Dr. Mark's Minute - The Dangers of Sugar in All Its Forms

So how has our diet changed in the last 100 years? Well there's a bunch of things. The first thing is that sugar has become abundant. Our diet has changed dramatically within the last 100 years and even worse in the last 30 to 50 years. And the biggest change has been our increase in sugar consumption. Our hunter-gather ancestors They ate about 22 teaspoons of sugar per year. That's based on research that some guy did. I don't know, somebody asked me how they know, but they figured it out. At the beginning of the 1800s, the average person went up from 22 teaspoons to 10 pounds per person per year. That's a lot. But now, the average American eats 150 to 180 pounds of sugar every year. That's almost half a pound of sugar per person per day. Now, that's not what I'm eating, so some of you might be eating a lot more. All sugar is harmful when it's consumed in those pharmacologic doses. When one 20-ounce high fructose sugar containing soda or sports drink or tea has 17 teaspoons of sugar, and the average teenager often consumes two of those a day, we're conducting a largely uncontrolled drug experiment. on the human species.