I think we have a sugar problem

[00:00:00]We need to talk about a substance that is a major health concern. We all know this white powder. It's addictive. It's deadly. And it's one of the first things you think of when you hear of drinks like Coca-Cola. Of course, I'm talking about cocaine. Oh, you thought I meant sugar. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, well, yeah, but that's for like later in the video.

[00:00:14]I should have clarified that. My fault.

[00:00:15]>> Now, I bring up drugs for educational purposes only. YouTube, please. When we think of addictions, it's one of the first things that comes to mind. They destroy health, lives, families, communities. But hypothetically, what if these very dangerous drugs were less regulated? And what if the negative health effects took much longer or the addictive habits were less noticeable? Or if the drugs just so happened to be everywhere, wouldn't it still be an addiction?

[00:00:41]>> I resisted calling their products addictive because it seemed crazy to me to compare cookies with heroin. And I'm now convinced that in some ways these food products are even more problematic than tobacco, alcohol, even some kinds of drugs. That was Michael Moss, author of the book Salt, Sugar, Fat. He is among many researchers and scientists and other smart people who are deeply concerned about the effects of sugar on the body. In addition, they're deeply concerned about just how much of it is in our food.

[00:01:08]>> But everyone knows sugar is bad for you.

[00:01:10]>> Yes, but not only should we have known that sooner, I don't think the average person realizes just how bad or how common sugar has become. So, let's explore America's Sugar Obsession, how we got here, and what's being done about it. If you still don't think it's that bad, did you know that certain estimates say that the average American consumes almost 70 lbs of added sugar every year, which is seven of these bags?

[00:01:29]Did I buy a 10 lb bag of sugar that I have no idea what I'm going to do with after I finish this video? Yeah.

[00:01:38]The dirty soda is an invention of the state of Utah wherein they ask the important question, "How could I have the negative health effects of drinking four sodas while only having to drink one?"

[00:01:46]>> Trying crumbles new dirty soda, cookie butter, Dr. Pepper, >> butterscotch sauce, >> pineapple, syrup, >> butterscotch, vanilla, and heavy cream.

[00:01:52]>> Oh, that's sweet.

[00:01:53]>> This is concerning.

[00:01:54]>> What [music] in the diabetes propaganda is going on?

[00:01:56]>> You take a soda and you add like syrups and fruit purees and cream and energy drinks and flavors and sweeteners and like glitter and bubbles. I guess >> Crumble is not the first brand to start serving these, but they are the ones that have gotten the most attention and backlash. And I'm pretty sure that's due to the fact that one of its flavors, Crazy Cousins, which is an absurd name, is rumored to have up to 186 g of sugar in it.

[00:02:18]>> 186 equivalent to either five cans of Coke or >> Crispy Cream Donuts.

[00:02:24]>> At least that's the number that everybody keeps floating around, but Crumble hasn't actually released any of the nutritional information on the drinks. Or I think they did at one point and then they took it down. I'm not sure how that's allowed. And I tried to reach out to Crumble like a real journalist, but um I don't I don't think they're going to get back to me.

[00:02:38]>> But they did put the rumors to rest in a Today News article where they told a reporter, "You guys can't believe everything you read. Okay, the Crazy Cousins drink only has 130 g of sugar.

[00:02:46]That's only 13 crispy cream donuts worth of sugar, not 19." All right, misinformation is scary. And while that is better, it is still multiple times the daily recommended limit of added sugar in one drink. And that is making the bold assumption that a person drinks one of these and then consumes nothing else but unseasoned rice for the rest of the day. Now, as an adult man, I understand that this drink is a terrible idea. But there is an inner child who speaks to me when I look at this beverage. When I was young, I almost killed my mother. And by that, I mean that she nearly died while giving birth to me. And she developed a lot of health problems that she still deals with today. Thank you, mommy.

[00:03:22]>> Love you. Uh but from then on her diet got like super strict and she was basically forced to become an almond mom, an immigrant African almond mom.

[00:03:30]That's like three different lifestyles rolled into one and it's the worst bits of all of them. When I was younger, I regularly watched my mom going to different appointments and taking medications and watching Dr. Oz and going to this one organic grocery store ironically called Moms. And when she would occasionally leave me in the car to go grab some things from said store, it would leave me with but one conclusion. Only mothers allowed.

[00:03:49]>> What are they planning in there?

[00:03:51]>> Was this good for her health? No doubt.

[00:03:52]And as an adult, am I happy that my mother was able to find food that wasn't going to leave her feeling terrible every day? Yeah. Yeah. Great. That's cool. Like, yeah. But it sucks for me because my mom was always complaining about everything, but she was mainly complaining about sugar like all the time throughout my entire childhood.

[00:04:06]>> Sugar is bad. Sugar is evil. Sugar is going to kill you. I still love you, mom. But dude, >> as you may imagine, that meant no snacks in the house growing up. So, any chance I got to eat sugar, I immediately abused it. My mother would buy honey from mom's, and because she didn't want me to use it, she would hide it in different places around the house. There was this one time both my parents left the house.

