MUST-SEE VIDEO RANT: John Oliver Dismantles the Lies 'Big Sugar' Tells Us
Halloween is nigh, not much more time to find your totally inappropriate sexy costume. And, of course, don't forget to load up on lots and lots of sugary candy for the kids.
Because it isn't as if there isn't ample science to demonstrate how bad sugar is for us.
John Oliver's Sunday night rant took on, not so much candy, because everyone knows that's full of sugar, but the refusal of food companies to divulge that they add sugar to the most unlikely of products: potato chips, ketchup, crackers. Clamato juice, for Pete's sake. A lot of sugar.
"We eat the equivalent of 75 pounds of sugar each year," says Oliver. "That's roughly Michael Cera's body weight in sugar."
The food industry is engaged in a massive cover-up of just how much sugar they are keeping us addicted to. This is not mere overblown rhetoric. Big sugar and big food are fighting tooth and nail an FDA effort to include a line on "added sugar" in food labeling. The cranberry industry is one of the most freaked out about that prospect, because they willingly admit that cranberries don't really taste at all good without sugar, or as Oliver says: "Cranberries taste like cherries that hate you."
Big sugar would like to keep you in the dark about just how much sugar is being added to your food by labeling it in grams instead of teaspoons, because "teaspoons have negative connotations." Ha! What negative connotations? Â
In the end, Oliver calls for a massive twitter campaign, #showusyourpeanuts, based on his suggestions that food labeling be based on how many "Circus peanuts" worth of sugar your product contains. This also gave the British comedian lots of opportunities to make penis jokes, and who does not love those?
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