How You’ve Been Fed Lies Since Birth
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It’s your fault you’re fat, “it shouldn’t be so hard to get them to run around and play, right?… It’s about how active our kids are” (Michelle Obama). For years, people have been told that it is their fault if they cannot lose weight, and that consistent exercise is the key to effective weight loss. While fifty years ago, exercise may have been able to purge a person’s system of sugar with some success, today, it is nearly impossible for the average person to cleanse their bodies of all the sugar that they consume. Although exercise is important for building muscle and enhancing one’s endurance, the only true way to combat the obesity epidemic the United States is through a dramatic change in everyone’s diet.
Have you ever noticed how a sip of Diet Coke provides one of the most satisfying feelings? This is because the combination of aspartame and caffeine in diet soda is extremely addictive (Geib, “Aspartame Withdrawal and Side Effects Exlpained”). By altering brain chemistry and triggering the brain’s reward centers, diet soda and its addictive chemical, aspartame, trick the body into feeling energized and recharged from consumption of the drink (Group, “Why Is Diet Soda Addictive?”). Just like a heroin addict gets relief from an injection of heroin, Diet Coke gives a similar relief due to the same physical addiction it causes in you. By eliminating this beverage from one’s diet, an individual can instantly improve his or her health and eradicate harmful toxins such as aspartame from their system.
This new generation is among the first to have grown up consuming harmful chemicals and high doses of sugar. People have neglected to link this truth with the fact that this is also the first generation expected to lead shorter lives than their parents. How is it that in an era of advancements in technology and medicine, we are not expected to outlive our parents? The answer is simple: it is because we are poisoning ourselves in ways that our parents never did when they were our age. Because of this, we have compromised our health and predisposed ourselves to a number of degenerative conditions.
Today, the average American consumes twenty-two teaspoons of sugar a day, and the sugar industry is profiting from the proliferation of obesity in the United States as a result of this consumption (Walton, “How Much Sugar…
