An Unnatural Sweetness

A recent blood test confirmed that I have insulin resistance. So, while my body continues to produce the insulin necessary to convert sugars into energy the body can use, my muscle tissues have become “resistant” to insulin, leaving too much of the stuff—a caustic (if essential) chemical—circulating in my blood. If not treated, the condition will almost certainly lead to Type 2 (adult onset) diabetes, with all the attendant consequences. Fun stuff.

All this talk of sugar got me thinking about artificial sweeteners. Michael Pollan posits—and others have as well—that today’s epidemic of insulin resistance and adult-onset diabetes may have something to do with Americans’ particular fondness for high fructose corn syrup—think sodas, candies, and just about everything else sweet these days—and refined carbohydrates (which the body converts to even more sugar) coupled with an appalling lack of exercise. All that blood sugar has to go somewhere, and, if it isn’t burned off through exercise, it just floats around and causes trouble. So, given my bad eating habits and appalling lack of exercise, a diagnosis of insulin resistance comes as no surprise.

Compare that situation to the one faced by our ancestors, who were lucky to find anything sweet to eat, and, if they did, likely ate it with all the fiber and other good stuff included—fiber that would naturally moderate the ups and downs of blood sugar, sugar that would likely have been burned off in any event over the course of a hard day’s labor. Even natural sugars like those found in a glass of orange juice would never have been consumed in any great quantity as recently as my grandmother’s day, when, as a girl in Holland, a single orange was viewed as a luxury, an extravagance, and each bite savored.

But this “unnatural sweetness” problem is broader than diet, isn’t it? It seems to me that we’ve made just about everything unnaturally sweet. Take contemporary notions of beauty for example, where the fashion, make-up, and plastic surgery industries have sold us on an artificial notion of beauty—impossibly skinny models with perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect lips and playboy bunny breasts. Is it any wonder that a teenage girl, beautiful in her own way, looks in the mirror and gets depressed? Why anorexia and bulimia run rampant? (If you haven’t seen this video, you should: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hibyAJOSW8U.)

And it isn’t just the girls who fall prey, as the recent flood of ads for products promoting hair growth, muscle-building, and male “performance enhancements” make painfully clear. (Just shoot me if I have to sit through another Cialis commercial.)

Apparently, reality is too dull, too bland, so why not sweeten it up?

It’s the same everywhere I look. Drugs and alcohol? Sweeteners. Step on those pleasure receptors, baby, no need for natural highs. Video games? Who needs saber-toothed tigers to give one an adrenaline rush? Pornography? Every fantasy at one’s finger tips (for a fee). But it’s all ghastly pink cotton-candy in the end, isn’t it, and does it really deliver as promised? A short term fix, to be sure, but does it linger?

Will we reach a day—if we haven’t already—where we no longer take pleasure in the simple joys of life: the sweetness of an apple, fresh from the tree? a sunrise? a smile? a warm hello? I hope not.

Life can be sweet in a simple, earthy sort of way. I just hope we don’t sugar coat everything to the point that we can no longer savor it.