Do you ever watch those infomercials in the middle of the night? If you haven’t, they’re always coming up with some fantastic breakthrough in medicine, weight loss or mental awareness. In just about every case, it seems too good to be true, and yet it could cost you a lot of money.

I have to admit, the people who produce these shows are very convincing. In effect, they are snake oil sales people, trying to sell you something you don’t really need.
There are products that are constantly advertised as being good for us, good for our cardiac health, good for our aches and pains, good for our eyesight and so on and so on.

As it turns out, all you have to do is eat right. Do you remember the Smucker’s TV commercial that was set in the early 1950s? There were two boys in that commercial and they were both razer thin.
In the 1950s, there wasn’t a convenient and cheap fast-food restaurant on every block and families almost always ate together full and complete meals, that yes, it included dessert.

People, including myself, complain about aches and pains. Hey, after all, I’m in my 60s and my body is supposed to hurt from time to time, right? Not necessarily.

These past three weeks have really been an eye opener for me. My wife and I have had three of our grandchildren, and now that they’ve gone back to Rapid City, we both agree why we are exhausted and why our knees, backs, ankles, necks and wrists hurt.

It’s because of sugar.

We should have been intelligent enough to have figured this out in our college years, but it took the timing of our grandchildren visiting to really realize this was not a coincidence.

Before they came to visit, I was quite conscious of any sugar consumption, and even though chocolate is one of the four basic food groups of a journalist, I did everything I could to avoid chocolate. Then, the littles were in the house.
To make it even more obvious, I had lost 15 pounds in June and July and it was because I was strict about my diet and if I had a craving, I would drink a glass of low-sodium tomato juice. It worked very well.

As we spent time with the kids, however, we had Smores, we had sugary drinks, we had chocolate, we had ice cream. We went to car shows, festivals and parades. The amount of candy the three of them picked up on parade routes was stunning.
And my grandchildren, bless their hearts, know I like Tootsie Rolls, so they shared their loot with their papa and you can guess what happened.

I gained almost all that weight back, I often slept through the night and woke up groggy and tired. My knees, wrists and back hurt almost all the time.

Sugar is inflammatory and it gives you highs and lows and that’s what was happening to me. There is no question and no denying it because the timing of it while the kids were here was spot on.

I’ve known about sugar’s inflammatory properties for years, but never paid attention to them, but here’s why this is different. Not only had I lost a fair amount of weight, I was feeling really good physically, almost as if I was 10 or 15 years younger. Then came the grandchildren and the sugar.

They started school this week so my wife and I both have abruptly halted any sugar consumption. I’m back to my “tomato juice diet” and although it’s only been a few days, I’m already sleeping better and my knees aren’t hurting in the morning when I get out of bed.

I’ll bet that weight is gone by mid September.