[00:04:22]I found the honey stash and I dumped like half the bottle into a can of soda and it was disgusting. It was way too sweet. I'm pretty sure I threw it out.

[00:04:30]>> But then my parents came home and I had to think on my feet.

[00:04:33]>> Yeah. So, this was a full bottle when we left 45 minutes ago. Okay. So, in this situation, you're going to want to acknowledge the issue while giving a possible explanation as to how we got here.

[00:04:41]>> Yeah, but it we it it fell on the floor and it spilled and I had to clean it up.

[00:04:45]>> The kitchen floor is spotless. Now, at this stage, you have to establish a second dimension to the story [music] that your receiver won't be expecting.

[00:04:51]>> No, it's bu it's spilled in the other room.

[00:04:53]>> The other room is made of carpet. Also, you are currently holding a visibly sticky can of soda. It's g. It's dripping.

[00:04:59]>> Now, it may seem like they back you into a corner, but never forget old reliable.

[00:05:03]>> Brother, you are in middle school. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that part of the story. Nowadays, I have like a heart thing, so I don't eat sugar all that often. And so, as much as I would love to try one of these drinks, I know that if I took even one sip, this video would be 4 hours long, and that I would die on camera, and then it would continue to film my unconscious body until it ran out of storage. Also, it's only available at select crumble stores, and I think the closest one near me is about an hour away. I would have to drive to a train station and then take the train and then walk and then bring it back.

[00:05:29]I'm not doing all of that for an overpriced soda that I can't drink. You can already hear the background music is getting louder. This setup isn't as surprising as I wanted it to be. [music] I've gotten the drinks. I am afraid to drive with this. It weighs like 7 lbs.

[00:05:47]>> I have never been able to smell a soda like I can now.

[00:05:50]>> This one looks like window cleaner.

[00:05:52]>> Okay, I'm not going to lie.

[00:05:53]>> These look and smell great. I really want to try it, but I know that even a little bit, if I look at it too hard, it'll kill me. I can't do that. Really want to try these, but that will not be happening. Don't be so sure. Juliet, what are you doing? doing what I should have done a long time ago. Avenging my father's death.

[00:06:09]>> I told you I was framed.

[00:06:10]>> Enough. I'm ending this once and for all. What are you going to do? Stab me?

[00:06:14]>> What? No. This is a pen.

[00:06:16]>> Yeah. I didn't know what the demonetization rules were on weapons, so I didn't want to risk it.

[00:06:19]>> Oh. Yeah, that makes sense. Instead, >> you're going to drink the soda >> right now. Juliet, please drink it.

[00:06:32]>> Delicious. But that's not possible. Why?

[00:06:34]I saw you take a sip. You should be dead. That's just the thing. It wasn't David. It was me.

[00:06:40]>> His twin sister.

[00:06:41]>> You guys aren't twins. You're like 3 years older than him.

[00:06:43]>> Yeah, but we're doing a bit.

[00:06:44]>> And he didn't want you to play the girl character. My youngest older sister has no vices whatsoever. She hates both the taste and price of alcohol. The only thing she does is drink copious amounts of Sprite soda, and I don't know why.

[00:06:56]She will buy Costco familysized packs of Sprite and then hide them in various places around the house because she doesn't want us to access her secret stash. We have photos of her collected empty cans on her nightstand. I suppose as a hunter does with carcasses as trophies for the hunt. We have talked to her about this multiple times and we finally reached the agreement that she'll only drink it on the weekend.

[00:07:15]This has led her to consuming seven cans of Sprite within a 2-day period habitually. I've decided to address these concerns while actively feeding her addiction on camera.

[00:07:23]>> Don't make that face.

[00:07:24]>> What face?

[00:07:24]>> You weren't making a face?

[00:07:25]>> No, I wasn't making a face. That was my face.

[00:07:28]>> Okay, we'll drink it.

[00:07:38]I'm not forcing you to drink it that long. You really like it.

[00:07:42]>> Oh, no.

[00:07:43]>> I didn't want you to like it. No, wait.

[00:07:45]Stop.

[00:07:47]Stop drinking it.

[00:07:48]>> It's good.

[00:07:49]>> Oh, I hate it.

[00:07:50]>> Thank you.

[00:07:50]>> Is that what you want? [laughter] >> That is a Spritebased soda. As we both know, you have a crippling addiction to Sprite soda.

[00:07:57]>> I wouldn't say crippling, but >> most people would. Everyone has their favorite items. Mine just happens to be Sprite.

[00:08:03]>> On that subject, why do you think you drink so much Sprite?

[00:08:07]>> You mean because it tastes good, >> right? But like you drink a lot of Sprite.

[00:08:12]>> Why do people eat a lot of chips? Eat a lot of of candy. Eat a lot of snacks cuz they taste good. You act like I drink it all in one sitting.

[00:08:21]>> How long does it take you to get through the pack?

[00:08:22]>> I don't know. I don't keep track. I drink like only on >> Do you think you have a problem?

