Sugar Controversy

The sugar trade was a money making machine and was driven by consumer demand, perfect farming land, and the hours of labor. In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds Great Britain had a money making business know as the sugar trade. The sugar trade made it so Britain would buy slaves from Africa and send them over to the Caribbean where they would farm sugar.

There has been a very large controversy on Aspartame and how bad it is for people. Aspartame is an artificial sweetener used all around the world for many food products. Aspartame can be found in diet soda, gum, yogurt, and sugarless candy. This artificial sweetener has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration(FDA) and the The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). A controversial claim I found online about Aspartame is it is: “By far the most dangerous substance added to food today”. Dr. Joseph Mercola was the man who said this controversial claim. I chose to write on this subject because aspartame is a sweetener seen often in my home. My family often purchases diet sodas, and I was curious to know how unhealthy it is for someone because of controversial claims I see on the Internet. It is believed that aspartame can lead to cancer and deadly diseases. In this essay, I will demonstrate why aspartame is not as unhealthy as what people say it is.

In the article from USA Today “Eating too much added sugar may be killing you,” Nanci Hellmich reports that people who consume too much added sugar are at higher risk of death from heart disease than normal people. Hellmich says that too much added sugar affects your body in negative ways and leads to heart disease and death. She supports her claim by stating how many calories from added sugar the American Heart Association recommends getting from added sugars each day, then reveals how many calories from added sugar one regular soda contains, then shows many different statistics about people consuming lots of added sugar having higher-than-normal death rates from heart disease. Hellmich writes in a tone that shows she’s interested about the topic for the general public and the readers of USA Today. Her language shows this when she says “Sugar not only makes you fat, it may be killing you” or “That’s far more than the American Heart Association’s recommendation…” In order to inform the readers about the dangers of added sugar, Hellmich shows statistics about people that eat added sugar and how their

In the US from since the turn of the century, obesity has been a rising and very serious issue. In the 1980’s, western culture experienced a fitness surge, and the major food corporations began producing new products that were “fat free”, but the issue was fat free food did not taste as good so people would not buy it. To compensate the taste, the food companies replaced the fat with sugar.

Did you know that Americans spent $76 billion dollars on soda or energy drinks in 2013? Teens today consume too much sugar from sugary drinks. The youth today are more unhealthy than previous generations and need to reduce their sugar. The article,”Soda Showdown”, written by Rebecca Zissou, presents two perspectives about taxing sugary drinks.

When it comes to the topic of sugar most of us would agree that it impacted the world. Where this agreement ends ,however, is on the question of whether good or bad. Whereas some are convinced that it was a negative change, others maintain that it was a positive change. However sugar affected the world in a negative way by causing slavery, poor work condition, inequality, and low wages.

The French and Indian War left England with a debt of £130,000,000. To help pay off the debt Britain set up taxes, to collect money, on frequently used products by the colonists. The Molasses Act put a six pence tax on every gallon of molasses. The colonists thought this was a lot of money to pay so they did everything to avoid it. This act was not really enforced and the colonists did not really obey this act. Britain needed a way to fix this. They came up with the Sugar Act, a set of taxes to help Britain raise money. Taxes were not a new thing for the colonists, but these new taxes caused big issues.

Fed Up is a documentary made in 2014 that is based on the issues caused by the American food industry. Fed Up, uncovers America’s true secrets about the food people consume every day. More specifically, it reveals the affect sugar has on people’s bodies. As a result, the amount of sugar in food, the bodies consent of glucose, and the satisfying taste it brings, too much sugar could cause certain sicknesses causing the body to not work the way it supposed to.

Many people want to believe old age will kill them, but more than likely, the killer will come from what they put into their bodies. Every day, people are faced with affecting their own health. To do so, one must be conscious of what their temple receives; this means people must watch what they eat. People must look at the ingredients contained in everyday foods, what those ingredients cause to happen in the body, and the effects the ingredients have on the body, like the ingredient high fructose corn syrup. The amounts of overconsumed and unhealthy contents of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) need to be replaced by natural sugars.

What we eat affects not only us, but the animals, and the world. After learning the truth about where and how our meat and food products are prepared and the effects they cause on our bodies, I was shocked and disgusted. As a society, we can make a few small changes that will have a big and healthy impact on the world and how we live.

The press is known to explode with news everyday, informing the people on different topics that are happening worldwide. The newest revelation is on the soda ban in New York. Websites and pages are plastered with information and headlines announcing how “Mayor Bloomberg is overreaching with N.Y.C. large soda ban” or “Banning the Big Gulp Ban”. Reporters are scrambling to join the bandwagon of criticizing or praising this mayor’s audacious decision. There are many factors that influence opinions on the matter, but one of the most popular reasons is because of the high numbers of people that are obese and overweight.

Dr. Lustig’s main focus throughout the presentation was the effects of fructose on the epidemic of obesity. He explains how we as a society place so much stress on fat intake and calories in versus calories out that we tend to neglect what is actually in our food. With much research, it has been determined that fructose does, in turn have an effect on the obesity epidemic. Throughout the lecture, many examples from this research show our biochemical response to our modern diets and are used to explain Dr. Lustig’s point of fructose poisoning.

Processed foods and beverages are the biggest sources of added sugar (and High fructose) in the diet. Sugar is very unhealthy and can have serious adverse effects on metabolism when consumed in excess. Sugar contains a lot of calories, with no essential nutrients. It also causes tooth decay by feeding the harmful bacteria in the mouth. For people who are inactive and eat a processed food, large amounts of fructose from added sugars get turned into fat in the liver. Excess fructose gets turned into fat, which can lodge in the liver and cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, which include soft drinks, fruit drinks, ice tea, energy and vitamin water drinks across the globe. Regular consumption of sugary sweetened beverages have been associated with weight gain, obesity and diabetes. The role of sugary sweetened beverages in the development of related chronic metabole diseases such as metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes, has not been quantitatively reviewed .