Whether it’s for a month, a week, a day or just a meal, everyone has tried to cut back on sugar at one point or another.
Sometimes we succeed, but other times (most of the time) we become exasperated by the blandness and reach for a triple chocolate cupcake in defiance.
But the takeaway shouldn’t be a feeling of guilt. Because the fact is, resisting sugar isn’t a fight against temptation. It’s an epic struggle against hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.
The History of Sugar & Humans
Okay, short biology lesson: as a species, humans are predisposed to seek out sweet foods. It was a survival mechanism designed to prevent early hunter-gatherers from eating poisonous or unripe plants (bitter and sour stuff) and reward them for eating the good stuff that would keep them alive (think sweet and healthy apples).
This behavior is so ingrained that infants prefer sweet tastes even from birth.
Unfortunately, what Mother Nature intended as a positive biological impulse has been hijacked by Big Sugar in an attempt to make a profit at the expense of consumers’ health and wellbeing.
Think about it like this: In nature, you come across sugar as often as you come across berries in the woods. But in grocery stores, you’re likely to be bombarded by sugar in everything from bread to sauces to yogurt, and even salad dressings.
While it’s great for business — sugar is a multi-billion-dollar industry — it’s terrible for humanity, contributing to diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and a host of other maladies around the world.
