Obesity and Carbs - Pop and Schools

In Canada, Coke and Pepsi will take out the traditional pop from junior and intermediate schools.

This has been a defensive move in the context of mounting pressure for a ban. A 12 oz serving has between 10-12 teaspoons of sugar. Kids drink between 1-4 cans a day. No wonder so many are obese. No wonder so many are agitated. When I end up in the check out at the supermarket, I have a little test. I look at the trolleys of everyone in the lineup with me. Fat families have cases of pop, loaves of bread and tones of cakes and buns and cookies. You don't have to be a fanatic Atkins dieter to recognize that all of this is pure sugar. The great hoax of the last 30 years is that fat makes you fat. No carbs make us fat!

At the turn of the century the average American ate two pounds of sugar. Do you know what it is now? 160 pounds, and for many of us it's probably twice that. The human body didn't evolve to handle that kind of input. The pancreas works overtime to flood your system with insulin several times a day, every day. By the end of each day, it's completely exhausted and your bloodstream is still jacked up with dangerously elevated levels of sugar. Eventually your pancreas functionality is borderline to failure and you've got adult-onset diabetes. Eventually it fails for good and suddenly you're a diabetic.

A study about a year ago got a lot of press. It showed that a child who drank two cans of soda a day WILL be overweight. That's two cans of soda, not "lots of high fat foods."

At the turn of the century something like 2 or 3 percent of people were dying from heart attacks and stroke. What is it now? 70% and rising? You don't go from 2% to 70% with a slight decline in lifetime physical activity. But what about a typical lifetime sugar (carbohydrate) consumption increase of eight thousand percent?

If I was the premier of PEI this is what I would do