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Remember when smoking was fashionable? It seemed like everyone smoked.

You’d see famous actors smoking in movies. Golfers smoked cigarettes as they made their way down the fairways. Nightclubs were filled with smoke, and it was seen as sexy to be sitting in the glow of candlelight and a cloud of smoke with a cigarette in your hand. Chivalrous men flocked to women so they could light their cigarettes.

Cigarettes were seen as energizers. I can remember my dad having a cigarette as soon as he got out of bed. He thought it got him going. Doctors smoked. Everyone smoked.

Then we learned cigarette smoking was an addiction and it was bad for us. We found out smoking causes lung cancer. Everyone knows that now. It has also been proven that smoking can cause bladder, breast, cervical, kidney, mouth, gastrointestinal, esophageal and throat cancer. Smoking also causes coronary heart disease, heart attacks and hardening of the arteries. The list goes on.

Our world changed. You’d be hard pressed now to find a bar or restaurant you can smoke in. Public buildings, private office buildings and public event locations are all smoke free now. Laws have been passed to prevent or deter smoking.

People who smoke are often looked down upon. They are seen as dirty and they smell. It’s not a smell anyone wants to tolerate anymore. No one wants to be exposed to second hand smoke, either.

Yet the Center for Disease Control estimates at 42.1 million people still smoke in the US. How can someone smoke with all the enlightenment available to us now?

Apply this same kind of enlightenment and education to sugar. In 1700 the average human consumed 4 pounds of sugar per year. In 1800 it ramped up to 18 pounds. By 1900 we were up to 90 pounds of sugar per person, per year.

And today… today we, as a population, consume an average of 180 pounds of sugar per year.

Sugar is everywhere, just like cigarettes were everywhere. We have sugar in our drinks, sugar in our food. Sugar is eaten all day long and glamorized on TV, in movies and in our homes. We call sugar a treat, and if we are willing to admit we are addicted to it, we laugh about it and make light of it.

Yet we now know sugar not only makes us fat, it makes us sick. It makes us as sick as cigarettes. The diseases are just different in some cases, but most of them can cause death.

The list includes:

• Type 2 Diabetes
• Heart disease
• Cancer
• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol
• Gastric and duodenal ulcers
• GURD, and severe indigestion
• Even Alzheimers. Yes. Some health scientists now call it Type 3 Diabetes.

With all this evidence, how in the world can we continue to ramp up our consumption of sugar? Are we really that stupid? Or just that addicted?

The majority of our population stopped using cigarettes. When are we going to put an end to the sugar?

Cheers,