“I plan to eat healthier and reduce the amount of sugar I consume this year.”

That’s a direct quotation from an email I mentioned indirectly in last week’s article, “Get ‘revenge’ on the sugar industry by eating well.” You read Kreg Rodrigues’ exact words now because of his use of the word “plan.”

If you want to cut back on something so ubiquitous as added sugar, you certainly need one. A study performed at the University of Sao Paulo and published in the BMJ in 2016 helps explain why.

It found that 57.9 percent of the average American’s total caloric intake comes from highly processed foods and that 89.7 percent of the calories from those highly processed foods come from added sugars. Highly processed foods, as defined by the Sao Paulo researchers, are “industrial formulations” that use substances not added in home cooking (like artificial flavorings, artificial colorings, and emulsifiers) besides adding salt, oils, fats, and — you guessed it! — all sorts of nutritionally void sugars.

In the same way that you can become desensitized to violence by seeing it repeatedly on a video screen, reading percentage after percentage in health studies can have the same effect. Because of that, think of the Sao Paulo results this way: More than half of what the average American eats is unnatural — and mostly junk — and nine-tenths of those unnatural calories come from added sugars.

So is it really a surprise when average Americans gain unnatural amounts of weight and develop heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or a number of other weight-related disorders at an unnatural rate?

Further complicating matters is the fact that sugar does more than satisfy your sweet tooth. More than one study has found sugar to be as addictive — at least in lab rats — as cocaine.

So how in the world do you battle both the food producers and physical dependency and reduce the amount of sugar you consume in a day?

Take a page out of my book. Put a healthy spin on the sugar-loaded foods the food producers try to hook you on and produce your own sweet treats.

In a sense, create a positive addiction.

As a youngster, I didn’t really enjoy swimming in the ocean, yet I loved taking vacations to the shore because I knew I’d get to gorge myself on a sweet so sublime that I used to joke that its existence is a way to prove the existence of God: chocolate fudge.

When we vacationed at the shore, my family would buy it in one-pound boxes and take it back to the motel room. On more than one occasion, I polished off nearly an entire pound in one night.

While I don’t eat any fudge anymore, I’ve been able to create something so good that it might also suggest there’s a supreme being: a thicker-than-sauce-but-not-quite-solid substitute I eat with healthy cereals.

I’m so hooked on dipping a spoon into the faux fudge and swirling the spoon in dry cereal that I’ve been eating the combo six or seven nights a week for the past few months. Luckily, it’s a positive addiction in the sense that virtually all of the calories in the faux fudge come from an undisputed superfood.

Cocoa.

If eating a poor (but certainly healthy!) man’s version of a cross between a Krackle Bar and Rice Krispie Treats while you read a good book or relax before bed appeals to you, take a trip to the grocery store. Purchase a 100 percent unsweetened cacao; two naturally and virtually calorie-free sugar substitutes, erythritol and stevia; and a low-calorie or no-calorie chocolate syrup.

While you may need to go to a health food store for the erythritol, most major grocery stores carry many versions of stevia as well as the no-calorie chocolate syrup from Walden Farms I use.

I tend to like my sweets really sweet, so you may eventually moderate the amounts suggested here. But try it my way to start, knowing that you can always take some of the sweetness by eating less of it with more cereal.

Mix three tablespoons of erythritol and three tablespoons of cocoa in a bowl by adding the low- or no-calorie chocolate syrup in one-ounce increments.

Use a fork and mix slowly. If not you’ll have a countertop full of cocoa.

Taste test after the mixture is clumpy but before it’s fully liquid. Based on that taste test, either add more syrup or a bit of water (if you want more of a liquid-like quality) or a bit of stevia (if you want more sweetness).

Just be aware that two compounds in stevia are up to 300 times as sweet as sugar, so you don’t need to use much of the powdered form. In this recipe, I usually add less than a teaspoon, but more than a half.

It’s best to eat the mixture with a cereal that contains no added sugars, such as puffed wheat, puffed rice, Fiber One, or plain Cheerios.