Sugar Will Make You Fat, Too Bad There's No Escape

Several actions resulted from my viewing of Katie Couric's 2014 documentary on sugar called Fed Up.

I learned that processed sugar is 10 times more addictive than cocaine and heroin, and that pretty much all Americans are under its spell.

I made a new-year's resolution to cut back on my sugar intake. So far so good. I'm putting fruit on healthy breakfast cereal instead of eating Fruity Pebbles several times a week. I'm rationing the candy stash in my office desk and no longer candy binging to stay away in the late afternoon.

Fed Up is really effective. If you didn't already know sugar is dangerously bad for you, it makes its case persuasively. Reviewing the promotional activities of Coke and breakfast cereals, Couric shows us how we are programmed to crave sugar from the earliest ages. Then the sugar works to tell our brains that we are still hungry and need to eat more junk food to satisfy that craving.

She attributes sugar as the cause of obesity, and the science and anecdotal personal stories present a compelling case that exercise and better diets won't get us out of the fat farm. It's sugar that we have to somehow avoid.

Fed Up has been called the "Inconvenient Truth of the health movement." Of course, Congress has done little about climate change since that film was released. It's pretty sad to think they will do the same about the obesity crisis.

If they do, I might even splurge and drink 10 teaspoons of sugar, the amount that is in one 12-ounce can of Coke.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Will Self Finds a Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz

I would consider Will Self one of my favorite contemporary authors. And that's saying quite a bit, since I've only read one of his books. But that book, Great Apes, is a blast of everything Self is about: shocking people, telling tales of English life, and a little bit of science fiction and fantasy to tell a tale in which chimps and humans switch places.

So it seems high time I read more Self. I bought his collection, The Undivided Self: Selected Stories, and dove right into the first of what will surely be several wild stories: "The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz."

The story opens with a guy named Tembe saying he's smoking the rock of the aforementioned title. Around this time, his older brother Danny is coming home from Desert Storm to take care of his old uncle in south London. But while living with Tembe in squalor, Danny comes upon an unexpected find. He locates some crack cocaine in one of the walls. The he locates some more. Then more. Then more. Nearly every wall is packed full. He doesn't do the stuff himself, so he decides to keep the source secret and have Tembe do the dirty dealing to make them both money.

Not much really happens in this story, but it's still a pretty poignant glimpse of how sordid, sad, and delusional the crack scene is, and it bodes well for the rest of this story collection.

***1/2 out of ***** stars