[00:08:28]>> No. Would you be surprised if other people said you had a problem?

[00:08:32]>> No, because y'all keep telling me I have a problem.

[00:08:33]>> Do you think that might be denial?

[00:08:34]>> I think because you guys just don't drink Sprite. You see somebody drinking Sprite as a treat and you think >> Are you concerned with how much sugar you're drinking?

[00:08:45]>> No, cuz I go to the gym.

[00:08:46]>> It doesn't.

[00:08:47]>> So, it cancels out.

[00:08:47]>> It That's >> With that being said, everybody in the family is concerned about you and we all pitched in and we're ready to make an offer to you. You can either continue with your debilitating disease or you can accept the mystery money envelope.

[00:09:02]In it is an unspecified amount of cash that will be yours if you promise on camera to never drink Sprite again.

[00:09:09][laughter] >> No. And I know there's only like $2 in there.

[00:09:14]>> I can assure you it's more than $2.

[00:09:16]>> Oh, five.

[00:09:16]>> I can assure you it's more than I cannot assure you it's more than $10. Crumbles dirty sodas are terrible. But what if I told you a regular soda isn't all that much better? But what if I told you Shapeland is Animal Kingdom? Again, Crumble doesn't show the nutritional information for any of their drinks. But if the worst one is around 130 g, then it's reasonable to assume that maybe like a mid-range one is about 100 to 110 g of sugar. Now, that's still really bad. But you know what else is bad?

[00:09:40]Pretty much all large drinks sold at every food place in the United States.

[00:09:44]McDonald's large Coke, 100 grams of sugar. McDonald's large high sea, 104 g of sugar. Wendy's large watermelon lemonade, 102 g of sugar. Popeye's large frozen purple drink. I couldn't even imagine what that's supposed to be flavored like. 115 g of sugar. Taco Bell large Mountain Dew Baja Blast Dirty Soda. 118 g of sugar. That's just random words put together. And last but not least, freaking Dunkin' Donuts. With multiple drinks that cost the three-digit mark, the worst I could find was the large mocha swirl coffee chiller with 148 g of sugar. Worse than the worst drink at Crumble. I've been seeing an increasing amount of people getting Duncan iced coffee. As a former employee, I feel like it's my right and duty to tell you that all of their swirls have 33 g of sugar per pump. The standard is two pumps for a small, three pumps for a medium, and a four pumps for a large. If you get a medium caramel iced coffee, that's not including the milk or the additional sugar that they put in there, you are automatically getting 100 g of sugar.

[00:10:37]>> I'm not saying crumble sodas are good, but they're not that out of the ordinary. Really, even if the sugar content isn't in the hundreds, most soft drinks, no matter the size, have way too much added sugar in them. But you may be thinking, "Hey, drinks are sweet. It is what it is." But what if I told you it wasn't just drinks? What if I told you most things in an American grocery store contain too much sugar? Pasta sauce, bread, cereal, milk, yogurt, condiments, dog drink. What if everything was Animal Kingdom? [music] >> I don't think the average person considers added sugar to be all that bad. I kind of brushed past it earlier, but those Duncan coffees are insane. If you really want to, one drink can be over 200 g of sugar. And honestly, even if you're not trying all that hard, you can accidentally push into the three-digit mark. But I get why people do it. Coffee sucks. I remember being a kid and waking up and I would smell my dad's coffee cooking in that black coffee pot and it literally filled the entire house. It smelled so good. And I remember begging my parents every day to try it. And eventually they gave in. And I took one sip and then I was deeply confused for the next 30 minutes. But as I was growing up, I noticed that literally all adults drink coffee. So, I just figured, hey, maybe coffee is something that grown-ups just do. But as a kid who was the youngest in the family and nobody respected me, and I desperately wanted people to view me as older, I tried to convince myself to like coffee. Here's the thing. I'm a terrible liar.

[00:11:56]>> It [laughter] tastes like acid.

[00:11:59]Is that normal?

[00:12:00]>> But eventually, I stopped lying to myself and I stopped drinking coffee.

[00:12:03]And now that I'm 22 and an adult, I can confirm that not all adults like coffee.

[00:12:07]Just the ones who are liars and think they're better than others. But it turns out a good reason for that is that my beans weren't high quality. Which is why I'm so glad that today's sponsor is my favorite coffee. My favorite coffee?

[00:12:16]>> No, I'm just kidding. Remember when Smos had a coffee brand? Wasn't that weird?

[00:12:19]No, this video is not sponsored by them.

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[00:13:10]>> So get Current. Sign up at current.com/davidachu or use my promo code Daviduw to get $75 and to unlock tools like paycheck advance, credit building, and more. Terms and conditions apply. I've always wanted to say that in a deep voice. That's weird. The audio files on these clips look kind of funny.

[00:13:27]I had to re-record all the lines from this point on. I'm upset. There's no denying that people like sugar and those who say they don't enjoy deceiving people for sport. For example, my oldest sister says she doesn't like the taste of sweets. She says things like that for attention, and it's sad.

