocery store today and grab a packaged product at random, there is an 80% likelihood that item will contain added sugar in some form.
Every year, 900,000 acres of sugarcane are harvested in the US. We process enough refined sugar for every American man, woman, and child to consume over 500 pounds in a given year. Thankfully, we fall below that number and the average American only consumes around 100 pounds annually, or roughly 82 twelve-ounce sodas. We won’t even get started on how much of this consumption is through hyper-palatable, highly-subsidized, high fructose corn syrup.
It’s therefore not surprising that the United States is a global leader in obesity rates, a worthy distinction indeed. Furthermore, US government guidelines recommend that modest amounts (up to 10% of our daily caloric needs) can be consumed to help meet our individual nutrition considerations - despite the fact that there’s no essential need for sugar in our diet.
Consider also that >60% of adults have one or more diet-related chronic diseases, 75% of adults are overweight or obese, 40% of children and adolescents are as well. Nearly half of our population is either pre-diabetic or diabetic. According to a recent NHANES, across all life stages, no age group of Americans scores better than a 63/100 on the Healthy Eating Index. If that’s not enough, “in NHANES 2015 to 2018, an estimated 28.2 million adults (10.4%) had diagnosed diabetes, 9.8 million adults (3.8%) had undiagnosed diabetes, and 113.6 million adults (45.8%) had prediabetes.”
Now it’s time to decide, will our country respond to sugar’s negative effects the same way we have to tobacco?
Will we prioritize our health over short-term flavor satisfaction?
Will producers explore healthy, sustainable, and natural alternatives for the sweet tooth we all have?
Time will only tell.
-Zesty Beverages
Sources:
