Sugar: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

let's talk about let's talk about Halloween as of tonight you have just four days to find your inappropriately sexy costume whether it's sexy Barney the Dinosaur or a sexy candy corn or as Playboy's website recently featured and I swear to you this is true a sexy John Oliver costume to look like a sexy me and the worst thing is there's more than one photo I don't know if I've ever been as confused as I am right now although I'm pretty sure that I'm not as confused as louis c.k is about his sexy doppelganger that's also real now at this point let's agree sexy Halloween costumes have simply gone too far but it doesn't matter because we all know what Halloween is really about candy sweet sugar treats this Halloween Americans will spend 2.2 billion dollars on candy although to be fair that does include Necco wafers which might be better classified as coagulated dust but but is it really fair to describe sugar as a treat considering how much we eat it all year round today the average American consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar a day three times what we need that's equal to 75 pounds of sugar a year for every man woman and child in the United States holy 75 pounds of sugar that's like eating Michael Sarah's weight and sugar every single year what that's a little less than it was in the late 90s it's still pretty incredible so let's talk about sugar everyone loves it and it turns out that's because we are genetically programmed to Eric's dice a neuroscientist at the Oregon Research Institute is using functional MRI scanners to learn how our brains respond to sweetness sugar activates a brain in a special way that's very reminiscent of you know drugs like cocaine sugar activates our brains like cocaine and I've got to say Scarface would have been a very different movie if it ended without Pacino sitting in a chair took it out of his mind on baked goods say hello to my little jam we shook out being so viscerally appealing to us it's frankly no wonder that food manufacturers put it in everything and I do mean everything about 35% of the sugars that Americans consume come from beverages but we're also talking about salad dressings and ketchup in you know breads and cereals and crackers and the list goes on and on even to beef in Turkey turkey we have no idea how prevalent sugar is in almost everything that we eat look at Clamato juice the original tomato cocktail with clam what one serving has 11 grams of sugar in it so they clearly thought well look let's improve the taste by adding sugar instead of thinking let's improve the taste by removing the cloud would be a problem were it not for the fact that as we all know excess sugar is probably not good for us both the World Health Organization and the American Heart Association have warned against the harms of eating too much of it and some studies suggest that too much sugar can literally mess with the brain this rat is perfectly healthy put him in a vat of water and he finds his way to safety every time now look at this guy what he's been eating is the equivalent of a North American diet complete with all the fats and sugars we regularly consume he doesn't know where to go his room has been damaged I don't think that rat is unable to find the island I think that rat is saying that Island there's no sugar on that Island once sugar that's a Pixar movie waiting to happen by the way but-but-but the sweetener industry is not going to take the findings of a wet confused rat lying down they are an immensely powerful five billion dollar industry who fought for decades to project their products health benefits the sugar Association used to claim their product was a diet aid with ads positioning it as a cure for the fats time of day with a woman saying if sugar can fill that hollow feeling I'm all for it because yes nothing says I don't feel hollow inside like a woman sitting alone eating straight from a bag of sugar the sugar Association has gotten a little more sophisticated since then here is that current president as it relates to obesity there's been plenty of science that exonerates sugar the clarified sugar is not does not contribute to obesity or diabetes really sugar doesn't contribute to obesity I'm not saying it's the only culprit but it's definitely one of the key suspects asking what causes obesity is a bit like asking who killed a first grade classes hamster sure they all killed it in a way but I think we all know one of them killed it the most I'm talking to you Kevin you killed that hamster and you drove your father away there I said it Kevin I said it to be fair take them down to be fair there are some scientists who dismiss links between sugars and obesity for instance this guy we take a complex situation like obesity and we say well if gee if we could just cut down on sugar sweetened beverages or added sugars in general that would solve obesity and I think that is a very slippery slope and almost certainly wrong that is dr. James rippy who like Clamato juice turns out to contain quite a lot of hidden sugar himself he's on the payroll of the Corn Refiners Association the corn syrup people and at one point he was receiving a forty $1,000 a month retainer from them that's half a million dollars a year for that much money you'd expect much grander claims than it doesn't link to obesity you can be say my research finds that corn syrup makes you an immortal sex card with x-ray vision and I'm not saying that corporate money distorts science but when researchers looked at two sets of weight gain studies one group with conflicts of interest like funding from soda companies and one group that was independent the vast majority of independent studies found direct links between sugar sweetened soft drinks and weight gain or obesity and the vast majority that weren't independent found the exact opposite of that particularly suspicious was a research paper titled I'm so delicious attributed to a dr. pepper regardless of whether sugar is terrible for you or the answer to all of life's problems shouldn't you at least get to know when it's being added to your food and to their credit the FDA is trying to take this on this week the FDA is reviewing new nutritional labeling standards and that may force food makers to not just list total sugar content but how much sugar they're adding to their products yes the FDA is trying to get an added sugar category onto their food labels which is fine as long as it doesn't distract them from forcing honeycomb cereal to reveal what in God's name their old mascot was was that it look like some kind of tumbleweeds made of merkins but look being forced to reveal how much sugar you are adding to people's food might seem pretty mild but there is no way the food manufacturing industry is going to let that happen the FDA has been swamped with letters from every conceivable product from the National yogurt Association to the National frozen pizza Institute to multiple representatives of the cranberry industry now cranberries are I think we can all agree nature's most disgusting berry cranberries taste like cherries who hate you cranberries taste like what a raspberry drinks before its colonoscopy and I think the industry noses the head of the Ocean Spray company wrote to the FDA saying cranberries are naturally low in sugar giving them a distinctly tart astringent even unpalatable taste that's the head of Ocean Spray describing its defining ingredient as unpalatable it's no wonder they want certain cranberry products to be exempted from the proposed added sugars declaration which is tantamount to begging please don't make us tell everyone how much sugar we dump on our garbage bog berry but the most revealing plea came from the American Beverage Association who wrote that if there is to be an added sugar label it must be measured in grams and not teaspoons because teaspoons are and I quote where teaspoons may carry an unfair negative connotation that undermines the factual nature of nutrition information which is ridiculous what negative connotation does a teaspoon unless you think you have an annoying dude at a diner who's always trying to balance one on his nose or the fact that they used to freebase heroin but need neither of those things is the teaspoons fault the only reason the beverage people want sugar to be measured in grams instead of teaspoons is that people understand what a teaspoon is no one understands the metric system which is why this proposed FDA food label is completely missing the point because if they really want us to understand how much sugar is in our food they need to find our measurement we can immediately grasp and that is why we are proposing in the spirit of Halloween that product manufacturers express their sugar content in the form of candy specifically circus peanuts the most disgusting of all the candies they taste like an elephant ejaculated into a packet of Splenda and there is more than 5 grams of sugar in each one of these horrifying things so what we're saying to companies is this keep loading your product products up with as much sugar as you like on the one condition that on the front of the packaging you display how much sugar it contains in the form of circus peanuts so for instance 64 ounces of Clamato juice has 88 grams of sugar or 16 peanuts worth a can of Campbell's tomato soup five and a half peanuts a package of twenty circus peanuts obviously twenty circus peanuts that goes without saying but we as compete consumers must demand manufacturers adopt this measurement so please tweet at them using the hashtag show us your peanuts to whip out their peanuts and present them to you and if if they say to you we don't want to that's embarrassing nobody wants to see our peanuts they're orange and misshapen and bumpy you tell them again show us your peanuts do it food makers expose your peanuts to the world because if you are going to shove your peanuts in our mouths the very least you can do is tell us what we're swallowing you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 18,008,945