[00:13:39]>> Speaking of which, for the next segment of this video, I've decided to infiltrate her home for my own selfish purposes.

[00:13:48]>> What are you doing? What are you Why are you so close?

[00:13:50]>> Let's play a brief game. And while we do this exercise, I'm going to need 70% of you to pretend to be something that you're not. Pretend you're a woman. I'm going to show you a normal day's worth of eating snacks. And I want you to guess at which point you have exceeded your daily limit for added sugar.

[00:14:05]A mini can of soda, a handful of Oreos, two Reese's cups, fries with some barbecue sauce, and a granola bar.

[00:14:18]Locked in your guess. All right, let's see. The answer is you get a mini can of soda, some that's it. In fact, you only get one quarter of an Oreo. That's 25 grams of sugar. That is the daily limit for women. If you're a man, you get to have a few more Oreos. In fact, if you are a woman and you were to eat all of these in one day, you would exceed your daily limit by over 300%.

[00:14:35]Honestly, I could easily crush all of that in one day. And I wouldn't think that that was a sugary day. I would think I made some pretty wise choices. A mini can of soda instead of a regular one and only three Oreos instead of an entire sleeve. Did I change my last name to Gogggins? Now, you may be wondering at this point, "But David, is sugar really all that bad for me?" Which is a stupid question because the answer is yes, according to everybody. There are mountains of papers and studies and books and articles and videos all about the different ways that sugar affects every part of your body. It can cause fatty liver disease, diabetes, raise your risk for heart disease, risk of osteoporosis, risk of stroke, risk of a lot of other things. And it doesn't take as much sugar as you think it would to do it. A 2013 study found that when you give a population 150 extra calories of any kind, it doesn't do all that much.

[00:15:15]But if that extra 150 calories is coming from sugar, which is about as much sugar as one can of soda, it shoots the diabetes risk of that population up by 11 times. To be fair, what I mean by that is that the risk goes from.1% to 1.1%. But in a population the size of the US, that's the difference between 350,000 and over 4 million cases of diabetes. And keep in mind that diabetes risk increase adds up with every 150 calories extra of sugar. That is millions more potential cases of diabetes from a few cans of soda. We'll get deeper into the science of it all later. But even right now, we should be concerned with how much sugar we're taking in. And it is definitely something worth considering before we blow through our daily limit for added sugar every day, especially when you consider the current state of food.

[00:15:59]Okay, let's go back to the kitchen.

[00:16:00]Similar to last time, slightly different foods, but we're going to try it again.

[00:16:03]Guess where this person went wrong in their days worth of eating?

[00:16:09]A bowl of bran flakes. a grilled cheese sandwich, spaghetti, low-fat yogurt, fries with some ketchup, a slice of cake from your cousin's graduation party, and every dessert you could reasonably fit on a to-go plate because the dessert bar at your cousin's graduation party was unsupervised. Okay, you probably guessed that this is something about how people will eat normally throughout the beginning of the day and then they'll overcompensate at the end and then they'll blow through their sugar daily limit. And I'm sure that's probably true, but the crazy thing is before you get to the dessert, you've already blown through your sugar limit for the day. Now, I know what you're thinking.

[00:16:41]Bran flakes.

[00:16:41]>> I feel like the most concerning part is that I would eat that entire day's worth of eating. Well, not actually because why would I eat spaghetti for lunch?

[00:16:48]What am I, 11? But if I was a child of a man, I would eat all of that, think I did amazing that day, and then it would be reason enough for me to justify eating 3 weeks worth of sugar at my cousin's graduation party dessert bar.

[00:16:59]>> He walked me through one of his recent creations, which was a new flavor of soda for Dr. Pepper. some three or 4 thousand consumer taste tests around the country tasting 50 60 formulas of sweetness. Each one just slightly different than the next. And then took the data and threw it in his computer.

[00:17:17]Out comes these bell curves like here.

[00:17:20]It's the perfect amount of sweetness, not too little, not too much. And it was Howard Moscowitz coined the term the bliss point which is how the industry described internally its efforts to optimize the sweetness in the product.

[00:17:34]So food companies have marched around the grocery store adding sugar to products that didn't used to be sweet before. So now bread has added sugar and a bliss point for sweetness.

[00:17:46]>> And if you want to keep track of your added sugar, it doesn't help that there are over 60 different ways to refer to added sugar on a nutrition label.

[00:17:53]Because sure, if you can't look at an ingredients list and tell them that maple sugar is a kind of sugar, then there's not much hope for you in life, generally speaking, but are you just supposed to know about flow malt or hoy flake or konami? Avoiding added sugar may be harder than you thought. But while it is difficult, it's not impossible. What would life be like if I was determined to have no added sugar in my diet whatsoever? Well, I wanted to see for myself. And the only way to supply the ingredients necessary was to set foot in the forbidden land.

[00:18:24]>> [music] >> That seems inappropriate.

