HI EVERYBODY, I’M JOHN G. — AND I’M A SUGARHOLIC.

Like all of you, I’m embarrassed that I became addicted to this drug, and that it changed my life for the worse, and that I wasn’t strong enough to resist it.

I guess I just didn’t exercise the personal responsibility necessary to use some self-control.

I’m so ashamed …

Wait, what, you ask? Sugar — a drug? That can’t be right, can it? I mean if it was, wouldn’t it have adverse effects? And wouldn’t it be regulated by the government? And wouldn’t it be highly addictive?

Glad you asked.

Sugar has very adverse effects, among which is the fact it’s pretty much solely responsible for the biggest crisis in global health today: obesity. According to the World Health Organization, obesity has surpassed starvation as the number one global health problem — ironic, huh?

And shouldn’t it be regulated by the government? Well, actually, it is, just in the opposite direction of other drugs. It’s regulated into society in a way that insures it is now in most foods on grocery store shelves. In fact 80 percent of the foods on those shelves now contain added sugar.

And what about addiction? Sugar activates the pleasure centers in your brain in a way that makes it up to eight times more addictive than cocaine. Good thing it’s way cheaper, right?

Sugar is what they call a carbohydrate, and — let’s be honest here — “carbohydrate” is a very confusing term. Do you know what a “carb” really is? I mean, we talk all the time about burning them, or loading up on them, but do you actually understand what they are?

No — no you don’t.

That’s OK — neither do I. When I looked up “carbohydrate” on Wikipedia my eyes glazed over at the very first sentence, which goes like this:

“Carbohydrate is a large biologicalmolecule, or macromolecule, consisting of carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O) atoms, usually with a hydrogen:oxygen atom ratio of 2:1 (as in water); in other words, with the empirical formula Cm(H2O)n (where m could be different from n).”

Yeah, thanks, that cleared everything up.

So let’s just do this — let’s call it sugar because, really, that’s what carbs are — they’re sugar. That means pasta = sugar. Tortilla chips = sugar. Rice? Yep, that’s sugar too.

Your body turns any “carbohydrates” you ingest into sugar, and then tries to burn that sugar as energy. But there’s a problem with that — in fact there’s two: One is that your body is actually designed to burn fat as its first choice for energy; the other problem is that we now consume so much sugar that we don’t burn all of it. We just keep overfilling our bodies with it until it gets stored as more and more fat rather than being used.

So how did we get into this situation? I mean how did sugar, which is dangerous, become so ubiquitous? I said earlier it’s in 80 percent of the food in the grocery store. That means, on average, eight out of every 10 things you put in your cart are, to varying degrees, bad for you.

How did that happen? Well, sort of like this:

As a species, Homo sapiens (you and me) have been in our present form for about 2 million years. For all but about 10,000 of those years we ate a basically sugar-free diet (save for when we beat everyone else to a fruit tree).

If you picture that timeline as a football field, we ate a protein-, fat- and vegetable-centric diet for about 99 ½ yards. The development of agriculture (wheat, corn, rice, etc., which is where most carbs/sugar comes from) fits neatly into that last ½ yard of the field. That means our bodies aren’t really set up for the carbohydrate-centric “modern diet.”

So then why do we follow it?

Well, it did some cool things for us. It allowed us to stop hunting and gathering our food — which took lots of time and energy from everyone in the social collective as they chased after woolly mammoths and tried to remember where the edible vegetation grew — in favor of settling in one nice, pleasant place. And in that nice, pleasant place they could plant crops of wheat and corn that produced enough food for everybody to eat, but didn’t take the energy of everybody to create. That left extra time in the day to design and build things like sailing ships, and helicopters and the Internet — and governments.

And some of those governments consisted of legislative bodies that made rules and laws that, ideally, protected the people of the land.

But sometimes those legislative bodies came under the influence of money — especially when it got to the point where lots of money was required just to get elected to them.

Anyone here remember Bob Dole? Aside from running for president in 1996, he’s also known for having been a U.S. senator from Kansas for almost 30 years. I can hear you thinking to yourself, don’t they grow a lot of wheat and corn in Kansas? Why yes, yes they do! And so if Bob was doing his job right, he should have been helping the people of his wheat- and corn-growing state by writing legislation that was favorable for those crops and their growers.

Let’s just say that Bob did his job right.

And he had some help, from companies like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which — with more than 700 worldwide locations — is in the business of growing and selling those carbohydrate-intensive crops.

In fact, ADM helped Bob Dole so much (with campaign contributions and donations and in just about every other way, legal or not, it could) that people in Washington started referring to him as the “Senator from Archer Daniels Midland.”

Ha. Funny.

Now I’m not dumping on Bob — well, I am — but not on just him. There’s a huge worldwide conglomeration of people and corporations and governments and monied interests that have a big stake in getting all of us to eat as much sugar/carbs as possible. And while I can’t stop them from getting their sweet deceit into your belly, I can prevent them from getting it into mine.

I removed sugar from my diet about a month ago. Here are some things that have happened since then:

I lost 12 pounds.

My hearing improved.

So did my vision.

Food that doesn’t contain added sugar now tastes better to me.

My mind is clearer.

I’m not hungry all the time.

My joints no longer hurt the morning after soccer games.

And my chances of getting diabetes just dropped to nil.

So I said earlier I didn’t take the personal responsibility to resist sugar. I’m not really suggesting that it’s simply a matter of personal responsibility — for me or for you. Sugar is in almost everything — it’s in ketchup, for pete’s sake. It’s almost unavoidable.

But I just woke up and started trying to avoid it.

Wish me luck …

Benicia resident John P. Gavin is the author of “Online Dating Sucks… but it’s how I fell in love.” You can find it at onlinedatingsucksbook.com or at amazon.com/dp/B009ZYYDVE.