On last night’s episode of Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver, who is known for eviscerating societal wrongs with razor-sharp wit, took aim at the “treat” in Trick-or-Treat. In the clip (below), he criticizes Big Sugar for marketing a substance to kids that is known to be both harmful and addictive.
Halloween is mostly about candy. But though we call it a “treat,” the average American consumes 22 teaspoons of sugar a day, according to the clip, which adds up to 75 pounds of the sweet stuff a year. “That’s like eating Michael Cera’s weight in sugar every single year,” Oliver quips.
But jokes aside, sugar is addictive, at least according to scientist Eric Stice, whose research claimed: “sugar activates our brain in a special way that’s very reminiscent of… drugs like cocaine.”
Because of its appeal, food manufacturers put sugar in everything from sodas and candies to salad dressings, ketchup and even Clamato juice. One of the biggest problems, says Oliver, is that people don’t realize how much of the substance they’re consuming, especially since “no one understands the metric system.” As his solution, he urges the sugar industry to adopt measurements everybody could understand: circus peanuts, or the ”most disgusting of all the candies.”
He asks his followers to tweet #showusyourpeanuts at food manufacturer and urge them to “whip out their peanuts and present them to you.” Who’s on board?
[video=youtube_share;MepXBJjsNxs]http://youtu.be/MepXBJjsNxs[/video]
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
