Despite the face mask, baseball cap, and eyeglasses, one of the hardcore stoners from my high school days recognized me as I pushed a cart in a grocery store back home in Berks County. Our five-minute conversation exceeded the length of the longest one we had in high school by at least four minutes and 50 seconds.

He seemed intent to let me know that he had turned his life around. Had become a family man. Fell into a sweet job.

I said I was happy for him.

He said, “How’d you do it, man? You know, say no when your buddies started the stuff I was into.”

I shrugged my shoulders although I could have answered. Even as a 16-year-old, I didn’t see how drinking a six-pack of Iron City and then puking out my guts on a Saturday night, or eating a few hashish brownies and then playing in a basketball game on a Friday night (as three of my friends once did) was going to make my life any better.

Getting wasted didn’t make any sense to me then and it certainly doesn’t now.

I share this with you instead of the stoner to explain why you’ll read yet another column crusading against sugar.

In the same way it’s unwise in high school to do alcohol and drugs just to fit in, it’s ill-advised in adulthood (and prior to that, too) to consume processed foods full of added sugars just to fit meals into your fast-paced days. Consuming any more than a minimal amount of added sugar just doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make your life any better - though it could make it worse.

Spend just a few moments searching the internet, and you’ll know why. Studies have linked sugar consumption to an increase in body fat, especially abdominal fat; insulin production; type 2 diabetes; obesity; many types of cancer; cardiovascular disease and its forerunners, elevated LDL cholesterol and triglyceride levels; as well as a decrease in growth hormone, a key component to all cell growth and good health.

But the damage sugar does isn’t limited to the body. It can also mess with your mind.

That was made clear in a column two weeks ago featuring a study with pigs that confirms the findings of the highly publicized study from 2012 where rats became as addicted to Oreo cookies as they did to cocaine and heroine.

Yet another potential mental harm may be even more debilitating. Taking in too much sugar can make you lethargic, irritable, and angry - three feelings that can lead to a state of mind you never want any food to produce.

Depression.

While researchers can’t ethically create studies designed to induce depression in human subjects, they can compare groups known to overindulge in sugar, such as type 2 diabetics, and the general population. When researchers at Diabetes UK in the United Kingdom did so, they found that diabetics are twice as likely to experience symptoms of depression as the typical Brit.

Researchers can also use surveys to assess whether there’s a link between what you eat and how you feel, but surveys have limits. They can suggest but not establish for certain that an unhealthy diet loaded with added sugars worsens depression or that a healthy improves it.

That’s why the study performed at Deakin University in Australia and published in BMJ in 2017 bears special mention. According to Georgia Ede, MD, in an article found on the Psychology Today website, researchers “recruited 67 men and women with moderate to severe depression who reported eating a relatively unhealthy diet. Most were taking antidepressants and/or were in regular psychotherapy.”

Half ate a diet that essentially eliminated added sugars (a modified version of the Mediterranean diet) and received dietary support counseling. This group, however, was allowed 2 sugar-sweetened beverages per week. The other group continued to eat as they had in the past and also received counseling.

At the conclusion of the 12-week study, the average score of those who altered their diet on the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale was 63 percent better than those who didn’t. In fact, 32 percent of the group that improved their diet, were no longer depressed according to medical standards.

A more recent meta-analysis of 10 studies and more than 36,000 participants published in the February 2019 issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders revealed that consuming the amount of sugar typically found in a 16-ounce soda daily “was significantly associated with a modestly higher risk” of depression, a risk that jumped to 25 percent when consumption increased to the daily equivalent of three cans of soda per day.

In short, most of us can handle just about anything life throws our way - when our minds are right. Why then do so many knowingly overindulge in a substance that has been found time and time again to do the opposite?