[00:18:36]I got it. Believe it or not, this is about to be $18 worth of grocery store goods.

[00:18:44]I have to make a control sandwich so I can compare the two. So, we're using the disgusting regular grocery store bread.

[00:18:54]You know, some people say you have to clean the knife off before you scoop it into the jelly after you've already done the peanut butter. I call those people losers and say they need to get a grip on their life.

[00:19:04]Like you're right here in the room with me.

[00:19:12]I don't think that looks as good.

[00:19:16]This smells like veggomite andor shoe polish. Oh, that's not a color I like.

[00:19:24]I did it. The rich and poor in sandwich form. Got to do a sniff test [snorts] immediately. This smells so much better.

[00:19:37]Oh my gosh, I love chemicals. I grew up on chemicals. All right, let's try it.

[00:19:44]Yeah, it's good. Here's a real test.

[00:19:53]I wanted this to be disgusting or even just a little bit worse. It's the same.

[00:19:58]Oh my. What? Like, obviously, it's less sweet, but that's really That's pretty good. You can tell it's real by how tough this bread is to chew. I guess it's time to wash it down.

[00:20:08]I'm so mad I don't hate this. This ruined my video. Dang it. What better way to end our meal than with a sugar-free dessert?

[00:20:17]Okay. Don't love that one. That's a Is that a success? I got to do it bigger for YouTube. Hold on.

[00:20:27]>> Did anybody believe that? I'm never doing this again. I hate filming like this. Okay, I'm going to be honest. All in all, this isn't that bad. Would it be my first choice? Obviously not. But if I grew up eating like this, I don't think I'd be complaining. I'm gonna finish this sandwich. It's not bad. So, why have we become so addicted to sugar? To understand that, we're going to have to go back to the beginning. Also, I'm going to have my second oldest sister handle the first part of this segment because if I include my other sisters in this video and not her, she will be jealous. Love you.

[00:21:00]Good evening. This is 9:00 news. Today, we'll be focusing on the topic of sugar.

[00:21:04]Originally, sugar is the product of cane sugar.

[00:21:07]>> It's not so easy, is it?

[00:21:08]>> I never said it was easy. Around the 4th century B.C.E., Indians learned to turn the juice of cane into crystals. For centuries, sugar was used more sparingly than it is today. It was used by some for some metitional purposes as some would use it for stomach issues. Ouch.

[00:21:21]Others would mix it in with water for a convenient source of energy. Still others during that time would use it like a spice for foods. Hopefully not savory stuff cuz that's nasty. At this time, sugar was far more expensive and only the rich could afford it in great quantities. Shocker. And by the 1500s, sugar had become more prevalent and the demand was outpacing production. Hm.

[00:21:38]Interesting. I wonder who they used to help speed up the production since the demand was increasing. Cut to the Europeans discovering America and learning that the land could be used for cultivating sugar through its plantations. Foreshadowing here comes in slave labor which would be a predominant if not the main source of sugar production during this time from then until the 1800s. From there industrialization and government subsidies make production easier and cheaper. Also, I referred to Gary Tab's book, The Case Against Sugar, while making this video. And one of the first pieces of research he uses in the book is how in the 1600s, the English doctor Willis noted that the urine of diabetics tastes, and I quote, wonderfully sweet like sugar or honey. If you like this segment with me in it, like and also comment below. Nice to meet you. Going back to the point about how industrialization changed sugar's place in society. Not only did it improve production, but the product itself became important to the lifestyle of the industrial period. As I read and watched about the history of sugar while trying to make this, I kept hearing about how sugar played a part in the quick sustenance of busy workers during the industrial era. Like for breakfast, they would have jam with bread or sugar with tea and coffee and that kind of thing.

[00:22:47]And I don't think it's insane to say that the fast-paced nature of modern life pushed slow home-cooked meals, ironically, to the back burner and was at least partially responsible in the rise of convenience food. Even today, in modern modern life, everything just feels so rushed. I had a friend who spent a summer in Ecuador, and she told me about how it was common for people to leave in the middle of the workday, go home for like 2 hours, and have lunch with their families. Meanwhile, there was a time in my life where I seriously considered keeping a pack of bottled waters and a jar of protein powder in the backseat of my car in case I got hungry in between classes because it just made sense. When life gets busy, convenience is king. And what's a more convenient, good tasting, cheap source of energy than sugar? But this convenience came at a cost. In the mid- 20th century, heart disease was on the rise. President Eisenhower just had a heart attack, and the people wanted answers. What was making these people sick? Put very simply, there were two ideas. There was the popular idea that the problem was fatty foods which was backed by famed American nutritionist Ancel Keys. Or there was the less popular belief that the problem was actually sugar and that was backed by British nutritionist John Udkin. Now intuitively Keys's argument kind of makes sense. I mean when compared with other micronutrients, fat has twice as many calories as carbohydrates and protein. Yeah, maybe we're just eating too much of it. It has always been surprising to me how low calorie sugar really is. If you look at a bag of Domino Sugar, 2 tsp is about 30 calories. Meaning that a 4- lb bag is roughly about 7,000 calories, which is a lot, but that's also about as many as two large Domino's specialty pizzas. I'm just saying, I've eaten a large Domino's pizza by myself. I have never eaten half a bag of sugar. Obviously, sugar is not no calories, but it's also not that many calories. It also probably didn't help that in the ' 50s, Sugar Information, Inc. was putting out ads that were talking about all the health benefits that come from eating sugar, and that they even won an award for quote advertising in the public's interest.

