Here’s “The Sugary Infographic”
Creating “The Sugary Truth” explanation video was a fun learning experience for us. Not only about the topic — added sugars in our foods — but also about our process, the result, and the response.
We really enjoy doing explanation videos. We’ve done a few as Tremendousness and we’ve done a bunch at some other companies. But do you know what else we’ve done a lot of in our past lives? Infographics. Plenty.
Regarded with both disdain and awe, most infographics we see these days just aren’t very good — but that’s for another post. Below is Tremendousness’ static version of our “The Sugary Truth” video. If you’ve seen the animation you’ll probably notice a few small changes here and there, and one… medium-ish change. Check it out then keep scrolling. The whole point of this is improve awareness around the sickening abundance of added sugars in our foods.
No matter how much you like sugar, that paints a pretty clear picture, eh?
We got a lot of great response to the original video. Right now it has nearly 14,000 views on YouTube. We kept comments off because, well, you know, YouTube comments—but we got an interesting and illuminating mix of positive and critical response on our original blog post and on other blogs that shared the video. Basically the only point of contention was this: why did you mention whole grain bread as a source of fiber?
Actually, it was more like this: why the *&#@ did you mention bread?!? Those carbs turn into *&#@$^@ sugar!
I’m paraphrasing.
Well, we mentioned bread because the video is about the huge problem of added sugars in our food. It’s not about the carbs that are a natural part of fruits and vegetables and whole grain breads — and other unprocessed or minimally processed foods. That’s why. The video is not specifically about diabetes, or weight loss, or a certain diet, or exercise, or Gary Taubes‘ excellent book Good Calories Bad Calories, or Dr. Robert Lustig‘s eye-opening research. It touches on each of those subjects but the video wasn’t created to say all sugar is always bad — it was created to help people realize that we are consuming too much sugar, and that is bad. Yummy, but deathly bad.
That said, we’ve completely left bread off of this infographic version [update: and we’ve added an annotation to the video].
Why?
Because if that’s all that’s keeping smart, health-aware people from sharing this information or using it to help family and friends get healthier — then goodbye bread. See ya.
Here’s a link to download a printable PDF version of “The Sugary Truth” infographic (8.5×40″ / 17MB) and here’s the video link again.
We hope this is helpful. Let us know what you think.
