By Shelley Krupa, Business Operations Coordinator at Lake Hallie Memory Care
Hello 2022, we’re ready to set sweet goals! We’re feeling joyfully plump and ready to put away the empty holiday treat plates, right? If you’re nodding yes, you’re not alone and wise in thinking ditching the consumption of non-essential sweets is a smart goal for 2022.
It’s predicted by the end of 2020/2021, that the global consumption of sugar will topple off the charts at 5.3 million metric tons more than was consumed in 2018/2019. That may be good for agricultural technology, but it is not so good news for the consumers of it and our brains.
2020 and 2021 kept us isolating safely at home. Some folks nibbled away on chocolate chip cookies dipped in that desperation to have contact with someone else drive-through vanilla latte in hand. A pining for and dabbling in sweet treats of comfort welcomed sugar-buzzed courage not to stop there. They ventured out and down the essential food aisles where the good cookies were located too.
According to my mishmash Google search, sweet goals were high for 245 million Americans who consumed ready-to-eat cookies in 2020 & 2021. On average, we consume over 2 billion cookies a year, 300 per person, or 35,000 in a lifetime because 95.2 percent of the households consume cookies. Perhaps the other 4.8 percenters who don’t may be onto something important for us to consider?
Guess who consumes the most cookies? You’d think kids, right? Nope, you’d be wrong. The highest consumption of cookies is for the over-65s. Yes, you read that right, the over-65s munch on them the most. Coincidentally, that age group is the highest risk for other not so sweet things.
Our brain uses glucose for energy, but too much of the wrong energy source can be bad when the glucose comes from high fructose corn syrup-laden foods like cookies. Too much bad sugar in our diet puts our brains at risk and our bodies in insulin chaotic levels. And may lead us on a detour to diabetes and compromised immune systems that can’t properly utilize Vitamin D. Making us susceptible for you guessed it - to the ever-lurking COVID-19 virus, small-vessel disease, vascular dementia, and Alzheimer’s.
It’s not that complex for our brains to process. The simple sugar cookies should be ditched from our diets to help us save more lives. The sweetest and smartest goal for 2022 is to skip the cookies – grab an apple or avocado instead.
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