Sugar...friend or foe? (Part 3)

Mike and Ike were all too happy to celebrate with me…

Man, can they throw a party.  Many like to drink (so do I, that may be part of the reason I am the way I am too), but sugar, the chewy centered glossy hard coated kind, that’s my real release.  Two pills a day, I’m armed, dangerous and ready to eat anything…and there is nobody out there really giving you the dangers of the stuff.  Sure, they will tell you about fat, trans fat, saturated fat, bacon, and how they are bad for the waist line.  But there aren’t as many willing to share the dangers of sugar and how they sneak High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) into any food product that can be processed and many that are not.

After a month on the Lipitor, it was time to go back to the lab.  I was happy to know that at this point my cholesterol was “beautiful” according to my doctor.  So I asked, “Can I come off the statin?”

“Oh no,” said the doctor.  “You’re going to be on that for quite a while!" 

"A while…Quite A While?"  That is hard to define and my doctor (and as I said before, friend and work associate) didn’t quite elaborate into the relative permanence of "Quite A While!"  But through a little reading and some listening I was getting the picture.

The big picture, well it was still blurry.  I never thought I felt bad, was rarely under the weather, yet, I keep getting this information that I was unhealthy.  Then I look at a Body Mass Index (BMI) Calculator, the slap to the face was hard and left red palm and finger impressions.  29.7…this skinny waif, who could eat everything in sight for years, was now borderline obese.  So, I got to looking at this whole BMI thing.  You see, a guy named Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet developed this formula based on height and weight to pretty much let doctors know how fat somebody might be...the irony is Quetelet had no apparent medical training at all, he was a astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist (maybe back then that was similar to an MD).  Further ironic (possibly) is this whole obesity thing, Quetelet lived in Belgium in the early 19th-century, it tells you this obesity thing is not necessarily a modern concept, even in Europe.  There is no exception for muscular people, but let us face the facts…we Americans are fat arses and we don’t seem to be getting any slimmer (sorry if you feel as if you have been called out…but it is what it is…you muscular people, well I guess there is some parallax, but Arnold sure isn’t epitome of health these days, is he?)

So, excessively overweight, chemically enhanced healthy blood pressure and lipid profile, and a father-to-be has some concerns.  I turn to Mike and Ike.  Why not?  They’re a "fat free food” it says so right on the box I got from the aisle right in the center of the grocery store…

AGAIN…TO BE CONTINUED…