The Bitter Truth About Big Sugar’s Caribbean Colonialism
By Natalie Hopkinson | Huffington Post
I awoke each morning dead tired, and often parched. I was going to the restroom constantly. My doctor did some blood work and delivered the dreaded news: My A1C levels were in the danger zone.
Like 1 in 3 Americans, up to 90 percent of whom don’t know it, I was what she called “prediabetic.” My body was struggling to process sugar. I had to eat less of it and I had to burn more of it off through exercise. My doctor gave me three months; if I didn’t get my A1C back in the normal range, she would put me on a drug to stimulate my pancreas.
This news was terrifying for me because diabetes ― as well as kidney disease, which is related ― runs rampant in my family. My late father and his late mother both lost the use of their kidneys in their late 50s and lived on dialysis for years.
And when I considered the political implications of diabetes, the sordid history of sugar and the rogues’ gallery of pharmaceutical and processed food industry vultures who continue to profit from it, I became even more determined not only to escape the danger zone myself, but to join the growing political movement to fight back against sugar.
Consider the trail of sugar, which has left a devastating map of destruction around the globe. Before the rise of the British Empire, sugar was a rare luxury, a status symbol, and even prescribed as a drug.
