Kreg Rodrigues and Zoey Kleintop do not know one another. But both do know ingesting processed foods packed with added sugars is not good.

They wrote to me about that after reading the “Fitness Master” article published in this newspaper on Dec. 30, “Eating too much sugar even hurts the healthy — and quickly.”

Kreg, whose body shape strikes me as being eerily — and impressively! — the same as when he ran high school track more than 30 years ago, emailed that he planned to eat healthier and try harder to cut back on the sweet stuff. Zoey, a seventh grader whom I see in the school hallways but do not teach, delivered a handwritten letter to me that let me know “my dad and I both loved your article” and that both agreed with my beliefs about sugar.

I got a real kick out of both letters — as well a creative kick in the pants to write more about the evils of added sugars.

After all, Kreg is just past 50; Zoey, approaching 15. Clearly, interest in the topic is not confined to a single generation — and for good reason.

In the span of one generation, every generation has increased its consumption of added sugars — and experienced an unsettling but not-so surprising increase in obesity. Part of the reason for these increases occurred about two generations ago as a one-two punch thrown by the sugar industry — and each certainly registered as a low blow.

The first: After financing research that linked an increase in sugar ingestion with a decline in health, the sugar industry decided to do nothing about it. Well, technically that’s not right. They did do something.

They hid the research.

That research, titled Project 259, fed lab rats either table sugar or starch and focused on the effects the difference made on gut bacteria. But the most important findings occurred outside the gut and in the bloodstream.

When the rats were fed large amounts of table sugar, they recorded an increase in triglyceride levels. In humans, increased triglyceride levels lead to increased cholesterol levels, which lead to an increased incidence of heart disease.

This should have been big news because at the time the U.S. was experiencing an upsurge in heart disease, an upsurge that other research had already attributed to the consumption of dietary fat, especially saturated fat.

The Project 259 researchers submitted their findings in August of 1970 to the sugar industry and requested additional funding to determine if it eating too much sugar could also be as harmful as eating too much saturated fat.

The sugar industry denied the request. My guess as to why: They realized that saturated fat served as a suitable scapegoat — if a little thing like contrary research didn’t get in the way.

The second low blow: The sugar industry found a new way to further increase profits that — in all probability — even further adversely affects consumer health.

Since the U.S. sugar tariffs in the 70s kept imported refined sugar at about twice the worldwide price, the sugar industry began using corn grown in the U.S. (purchased at bargain-basement prices because the federal government was subsidizing the corn growers at that time) to make an alternative: high-fructose corn syrup.

Not only was HFCS much cheaper than refined sugar (and still is, by about 20 percent), but it is also sweeter, allowing food producers to use less, charge the same, and further increase their profits. As a result, HFCS began to be used more and more, and by the 1980s, Drew Davis, the vice president of federal affairs for the National Soft Drink Association, estimated the profit to be “millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.”

But that’s not the only way in which the use of HFCS helps the food industry while hurting you. A study in 2012 that tracked blood flow in the brains of 20 healthy young adults of normal weight found that consuming drinks containing fructose did not suppress activity in the area of the brain that controls the desire for food.

Yet drinking a beverage containing glucose, a sugar closely akin to your blood sugar, did.

The results of this study caused Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, to call fructose “a bad actor” when it comes to promoting unneeded food intake and causing unwanted weight gain.

So in your metaphorical boxing match for better health, how can you best counter your opponent’s two low blows?

Not by throwing punches of your own. There’s no way you can hurt your clearly stronger opponent. Plus, it seems is if he’s got the judges — aka the lawmakers — on his side.

Yet there is a way for you to win this match.

All you need to do is eat well.

In this case, with all apologies to the metaphysical poet George Herbert, eating well rather than living well is “the best revenge.”

For specific ways to gain it, be sure to read next week’s column.