[00:24:28]Combine all of that with Anel Keys's confident personality, the backing of the food industry, the fact that his data may or may not have been cherrypicked. And the argument against fat had a strong backing. There is a lot more to say about this topic. It's really interesting. Some people call it a conspiracy. Some people call it a war.

[00:24:43]Some people think that it wasn't any of those things and it was just like a really weird situation. But all we need to know is that basically this was just a big competition as to who could better answer the question, why are people getting sick and fat? Anel Keys and his argument that fatty foods was the problem won that debate. And he was wrong. You may remember earlier in the video when I interviewed my sister, she said something along the lines of, "Is that how math works?"

[00:25:02]>> Yes, it is. If you consume unhealthy foods, but then you go to the gym and burn off those calories. It's like you never even consume the calories in the first place.

[00:25:09]>> But that's what most people get wrong when thinking about sugar. The calories in, calories out approach does not work for this discussion because it ignores both the nutritional value of food and also how sugar is processed in the body.

[00:25:20]Some calories are not the same as others. There are two types of carbohydrates. There are simple carbs, which includes most processed foods and added sugars. And then there are complex carbs, which is basically any boring old person food that's brown. Simple carbs have been refined and stripped of the nutrients that were present in their natural unprocessed form. They're just straight carbs. And by their nature, simple carbs are easy for your body to break down, so they burn through the energy the carbs provide rather quickly, and you don't feel as satiated when you eat them, meaning you'll probably eat way more than you should. From there, the body takes as much energy as it can from all the carbs. It turns some of it into glycogen, and the rest of it is stored as fat. Complex carbs, although still carbohydrates, also have nutrients that your body can use. And they typically also have a higher fiber count, meaning that you'll feel satiated for longer. Also, as the name suggests, complex carbs are more complicated for your body to break down, meaning that the energy they provide is released in a more sustained way over a longer period of time. It makes you feel more satisfied, which makes it less likely for you to overeat, and it is less likely that this energy is going to get turned into fat. I don't know if this is the greatest analogy, but I like to think of it as having a homework assignment that's too easy. And if I have a really hard homework assignment, it takes me hours to get it done, but I'm smarter at the end of the process.

[00:26:23]If I have a homework that's too easy, I get it done in 2 seconds, but I've learned nothing. After a year of doing either one of those scenarios, which situation am I better off in? As registered dietitian Ashley Medhurst said in Dartmouth Health, "Always think of your body as the processor. You want your body, not the place making the food, to be the one processing your food as much as possible." But none of that was appreciated at the time. And all of a sudden, fat became the number one dietary enemy of the late 20th century.

[00:26:44]As a result, low-fat foods became the craze, which is insane because low-fat foods taste terrible and the only way to make them good so that people will buy them is to put sugar in them. So, like you fill them with sugar, the thing that's making the people fat. Isn't that crazy? What I think was most concerning was the 1980 dietary guidelines for Americans produced by the USDA and the US Department for Health and Human Services. In my uneducated opinion, it seemed like the guidelines saved their harshest words for fatty foods. And while they do mention sugar as a danger in the guidelines, the worst thing they mention about it is how it's bad for your teeth. And that quote, "Contrary to widespread opinion, too much sugar in your diet does not seem to cause diabetes."

[00:27:22]>> And that there is no convincing evidence that sugar causes heart attacks or blood vessel disease.

[00:27:28]>> Mind you, doctors were giving health advice to patients based off these guidelines. And while I'm not a good enough historian to be able to bridge the gap from what I just said to what I'm about to say, I don't think it's a coincidence that in the '90s, the average American was consuming over 50 gallons of soda every year. That is an average of 1.5 cans of soda a day. And do you remember how he said a regular can of soda on its own is already enough to blow past the daily limit for added sugar. And how for every soda cans worth of excess sugar, the diabetes risk of a population shoots way up. Again, not a good historian. don't know how to connect what I just said with what I'm about to say, but there are 40 million people with diabetes in the US today.

[00:28:05]That's got to be related, right? And while it is old at this point, all of this does make me think about a quote that Gary Talbs used in one of his presentations.

[00:28:13]>> Margaret Chan, when she gave this talk uh in October 2016 at the annual meeting at the Nationalmies of Sciences, called this a slow motion disaster. So she asked this question, what are the odds that public health organizations like her her own are going to prevent the increase in diabetes and obesity that was overtaking the world? And her estimate of the possibility that they would do so was virtually zero. Imagine the head of the the world's greatest public health organization basically predicting with complete and utter certainty that they were going to fail to control this epidemic. Not reverse it, but prevent it from getting worse.

