Sugar: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

let's talk about Halloween starting

tonight

you have only four days to find your inappropriately sexy costume, whether it's the sexy Barney the Dinosaur or a sexy candy corn or as it recently appeared on the Playboy website and I swear this is true, a Sexy John Oliver. costume to look like a sexy me and the worst thing is that there is more than one photo. I don't know if I've ever been as confused as I am now although I'm pretty sure I'm not as confused as Louis. c.k it's about her sexy double who is also real now at this point let's agree that sexy halloween costumes have simply gone too far but it doesn't matter because we all know what halloween really is with candy, sweets and sweets

sugar

this Halloween.

Americans will spend 2.2 billion dollars. In the case of sweets, although to be fair, that includes Necco wafers, which could be better classified as coagulated powder, but is it really fair to describe

sugar

as a treat considering how much we eat all year round today? The average American consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar a year. a day three times what we need, that's 75 pounds of sugar a year for every man, woman and child in the United States. Holy 75 pounds of sugar, that's like eating Michael Sarah's weight and sugar every year, which is a little less than it was in the late '90s is still pretty incredible, so let's talk sugar.

Everyone loves it and it turns out that's because we're genetically programmed for Eric's dice. A neuroscientist at the Oregon Research Institute is using functional MRI scans to learn how our brains respond to sweetness. The sugar is activated. a brain in a special way that is very reminiscent of, you know, drugs like cocaine, sugar activates our brains like cocaine and I must say that Scarface would have been a very different movie if it had ended without Pacino sitting in a chair. would remove mind in baked goods, say hello to my little jam we put out because it's so viscerally appealing to us that, frankly, it's no wonder food manufacturers put it in everything, and I mean everything, about 35% of the sugars that Americans consume come from beverages, but we.

We're also talking about salad dressings and tomato sauce, you know, breads, cereals and crackers, and the list goes on and on, even down to beef in Turkey, turkey, we have no idea how prevalent sugar is in almost everything we eat, look at Clamato juice, the original tomato. cocktail with clams, one serving has 11 grams of sugar, so they clearly thought: well, look, let's improve the taste by adding sugar instead of thinking, let's improve the taste by removing the cloud, it would be a problem if it weren't for the fact that I eat We all know that too much sugar is probably not good for us.

Both the World Health Organization and the American Heart Association have warned against the harms of eating too much, and some studies suggest that too much sugar can literally mess with the brain. This rat is perfectly healthy. Put it in a tub of water and it will always find its way to safety. Look at this dude. What you have been eating is the equivalent of a full North American diet with all the fats and sugars we consume regularly. He doesn't know where. wow, his room has been damaged I don't think that rat is incapable of finding the island I think that rat is saying that island there is no sugar on that island once sugar that's a Pixar movie waiting to happen by the way but-but- but the sweetener industry isn't going to accept the findings of a wet, confused rat lying on the floor.

They are an immensely powerful five billion dollar industry that struggled for decades to project the health benefits of their products. The Sugar Association used to claim their product was an ad-supported diet aid. positioning it as a cure for the fatty time of day with a woman saying if sugar can fill that empty feeling, I'm all for it because yes, nothing says I don't feel empty inside like a woman sitting alone eating straight from a bag of sugar, the Sugar Association has become a little more sophisticated since then, here is the current president when it comes to obesity, there has been a lot of science exonerating sugar, clarified sugar does not contribute to obesity or diabetes, sugar does not really contribute to obesity.

I'm not saying he's the only culprit, but he's definitely one of the main suspects. Asking what causes obesity is a little like asking who killed a first-grade hamster. I'm sure they all killed him in some way, but I think we all know one of them. I killed it more I'm talking to you Kevin you killed that hamster and took your father there I said it Kevin I said it to be fair Take them down to be fair there are some scientists who rule out the links between sugars and obesity for example, take a complex situation like obesity and we say, well, if we could reduce the consumption of sugary drinks or added sugars in general, that would solve obesity and I think that's a very slippery slope and it's almost certainly wrong.

