By Dean L. Jones
More and more, eating patterns staggeringly surge on Super Bowl Sunday. On this day last year Pizza Hut alone sold 2-million pizza pies. This represents a sizeable number of people placing pizza orders, all of which usually come complete with sauces, breads, drinks and desserts.
Undoubtedly, for companies like Pizza Hut the huge one day spike in revenue is welcomed. However, consumers not so much as the spike in respective blood sugar levels are not a welcomed outcome on this one day of enjoyment.
Obviously desserts are basically synonymous with sweet, so it comes as no surprise that one slice of Pizza Hut’s Ultimate Hershey’s Chocolate Chip Cookie contains 4-teaspoons of added sugar. But, when you think of added sugar rarely do the sauces and breads enter the discussion.
For example, most of Pizza Hut’s side dishes like garlic bread, cinnamon bread sticks, Honey BBQ Sauce, Honey French Dressing, personal apple pies depend heavily on high fructose corn syrup as a main ingredient. Even their famous Cherry Dessert Pizza adds a significant amount sugar and high fructose corn syrup to its starch-modified ingredients. Remember, pizza dough mixes made by companies everywhere add to their enriched flour ingredients significant amounts of sugar.
Added sugar is circulating heavily on Super Bowl Sunday, as the aforementioned makes no reference to liquid candy in the form of sugary drinks. Likewise, if the previous years are any indicator there will be at least 1.25 billion chicken wings devoured on that Sunday. In view of that, it is worth noting that Pizza Hut adds high fructose corn syrup to its WingStreet® Spicy Asian and Chipotle BBQ Sauces.
Of course there would not be any problem with dining on this foodstuff if only eating too much added sugar did not bring with it accelerated aging, weight gain, increased risk of heart disease and diabetes. Another commonly overlooked illness brought about from eating too processed sugar are sleepless nights that weaken the immune system, slows the metabolism, hampers memory, challenges learning processes, elevates moodiness, and other negativity side effects.
Eating too much sugar raises blood sugar levels and after when trying to sleep with added sugars in the body causes higher sugar levels that unfortunately drop during the night enough to abruptly wake you up, usually feeling hungry. Adrenal glands release stress hormones such as cortisol which enable the ‘fight or flight’ response by increasing your heart rate, quickening breathing and alerting your brain to the need for action, which is in direct opposition to sleep.
Whenever sleep is disrupted the body produces less melatonin, which is an antioxidant that helps with preventing cancer, whereas melatonin suppresses free radicals that can lead to cancer. So therefore, Super ‘Sugar’ Bowl Sunday can be brutal, thereby making it smart to spend time and money around living SugarAlert!
www.SugarAlert.com
Dean is a marketing strategist with the Southland Partnership Corporation (a public benefit organization), sharing his view on mismanagement practices of packaged foods & beverages.