Rating: 4.8805761 out of 5

Keywords: sugar, cocaine, hbo, dr. pepper

Id: MepXBJjsNxs

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 26 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/thepetros]

Relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

[u/MirrorNinjaBot]

mirror - GB restricted

scievo

[u/[deleted]]

Yeah we get it, sugar is bad. But seriously, fuck Kevin, that little shit.

[u/beantown_throwaway]

Everything else on the nutritional label is in metric, why would they add something else using teaspoon? It's just going to complicate things.

Besides getting it confused with tablespoon, it makes it harder to compare the natural sugar to added sugar. Let's not forget sugar is a carb. The label would start making no sense. 10g protein, 14g fat (3g of which are saturated!), 30g carbs (20g of which are sugars, 4 teaspoons of which are added!).

That is just stupid. If people "don't know what a gram is", then change everything to be in teaspoons, not just added sugar. How are people supposed to know how much protein they're getting if it's in grams?

I'm all for consumer protection. While giving consumers more information is always nice, it does nothing if the crux of the problem is that consumers are too stupid (or don't care) to use the information to make a better decision.

[u/prium]

Well I just found out what circus peanuts are.

[u/EpoxyD]

It is time America: join us at /r/metric

[u/Rixxer]

Am I the only one who thinks Grams are a more understandable measurement than Teaspoons? I mean, is it a teaspoon with a mound? A teaspoon filled just to the rim (flat on top)? Are all manufactured teaspoons REALLY a teaspoon?

A Gram is a Gram.

[u/Animal2]

That was a good mostly even handed look at sugar, as I expected.

It's interesting to see the recent craziness over sugar that's going on and especially funny to see it combined with the 'new info' that fat wasn't as bad as was previously believed. It's funny because the belief that fat was evil deadly poison (slight hyperbole) probably relates to the overuse of sugar.

Companies want to make their food sell, people buy tasty food but wanted to avoid fat, therefore the tasty fatty food becomes tasty sugary food. I can only imagine what will happen next when people avoid sugar like it's poison. I guess food makers will figure out new ways (probably go back to fat) to make their food taste good and people will continue to buy it because it tastes good and it'll probably be equally unhealthy as any sugar filled junk food. I think the push for healthy food really does have to come from consumer demand and I kind of doubt our appetite for delicious food will stop.

It just seems like the standard thing I hear about sugar basically being poison (seems especially prominent with regards to HFCS) is something like, "We made a mistake years ago by demonizing fat as evil and deadly, the real problem is sugar! It's evil and deadly!"

[u/[deleted]]

"People won't stop eating sugar, BLAME THE INDUSTRY"

I say this as a recovering fat person. Step 1 was learning to read the labels. The FDA has specifically put a food label on everything you consume so that you have the ability to look at the many treats along the food isle and determine the best choice for you.

You cannot sit there and blame the food industry when you and your fat family have to walk down the isle and put the stuff in your cart and bring it home.

They aren't delivering little debbies and oreos to your front door, YOU are purchasing them.

Blaming the food industry for your sugar consumption is like blaming the alcohol industry for your DUI. You drank it and you did it, they just sold the product.

I got fat because I didn't understand basic health and my family didn't understand basic health. I learned and I did better by it. Enough of blaming everyone else for the crap you insist on putting in your own mouth.