A Laughably Small Amount of Sugar Will Make You Officially Unhealthy

One of America's favorite foods (after partially hydrogenated soybean oil) is sugar, which is a poison to the human body. You will all be pained to hear that the World Health Organization has just halved the acceptable amount of sugar in your diet.

New WHO guidelines released yesterday recommend that sugar make up only 5% of your daily calories— down from 10% in its previous guidelines, published a decade ago. It seems that there has been no scientific findings about the magical health properties of sugar in the past decade. Pity. So uh, how much sugar are you actually allowed now? From The Guardian:

For an adult of average bodyweight, with an intake of about 2,000 calories a day, 5% would equate to 100 calories – which at four calories in a gram would be 25g of sugar, said Dr Francesco Branca, the WHO's director of nutrition for health and development. A standard 330ml can of cola contains 35g of sugar.

The best case scenario response to these guidelines are a collective bemused grin by America. To be clear, the very latest science-based health guidelines suggest you should have less than the amount of sugar in one can of soda per day. This, in a nation that has entire lobbying campaigns dedicated to convincing the public that corn syrup is a natural part of any diet. Friends, I challenge you to go to your average grocery store and find a single jar of fucking pickle relish that does not contain added sugar. You can't do it. The average American diet is packed full of sugar in the same way a goose is force-fed grain to produce foie gras. It doesn't matter if you want to eat sugar; you will eat sugar, unless you want to "cook" your own food, which is an unfashionable ancient ritual based on oral traditions that were lost long ago.

These new guidelines are absolutely correct from a health standpoint, and my conviction that we should all follow them is equal to my conviction that almost none of us will. See you in hell, fellow Americans.

[Photo: Flickr]