What do you think would happen if a species evolved a powerful,
undeniable craving for an incredibly nutritious and seasonally available food,
and then a company figured out how to duplicate that food,
make something that tasted extremely similar, only turned out to be extremely
toxic to that species? Sugar is in everything, I mean everything.
When I first started really looking into sugar, I was shocked to find how many
things it was in. In fact, I gave up sugar for a while
on a little challenge. I thought, "I'll take a break from sugar."
I came home one day, I made myself some lunch. I was ready.
The lunch was sitting there, the lunch was some pasta with some
tomato sauce, all healthy, organic, good stuff. And then, I took a mouthful of it
and I almost spat it straight out because it just tasted wrong.
I thought maybe the tomato sauce had gone off. Something wasn't right.
Something wasn't right, it was really sweet, like really sweet.
And so I started looking at the ingredients. And here's what I found that
shocked me, I mean, truly shocked me. Sugar was the number 2 ingredient
in a beautiful, organic tomato sauce. Let me ask you, if you were making some
tomato sauce at home, you know, for your pasta or for a lasagna or a pizza
or something like that, would you take some tomatoes and chop
them up, a little garlic, some onion maybe,
oh, some basil and oregano and then 2 tablespoons of sugar? No, you wouldn't.
But are you curious at all as to why a food manufacturer might do that?
They do it because sugar has some really important roles in the body.
One of them is is that sugar triggers hunger. This is an evolutionary protection
of our species. You see, our species has spent a long,
long time doing everything it could to avoid starvation. Starvation's been
the number 1 cause of death of our species right up until the modern times.
And so what that means is is that when fruit suddenly came out onto the trees and
was available to us, the idea was if we ate a little,
our body would be triggered to keep eating even if our stomach got full,
because who knew how long it would be there for, and also,
what season's coming next? Winter, probably an entire problem
around getting food. And so if we didn't eat enough now,
we might not survive the winter. So sugar triggers in us appetite.
And so sugar manufacturers put it in everything. Out of the something
like 60,000 different foods that are available, packaged foods that are
available in our shopping mechanism today, something like 70% of them had some form
of sugar, corn syrup, or other refined sweetener.
And we are getting addicted. In fact, it's even worse than that because from
a marketing perspective, the sugar manufacturers and the food
manufacturers that are using sugar in this way, they know what they're doing and they
know we're catching on, and so what are they doing?
Ever better advertising. All the time, with the manipulation,
almost to the level of hypnosis to get us to feel good about their products.
How about the cereal manufacturers? Here's what's really scary.
The cereal manufacturers will pay grocery stores to keep their sugar-laden,
plastic-toy filled cereals at child-height view. Why? Because in marketing,
there's a term, a technical term, it's called "pester power."
And the marketing companies know that there's a price that parents are willing
to pay to end pestering. And so they put the sugar-laden,
brightly-coloured, plastic-toy giveaway cereals right at the height that your
children can see it. And so the pester power begins.
But let me ask you something really careful here, what do you think the number
2 ingredient is on just about every breakfast cereal? Sugar, refined sugar.
It's right there on the label. And it doesn't matter that in bold print,
on the front, it says, "Fortified with this vitamin.
Fortified with these essential nutrients." Yeah, but the number 2 ingredient
is sugar. We are living in a time when our entire western world is facing a massive
health care crisis. And at the root of that crisis is refined sugar.
The statistic in the United States is the average American is eating 154 pounds or
over 70 kilograms of sugar. So what I'm going to ask you to do is
consider taking a 7-day sugar holiday with me, so that at the end of that 7 days,
if you decide to have sugar, you can do it completely consciously,
with knowledge, knowing that you're doing it, in a mindful way,
or maybe you want to give it up entirely. So join me and Mindvalley for
a free Mini-Quest, a quest to create consciousness around sugar,
a 7-day opportunity to change your relationship with sugar right now.