For many of us, sugar provides instant warmth and comfort. We identify it as an essential ingredient for great food and blissful culinary satisfaction. Even in foods that promise higher nutritional value, its presence is unavoidable. In many parts of the world, humans have a seemingly insatiable craving for sugar. In fact, it’s hard to find an addiction more pervasive than our addiction to sugar. But this addiction could kill us in record numbers.
The documentary, “Secrets of Sugar,” examines this addiction and its dangerous impact on the well-being of our societies around the world. Extensive research has found that sugar is to blame for many of our most common and life-threatening diseases, including high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and even Alzheimer’s.
The weight loss craze that took shape in the 1980s emerged as an attack on fat. Yet even in an environment where the public enjoys unprecedented access to low-fat or fat-free foods, rates of harmful disease remain alarmingly high. “What’s Worse: Sugar or Fat? A thousand times more sugar,” says Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist, is one of the film’s main interview subjects. In his view, sugar is a poison, a devastating drug for people of all ages. As a leading fighter against the dangers of sugar, Dr. is entertaining ahead of the uphill battle of changing existing food industry practices and educating the unsuspecting public about their strategies.
As observed in The Sugar Secret, these tactics include ambiguous or misleading nutrition labels, obscuring science, and running advertising campaigns on a scale unmatched by even companies like the tobacco industry.
If public awareness doesn’t change, the ubiquity of sugar in our daily diets could exacerbate disease epidemics and ultimately bankrupt the entire healthcare system in the United States and Canada. By exploring an issue that’s often been kept in the dark, Sugar Secret seeks to spark a movement among audiences, correcting this troubling trend before it’s too late.
