Time for a little science experiment: Go into your kitchen and get out the sugar, a teaspoon and a clear drinking glass.

Now, put 22 teaspoons of sugar into the glass.

Builds up fast, doesn’t it?

You’d have to be clinically insane to put that glass to your lips and knock back all that sugar… but that’s exactly what you’re doing, every single day, if you’re an “average American.”

Put it all together, and you get 355 calories in added sugar a day — or almost an entire meal made of white stuff. And over the course of a week, it adds up to a pound and half of sugar.

One food industry analyst in the news, Phil Lempert, says that’s about double what you should be eating… but I’ve got news for Phil: You’re only half right, pal.

You shouldn’t be eating ANY added sugar, period.

But instead, we’re going in the opposite direction. Want to know what you’re grandkids are eating? Add another five teaspoons to that glass.

And these are just averages. If you’d like to see what millions of Americans at the high end are eating, you’d have to add almost 20 more teaspoons — 46 in all!

That’s enough to cause an 8-ounce glass to runneth over with sugar — and that’s why America is fatter and sicker than ever before.

We could slash disease rates in this country overnight if we’d simply stop adding sugar to everything from bread to salad dressing.

But that’s not going to happen.

So look out for yourself: Read food labels carefully… and if you see added sugar in any of its guises, treat it like a hand grenade and get rid of it as fast as you can.

Jack Forbush