We’re living longer, despite our deadly diets

Sugar is the new smoking, or at least the latest new smoking.

A while ago, anything with wheat flour was the new smoking. Before that, it was fat. But now it supposedly is sugar that is killing us. We might as well be eating rat poison, according to some of the more militant anti-sugarites. People seem to believe it, too, if only to the extent of feeling guilty for eating so much of the stuff.

Some forms of sugar are said to be deadlier than others. In ascending order of deadliness, they are sucrose, fructose, dextrose, varicose, comatose and, the deadliest of all, verbose. You really shouldn’t eat anything that includes verbose on the list of ingredients. It’s worse for you than iodine.

Fructose, because it is a common ingredient in processed foods, often is singled out as public health enemy No. 1. Fructose previously was deemed to be healthier than the alternatives, but it now is grouped with botulism, anthrax and rattlesnake venom. This illustrates how nutritional information evolves over time. Remember when experts told us to eat nothing but oat bran, the industrial abrasive of foods? After further years of research, they found out that oat bran does not, after all, confer the benefits they thought it did. So it was all for nothing that people gave up decent food and survived instead on nasty, gritty oat bran. Nutrition experts must have laughed their asses off over that one.

Then they went after salt. It’s death in a shaker, they said. But now we’re hearing that maybe salt isn’t so bad after all. What’s bad for you is an egg without salt. It saps the will to live.

Now we are told to lay off something called high-fructose corn syrup. High-fructose corn syrup is the same as the regular corn syrup that people who are out of maple syrup have been putting on their pancakes for centuries, but deadlier. High-fructose corn syrup is the dietary equivalent of live scorpions.

It starts with fructose, the sugar that’s in fruit, of which we are supposed to eat from 35 to 40 servings a day. This healthy kind of fructose is transformed into a liver-melting toxin, however, simply by putting “high-” in front of it. Even though they are chemically identical, the dietary value is totally different:

Fructose: Healthy and nutritious.

High-fructose: Worse than Hitler.

What no one is reporting is a spike in the number of melted livers. The food-processing industry has been using high-fructose corn syrup by the train load for more than 30 years, but most of us still have functioning livers. That’s why we can drink as much as we do.

We also have more time now to do things that are bad for us. Since 1960, around the time the highfructose corn syrup trains started rolling, life expectancy among Canadians has increased by 10 years, to age 81. That’s a full decade more for us to do all the things that experts say are killing us earlier, such as eating foods containing high-fructose corn syrup.

A broader view of the evidence would suggest that high-fructose corn syrup actually is good for us. The more of it we eat, the longer we live.

How upsetting it must be to alarmist researchers that, in spite of all their dire warnings, most of us will live into our 80s. We must be doing something right at the dinner table. We must be doing most things right, but the news from nutrition labs always is so negative. If you just listened to them, you would think that the accumulated toxicities of modern life are driving us to an ever-earlier grave. Instead, life expectancy keeps trending higher. In another 50 years, we’ll be living to age 90, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that nutritional science can do to stop us.

Of course, we might live even longer if we ate as the nutritional experts say we should. I say it’s not worth the risk.