[00:28:47]>> Isn't that cool? That isn't to say there have been no efforts to solve the sugar problem. There are a few out there, but frankly, a lot of them, I think, are wishful thinking, annoying, or stupid.

[00:28:59]>> I hate brown rice. With God as my witness, I hate it so much. It's chewy.

[00:29:04]It has this weird aftertaste. Its color is worse than white rice. Don't make that a race thing. It sucks. I hate it so much. It's the worst.

[00:29:11]>> And I know I just talked about how complex carbs are so great and simple carbs are going to kill you. Yeah, I don't care. I hate This is for the part of the video where if I start ranting about brown rice, I hate it. I hate it.

[00:29:22]I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it so much. We make fun of that lady on My 600 lb Life or My Strange Addiction or whatever that show was where all she ate was McDonald's fries and if she ate anything else, she would start to cry. We laughed and we jeered. But if you left me with a bowl of brown rice and nothing else, my tears would fall the same. I hate it.

[00:29:43]People don't like to change the way they eat, even if it's better for them. There was this interesting example that Michael Moss used in his book, Salt, Sugar, Fat, that had to do with Campbell Soup. It's not a perfect example because this had to do with salt and not sugar, but it's the same idea. Basically, years ago, Campbell Soup tried to reduce the amount of sodium that was in their products so they could give people better options, but it backfired for very obvious reasons. We deserve to have food that's not going to kill us and our children. You need to do better.

[00:30:08]>> You're right. And we've put in the work, and we are committed to giving you better food with better nutritional value. So from now on, our soups are going to have less sodium so we can help fight against high blood pressure and hypertension.

[00:30:17]>> Well, thank you. Maybe all of this can be a stepping stone to a brighter tomorrow.

[00:30:24]>> I'm sorry. What is this?

[00:30:25]>> That's the new suit.

[00:30:25]>> I don't like it.

[00:30:26]>> That's what happens when you take the salt out.

[00:30:27]>> I don't like it.

[00:30:28]>> It doesn't taste as good.

[00:30:29]>> Put it back.

[00:30:30]>> But what about the brighter tomorrow?

[00:30:31]>> What about the children?

[00:30:32]>> I don't like you.

[00:30:33]>> Are you crying?

[00:30:34]>> All right. Well, if we can't get them to eat different foods, maybe we can get them to eat less of the foods they're eating now. You remember a decade ago when New York tried to ban soda and everyone lost their minds?

[00:30:43]>> Michael Bloomberg this week banning the sale of 16 anything over 16 ounces of soda. [laughter] >> Bye-bye big sugary soft drink.

[00:30:50]>> I think it's ridiculous. I think it's just another step in trying to control what people are doing.

[00:30:54]>> Looking back now, it is not difficult to see why they wanted to do that.

[00:30:57]>> Because first off, it's not like soda was going to be outlawed citywide. It was just that a lot of food places were no longer going to be allowed to serve sodas over 16 ounces. Which is fair because if you remember earlier we were talking about how bad large sodas are now. Back then it was basically the wild west. At the time Regal theat's largest soda size was nearly half a gallon. Now the idea got a lot of backlash and it never really went into full effect. But New York was not the only city to come up with the idea of making soda more inconvenient to buy. Years back Philadelphia proposed a tax specifically on sodas. Reason being not only would it discourage people from buying soda but also the money they made on that tax was going to be put towards Philadelphia healthcare. And about after a year it went into effect, estimated soda purchases fell by 38%. Meaning the amount of soda purchased by Philadelphia citizens dropped by almost a billion ounces. But really, my favorite alternative to sugar consumption is to eat not sugar. Low and no calorie sweeteners have been a hot button issue in the online health space for a while.

[00:31:53]It makes no sense to me and I hate it.

[00:31:55]>> Why diet soda is so bad for your brain.

[00:31:57]>> The issues with a lot of these sweeteners that they alter your gut bacteria, which is the next frontier of human health.

[00:32:02]>> It's poison. It's not doing what you think it's doing. It's hurting you in every single way.

[00:32:07]>> These ingredients >> can be a trigger for headaches and migraines and was most recently classified as a possible human carcinogen.