Dr. James Rippy, who likes Clamato juice, turns out to contain quite a bit of hidden sugar. He is on the payroll of the Corn Refiners Association, the corn syrup people, and at one time he received from them an advance of forty $1,000 a month, that is, half a million dollars. per year for that amount of money you would expect much grander claims than those not related to obesity. You can say that my research finds that corn syrup turns you into an immortal sex card with x-ray vision and I'm not saying that companies Money distorts science, but when researchers looked at two sets of studies on the increase weight, a group with conflicts of interest, such as financing of soft drink companies, and a group that was independent, the vast majority of independent studies found direct links between sugary soft drinks and weight gain or obesity. and the vast majority who were not independent found the exact opposite of what was particularly suspicious: a research paper titled I'm so delicious attributed to a dr. pepper, regardless of whether sugar is terrible for you or the answer to all of life's problems, shouldn't you at least know when it's added to your foods and, to their credit, the FDA is trying to address this this

week

? reviewing new nutrition labeling standards and that may force food manufacturers to list not only the total sugar content but also the amount of sugar they add to their products.

Yes, the FDA is trying to put an added sugar category on their food labels, which is fine as long as it doesn't distract them from forcing honeycomb cereal to reveal what, in God's name, was its old mascot, which looks like some kind of tumbleweed made of merkins, but it seems that being forced to reveal how much sugar you are adding to people's food may seem nice. slight, but there is no way the food manufacturing industry will allow that to happen. The FDA has been inundated with letters from everyone imaginable, from the National Yogurt Association to the National Frozen Pizza Institute to multiple representatives of the blueberry industry.

Now I think blueberries are we can all agree that nature's most disgusting berries, blueberries taste like cherries that hate you, blueberries taste like what you drink a raspberry before your colonoscopy and I think the industry realizes Note that the director of the Ocean Spray company wrote to the FDA saying that blueberries are naturally low in sugar. gives them a distinctly sour, astringent and even unpleasant taste; the director of Ocean Spray describes its defining ingredient as unpleasant. It's no wonder they want certain blueberry products exempt from the proposed added sugar declaration, which is begging, please don't make us tell everyone. how much sugar we dump in our bog berries, but the most telling plea came from the American Beverage Association, who wrote that if there's going to be an added sugar label, it should be measured in grams and not teaspoons because teaspoons are and I quote where teaspoons.

It can have an unfair negative connotation that undermines the factual nature of nutritional information, which is ridiculous. What negative connotation does a teaspoon have unless you think you have an annoying guy at a restaurant who is always trying to balance one on his nose or the fact that they used to do it? freebase heroin, but it doesn't need any of those things, it's the teaspoons fault, the only reason the drink people want sugar to be measured in grams instead of teaspoons is because people understand what it is a teaspoon, no one understands the metric system, which is why this FDA food label proposal misses the point because if they really want us to understand how much sugar is in our food, they need to find our measurement that we can understand immediately and that's why we propose, In the spirit of Halloween, let product manufacturers express their sugar content in the form of candy, specifically circus peanuts, the most disgusting of all candy, they taste like an ejaculated elephant in a Splenda package and there are more than 5 grams of sugar in each of these horrible things, so what we are saying to companies is this keep loading your products with as much sugar as you want with the only condition that on the front of the package it shows how much sugar is in the form of peanuts of circus, so for example, 64 ounces of Clamato juice has 88 grams of sugar or 16 peanuts for a can of Campbell's tomato soup five and a half peanuts a package of twenty circus peanuts obviously twenty circus peanuts that's Obviously, but we as competitive consumers must demand that manufacturers adopt this measure, so tweet them using the hashtag show. us your peanuts to take out their peanuts and present them to you and if they tell you we don't want it, that's embarrassing, no one wants to see our peanuts, they are orange, misshapen and full of bumps, tell them again, show us your peanuts.

Get it done, food manufacturers expose your peanuts to the world because if you're going to put your peanuts in our mouths, the least you can do is tell us what we're putting down.