Terminate With Extreme Prejudice

So we recently started taking Google AdSense. We knew it would be quasi-random, what ads showed up on the website, and it would take time to filter out the companies that we really, truly didn't want advertising here. The very first ad that showed up featured the Lucky Charms leprechaun, of all things. Clearly, the keyword algorithms by which ads are distributed are not perfect.

But that wasn't the worst. Yesterday, we started seeing ads from "sweetsurprise.com" -- the High Fructose Corn Syrup lobby. You know, the people who put out all those ads about how corn syrup is no worse for you than sugar, and fine "in moderation."

Talk about damning with faint praise. Saying corn syrup is no worse for you than sugar is like saying crack is no worse for you than powder cocaine -- they're both dangerous, highly addictive drugs. (When people ask me "Are you saying I should never eat sugar again?" I generally respond, "No, I'm saying you need to stop thinking of sugar as a food, and start thinking of it as a highly addictive, potentially dangerous recreational drug." I'm not entirely against dangerous, addictive recreational drugs, mind you. I've written here many times about the fact that I like alcohol. But then, I never stole to get alcohol. And I sure as heck wouldn't get up in the morning, have three shots of tequila, and then expect to have a productive day. And if I had a kid, I wouldn't give him or her three shots of tequila, and then wonder why he or she had trouble focusing in school.)

What about "fine in moderation?" "Moderation" is a junk-food apologist's buzz word. "I believe in everything in moderation," they intone, implying that their consumption of sugar and other junk is "moderate," and my eschewing such things is "extremist." My response is "So do I. Now define "moderation." "

How about eating only half the sugar the average American does. Sound moderate? You'd still be getting more than ten times the sugar your ancestors were eating in 1800. Well, how about cutting back to just one soda per day? And not one of those big 20 ounce sodas that are popular today -- let's go with the 12 ounce can that was standard in my youth. Just one soda per day, and no other sugar at all -- no candy, no cakes, no cold cereal, no ketchup, no canned baked beans, nothing. That one soda still represents more than twice the sugar your ancestors were consuming in the years just following the Civil War. (For you folks in other nations, the American Civil War ended in 1865. So we're talking the latter part of the 19th Century.)

So what's moderation?

I contend that my avoidance of a substance that constituted only the smallest fraction of the human diet up until the past century or so is moderate. It is the modern American diet that is wildly, suicidally immoderate.

So, anyway, as you might have guessed, we have banned Sweet Surprise from our website. Please let us know if any similarly offensive ads show up in your browser, so we can terminate them, too, with extreme prejudice.