How much sugar are you eating? Odds are you don't know, and as John Oliver pointed out Sunday on "Last Week Tonight," it's because food makers are doing their best to make sure you never find out.
For example, most cranberry products are packed with sugar, and for good reason.
"Cranberries are, I think we can all agree, nature's most disgusting berry. Cranberries taste like cherries who hate you," Oliver said. "Cranberries taste like what a raspberry drinks before its colonoscopy -- and the industry knows it."
That, he said, is why even cranberry companies are fighting against adding labels that would disclose added sugars.
"Which is tantamount to begging, 'Please don't make us tell everyone how much sugar we dump on our garbage bog-berry,'" Oliver said.
It's not just the cranberry industry, either. Most food and beverage makers are fighting the proposed inclusion of an added sugars label on food packages. And, if there is a label, they don't want sugars listed in teaspoons. They want it in grams, which Oliver says is because no one knows what a gram is.
So he's offering a better solution.
"We are proposing, in the spirit of Halloween, that product manufacturers express their sugar content in the form of candy," Oliver said. "Specifically, circus peanuts, the most disgusting of all the candies. They taste like an elephant ejaculated into a packet of Splenda."
Since there are more than 5 grams of sugar in each circus peanut, Oliver said food makers should put a picture of one circus peanut on the front of the package for every 5 grams of sugar in the product.
"Do it, food makers. Expose your peanuts to the world. Because if you're going to shove your peanuts in our mouths, the very least you can do is tell us what we're swallowing."
Oliver called on viewers to support this idea by tweeting food makers with the hashtag #ShowUsYourPeanuts.
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