Sugar is as addictive as hard drugs, difficult to manage and at the root of many severe health problems, according to Ian Walmsley, who made a presentation Monday to The Villages Civil Discourse Club at Colony Cottage Recreation Center.
“It basically stimulates the same pleasure centers that heroin and cocaine stimulate,” said Walmsley, a confessed sugar addict and financial specialist from Great Britain who worked a decade in the sugar industry.
Americans consume on average of 36 teaspoons or 600 calories of sugar daily and it has been linked to heart disease and diabetes. Of the 130 pounds of sugar the average American consumes each year, more than a third comes from sports and energy drinks, 13 percent from desserts and just 6 percent from candy, said Walmsley, who worked 10 years for General Foods, producer of Kool Aid and other sugary products.
“In the 1970s, when I worked there, we weren’t conscious that sugar was a health issue,” he said. “We thought it was a healthy food.”
Although nutritionists warn about the health effects of sugar, Walmsley said it’s difficult to prove the connection because of the problem of finding a control group that does not use sugar.
“You can’t prove that sugar kills us,” he said. “It’s like breathing. One hundred percent of us are going to die and 100 percent of us breathe. Does breathing cause death?”
Unlike the tobacco industry, Walmsley said the sugar industry was granted immunity by Congress for health-related lawsuits. A political difficulty is that most sugar comes from corn syrup.
“I don’t think we’ll get any effort to control it as long as Iowa has the first primaries,” he said.
Walmsley said sugar consumption, which produces fat, allowed our ancestors to survive the Ice Age.
“The irony is that what saved is in the Ice Age, if we can’t control it, could end up poisoning us,” he said.
Throughout history, sugar and slavery have had a close relationship, according to Walmsley.
Sugar production dates back to 8000 B.C., but it wasn’t until 500 A.D. that it first was stored and transported. Since it could survive long ocean voyages unlike other foods, sugar was a dominant trade commodity first from the Far East and later from the Americas.
The Spanish and Portuguese imported African slaves for sugar production in the West Indies, Walmsley said, and the U.S. Colonies later supported that effort by providing food for the sugar plantation slaves. By 1750, sugar was the most valuable commodity in Europe.
“Unfortunately, we now have the bittersweet heritage of this,” he said.
During the discussion period, Remi Wrona, a club co-moderator who teaches geopolitics at The Villages Lifelong Learning College, cited examples of how our society values sugar. Parents sometimes reward their children with sweets, he said, and the phrase “he’s so sweet” is considered a compliment.
Walmsley’s presentation will be repeated at 10 a.m. next Monday at the Savannah Center.
