Sugar consumption in the United States has skyrocketed in recent decades, and this increase has resulted in a corresponding rise in obesity, diabetes, and other health problems. The use of high-fructose corn syrup has increased over 1,000 percent since it first entered the American food supply in 1975!
Notice that consumption of high-fructose corn syrup peaked around the year 2000. The low-fat craze of the 1990s exacerbated the sugar overload in the American food supply. To make fat-free food taste good, manufacturers add a pile of sugar and salt (and often other chemicals that are even worse) to make up for the missing fat. This process exchanges dietary fat for processed sugar and other chemicals, which are harmful.
The United States leads the world in sugar consumption, and as a result, it also leads the world in diabetes healthcare expenditures. The following figure shows the costs of diabetes in the United States over the same time period as shown in the preceding figure.
The American Diabetes Association reports that millions of new cases of diabetes are diagnosed every year in the United States. In addition to the tens of millions of diabetics, 80 million Americans have pre-diabetes (insulin resistance), so unless those people change their eating habits, there’ll be no shortage of diabetes in the years to come.
