If you stroll down any grocery store aisle in America it is not uncommon to see some distraught and harried mother shoving some sugar into the mouth of a screaming child. I once saw an advertisement in an Atlanta shopping mall that showed a picture of an ice cone with the caption "15 minutes of silence."

On the other hand we are subject to almost nightly dire warnings of the coming obesity epidemic amongst our youth.

As per usual, we are our own worst enemy in these matters. Imagine how the world would change if the frustrated mother calmed her child with a raisin, or a grape or an apple.

America's parents should go further than that. In each school district parents should call for the abolition of soda and sugary snack machines in public schools.

There is no minimum daily requirement for refined sugar so why not push for a zero refined sugar content in the diets of children. If they develop no taste for sugar in their youth  then when they grow up they won't waste their money on sugar either. For those have gone into shock over the notion of the absence of sugar, there are plenty of sweeteners like honey to take up the slack.

We do need to get rid of that corn syrup crap in my opinion. I think it makes you fat and rots your teeth.

I am sure some of you sugar junkies are quietly sweating in the shadows, biding your time until your limitless craving for the white powder drives you into a feeding frenzy.

Take heart sugar dope fiend, I'll not abandon your drug of choice completely. Prepare for sweet surrender as I relate what I'm going to do with all that excess sugar that will pile up. Let the rats eat it and die. Whoops, I mean I will slavishly copy the people of Brazil and turn all that excess sugar into ethanol and do my part in  getting the US off of foreign oil. A home grown renewable fuel source that we control will definitely strengthen our economy and even our national security. No longer will we be beholden to the whims of oil cartels who support terrorism with the money they make from our oil addiction.

There are times when it is difficult to see who does the greater harm, the lazy or the incompetent. The lazy would be those who can't be bothered to lift a finger to get kids off their sugar addiction. The incompetent would be politicians whose swift action on turning corn into ethanol caused world wide food riots when the price of all foods containing corn shot up.