[00:32:13]>> The reason it makes me mad is that I'm 90% sure they're fine, but almost no one will come out and just say that. One of the most famous of these sugar substitutes is aspartame. And you will hear people make all kinds of claims about the substance. For example, you can't drink aspartame. IT'S A CARCINOGEN. WHICH IS LIKE, YEAH, but it's not that simple. There are multiple levels of carcinogens. There's group one, which is basically these things will give you cancer. Moving down, there's group 2 A, which is basically we definitely want to do more research on this. Even further below that, there's group 2 B, which is where aspartame is, which is basically, you know, I I don't know. It maybe you know what else is in this category? Aloe vera and pickled vegetables. And despite that carcinogen label, it is still generally considered safe as long as you consume it within the daily recommended limit. That limit being no more than 40 mg per kilogram of body weight. To put that into English, I weigh about 200 lb, which is roughly about 90 kg. So for me, I am allowed to have 90 * 40 mg of aspartame per day, which is about 3600 millig, which is 18 cans of Diet Coke. Meaning I can drink 17 cans of Diet Coke every day and I should be fine. So after hearing all of that, you would assume that the issue is over. Astartame is great. Diet sodas are awesome. BUT ALMOST NO ONE JUST COMES OUT AND SAYS THAT >> I'm not a health expert, so I will not be contradicting nor giving health advice. However, from my lowly perspective, it does seem that when health experts tackle this subject, they do so in a way that is silly or entirely misses the point. More than once, I read articles that were something along the lines of, "We cannot recommend diet drinks as an alternative to sugary beverages. Instead, we recommend drinking water or low-fat milk, which is like the person who wrote that. I'm sure you have like a degree or two. You got to know that's a stupid suggestion. No one is going to do that. Obviously, in a perfect world, we would all drink nothing but water and all of our pee would be perfectly clear, but that's never going to happen.

[00:34:03]>> While we live in the real world, isn't it true that diet sodas are vastly better for your long-term health than sugar loaded regular sodas? I can't say that officially because I haven't done studies on this stuff, BUT I'M LIKE, THE FACTS YOU PUT IN THESE articles make me think that. Or again, in the articles, they'll say something along the lines of, "If you continue to drink no and low calorie sweetened beverages, it will continue to train your brain and taste buds to be used to the sensation of sweet, which will only make you gravitate toward regular sweets sooner or later."

[00:34:29]>> Okay, that makes sense. But like, what if I didn't though? What if I just stuck with it? Because that's basically what I've done now, and it's great. I drink Crystal Light every day. It's the greatest thing that has ever been made.

[00:34:40]and I love it so much. I drink a crystalite before I started recording this and I will be drinking one as I edit it. Crystalite, if you want to sponsor me, I will do it for $5 and a lifetime supply of your product. I love it. I love you so much. But on top of all of that confusing advice, there is still some debate as to whether or not aspartame is totally safe after all.

[00:34:59]>> Last year, a French study which included more than 100,000 people looked at sweetener consumption over the entirety of people's diets. and they found those who consumed more than average aspartame were 1.15 times more likely to develop cancer compared to people who didn't consume any.

[00:35:14]>> Are those sugar substitutes harmless?

[00:35:16]>> No, of course not. A paper just came out like 3 days ago basically showing that diet sweetener consumption uh correlates with dementia.

[00:35:25]>> At this point, I'm convinced that everything is going to kill me and I'm too stupid and tired to disprove that hypothesis.

[00:35:29]>> I'm just going to do the things that kill me less. I don't do drugs. I barely drink. I can limit my sugar consumption, but I will never reduce how much aspartame I take in by drinking Crystal Light. I would die for that brand. If it was slowly giving me every cancer over the course of the next 50 years and they had to start doing those Johnson and Johnson style ads about the green tea raspberry drink mix, then maybe we could talk. But until then, I will drink it every day. And that's not going to change over a podcast appearance. I don't care how smart that guy is. I can't say that it is completely safe or completely dangerous because I DON'T KNOW. BUT THEY DON'T FULLY KNOW EITHER.

[00:36:03]I'M GOING TO keep drinking it and I'll probably be fine. But even if it does kill me, whatever. Everything is trying to kill me and at a certain point, you just have to stop caring because at the end of the day, maybe I'm going to die by getting hit by a bus. I'm pretty convinced that the end of my days will take form in a cartoonish manner, and I'm okay with that. The most interesting thing to me about this whole discussion is how many questions there are left.

[00:36:24]When I think of science, I like to think that they've solved pretty much everything. And once you get to the part of your science textbook where the pictures stop being in black and white and they start getting to color, that's when the real crazy stuff happens. Like, y'all should be asking questions about what's at the bottom of the ocean or what's at the edge of the galaxy. You shouldn't still be wondering what sugar is going to do to me 50 years from now.

[00:36:41]And yet, there are still a lot of questions about sugar and about aspartame and about other sweeteners and complex carbs and simple carbs and what the body does over time with like excess fat and all these things. Food is weird.

[00:36:53]People are weird. There's so much that we don't know about food. We have a basic general idea of what we should and should not eat. And generally speaking, among those guidelines, reduce your sugar consumption. I'm pretty sure aspartame and diet drinks are fine.

[00:37:07]Never go to crumble. It's just not a good idea. And eat brown rice every now and then. That is advice for you. I will never be doing that. I am content with dying a little bit sooner and happier.

[00:37:15]This has nothing to do with what I've said up to this point. But yesterday, I met a very nice girl named Tegan. She recognized me in public and we took a picture together. I say all of this to say that I wasn't sure how I would feel about being recognized in public, but now I know I love it. Turns out I love the admiration and attention of strangers, and I would love for that to continue until the day I die. I genuinely don't know what to do with