SUGAR

Hi, today I’m going to be talking about sugar. No not the song... the

sugar you eat, the one that’s killing you very very slowly, the one that’s EVERYWHERE even in the foods considered “healthy”

Did you know that if you removed all of the products with added

sugar from your average supermarket you will be left with only 20%

of items, or that you can use Coca-Cola to remove old rust or even clean

dirty toilets.  Is sugar really that bad for you? What can happen if you eat too much? Those are the annoying questions taking over the our confused minds.

When you eat sugar your body has 2 options about how to deal with it.

Option 1 burn for energy, or option 2 store in your fat cells.

Problem is there is much more room for fat than room to burn

sugar as energy.

The average 9-19 year old is recommended to have around 6 teaspoons of sugar per day, when Coca-Cola has 44 teaspoons of sugar.  Heres a fact you

might not know.. Coke is actually green, yes you heard me right... green!

Did you know, not only can you drink Coca-Cola you can use it to clean grease

and oil stains, kill slugs or snails, melt frozen ice, get rid of hiccups,

attract bees or wasps and at McDonalds they even clean their trays with

Coke. Now imagine what it does to your body.

Sugar cane began to grow wild in India and south-east Asia about a hundred

million years ago. Most people ate sugar for energy when they ran and to work hard, sugar provides a lot of carbohydrates - and it tastes good too. 2500 years BC is when Indians really started eating sugar. 3 thousand years after that, only people in India and south-east Asia ate sugar cane. This was because you had to eat it fresh.

Then after about 350 years (AC) Indian food scientists finally invented a way to make the sweet sugar cane juice into crystallized sugar. You did this by grinding or pounding the sugar cane to get out the juice. Then you dried the juice in the sun and you got lumps of sugar.

When people began to travel back and forth between India and China, they brought sugar to China with them. The emperor got interested in sugar, and he asked the Indians to come to China to explain how to grow sugar cane and make sugar.

In 1822 Americans consumed 45 g of sugar every day 5 days and in 2012 Americans consumed 756g of sugar every 5 days. 29.1 million people in

America have diabetes. In NZ we consume 54,000g of sugar per year,

that is equivalent to 37 teaspoons of sugar per person per day.

I hope the next time you open your pantry to get that delicious piece of chocolate you’ve been waiting to have hopefully you’ll think twice before you’ll grab that piece. Or hopefully you wont have any chocolate in your pantry in the first place.