Is there a highly addictive, exciting, and pleasurable drug that almost all Americans are addicted to and abuse, from early childhood to the grave?
Can you imagine advertising addictive, deadly drugs on TV to young children,  giving them cartoon mascots and showing kids how great and excited it makes them feel? How it’s good to crave it and necessary to satisfy those cravings? We do that all the time during kids TV shows and online. The drug is sugar (and high fructose corn syrup). Please read these, and I invite you to do and add your own research.  Were you aware of some, or all of these facts? What do you think about this? There are some different types of sources here, some of which may be unfamiliar, such as medical study abstracts. I’m a sugar addict, so I try to be aware of what I’m eating and limit my intake a lot. Are we as a society focusing on prevention of disease enough? Covid co-morbidities such as obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure are all affected by sugar (and high fructose corn syrup) intake, and have had strong impacts on mortality, according to research (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33529978/). Have we been advised to cut down? Anyway, this is a topic ripe for Op-Eds, I think. I really had to narrow down the tons of articles I found.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/the-sweet-danger-of-sugar
https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/experts-is-sugar-addictive-drug
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2013/02/98777/quantity-sugar-food-supply-linked-diabetes-rates
https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/sodas-linked-to-endometrial-cancer
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sweets-sugary-snacks-linked-to-colorectal-cancer/
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After reading these articles, it is unbelievable that advertising addictive deadly drugs on TV to young children is not stopped or talked about as much because it shows how selfish money-making is. All these ads or sugary food is making others rich while making the consumers have a short amount of lifetime. In this article , it determines the money making out of certain types of candies in 2023 “non-chocolate chewy candy sales were $2.2 billion, up 13.9%. Hard sugar candy/package and roll candy saw sales of more than $264 million, a 12% gain. And novelty non-chocolate candy noted sales of almost $169 million dollars, up 55.4%”. This conveys that this won’t be a big concern to stop the drug use for children or adults because the making of it is making lots of money. I was not aware of some of these facts. I mostly knew that sugar causes diabetes,high blood pressure, weight gain and it’s as addictive as cocaine. Knowing that sugar could be the cause of breast cancer, heart disease, endometrial cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer, or even covid-19 cause and knowing much is being said is really devastating. I don’t think our society is really putting the full effort to prevent this drug because the drug has gotten worse. It has gotten more seen on TVs and in kids. Also, for covid we were not provided with the right preventions for it because we were never told to cut down sugar we were told to stay inside and get the flu shots. If we were told to cut down sugar and exercise, many companies would lose money because people would actually do it and avoid sugar. It’s sad to know sometimes we might not even be told the truth because it won’t benefit those higher than us.
I am aware that sugar is a human’s greatest addiction. Trying to quit sugar cold turkey can result in withdrawals, which is a crazy fact. Sugar is an important part of life because that’s where we get our energy, but an overconsumption of processed sugar isn’t healthy. Heart disease is only talked about with older people. Young people are assumed to be healthy so they aren’t informed on heart disease prevention. Society doesn’t focus on prevention enough, it is only addressed when it is too late after one is diagnosed. The danger of sugar isn’t advertised of course because many companies will go out of business. Big companies profit from getting people hooked on their products, so if the world is aware of the overconsumption of sugar and stops buying from these companies and their processed food, they would lose big bucks.