Sugar is evil.

There. I said it. There are more and more medical studies every day that say sugar is more addictive than cocaine.

Even lab rats who received shocks every time they went for the sugar still went for the sugar. Sugar can be found in just about everything we eat that didn’t grow out of the ground, keeping a steady stream of it flowing into our addicted systems. And processed food companies market the hell out of it—to our kids!

We are one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t regulate food marketing for kids. We just let them walk into our pantries and fill them with crap.

I visited my sister in New York. I went in to her cabinets and couldn’t find one thing I would eat or feed Madeline, my four-year-old daughter. The whole house was full of processed crap. Sugar cereals, sugar drinks, even the rice cakes were the gross kind. My daughter saw it all and a minute later, that’s what she wanted. I pull my hair out of my head to try to feed her food that doesn’t look as pretty as the processed junk and doesn’t have crazy commercials with theme songs and cartoon characters or rock stars promoting it, and one visit to my sister’s house undoes it all.

As if it weren’t hard enough to keep kids from being enticed to the point of addiction to sugar, it gets worse when someone like Taylor Swift becomes a spokesperson for Diet Coke. Artificial sweeteners don’t have any actual sugar on them, and they do nothing to break the addiction to sugar.

Not only are most artificial sweeteners way sweeter than regular sugar, but your tongue gets used to that intense sweetness, making naturally sweet foods like fruit taste less sweet. Artificial sweeteners also trick your body into thinking it’s getting calories when it’s not, leaving you hungrier and craving more food. You might even convince yourself that you can get away with having that slice of cake because you were good and had a diet soda.

And the biggest problem of all with diet sodas is that they’re all chemicals and garbage! And here’s Taylor Swift, the young lady every little girl wants to be, selling it to our kids.

Why don’t we just put a crack pipe in her hands and have her sell that?!

Advertising agencies don’t care what message their commercials send our kids. They only care that their clients—the big sugar-addict factories that pay them to advertise their products—are happy. They will stop at nothing to get you to buy their products. I think if Taylor Swift thought about it a little more, she’d realize what she’s doing as the Diet Coke spokesperson is wrong, but even she and her managers need their paychecks.

As long as there are parents willing to buy that crap, there will be crap to buy. It’s not always easy to be the ‘healthy parent’, but when Madeline grows up to be a healthy adult, I will not regret a single decision I made in what I fed her. Don’t let Taylor Swift and advertising agencies parent your kids. YOU be their parent.

Love elephant and want to go steady?

Sign up for our (curated) daily and weekly newsletters!

Editor: Renée Picard

Photo: Jeanny at Flickr