Dwight Howard’s legendary sweet tooth has been discussed numerous times over his 12 year NBA career and makes sense with his general child-like demeanor right? But the true level of Howard’s sugar addiction is even more mind-boggling than you would think.
Here is a breakdown of the depths of Howard’s need for candy from Baxter Holmes of ESPN:
“By February’s All-Star break, it was time for a full-blown intervention, and Dr. Cate Shanahan, the Lakers’ nutritionist, led the charge, speaking to Howard by phone from her office in Napa, California. Howard’s legs tingled, he complained, but she noticed he was having trouble catching passes too, as if his hands were wrapped in oven mitts. Well, he quietly admitted, his fingers also tingled. Shanahan, with two decades of experience in the field, knew Howard possessed a legendary sweet tooth, and she suspected his consumption of sugar was causing a nerve dysfunction called dysesthesia, which she’d seen in patients with prediabetes. She urged him to cut back on sugar for two weeks. If that didn’t help, she said, she vowed to resign.
To alter Howard’s diet, though, Shanahan first had to understand it. After calls with his bodyguard, chef and a personal assistant, she uncovered a startling fact: Howard had been scarfing down about two dozen chocolate bars’ worth of sugar every single day for years, possibly as long as a decade. “You name it, he ate it,” she says. Skittles, Starbursts, Rolos, Snickers, Mars bars, Twizzlers, Almond Joys, Kit Kats and oh, how he loved Reese’s Pieces. He’d eat them before lunch, after lunch, before dinner, after dinner, and like any junkie, he had stashes all over — in his kitchen, his bedroom, his car, a fix always within reach. She told his assistants to empty his house, and they hauled out his monstrous candy stash in boxes — yes, boxes, plural.”
Sugar addiction can be a real serious issue that negatively effects the health of millions of people around the world and it is clear that Howard was a true junkie and was headed toward early onset diabetes and early retirement.
Pretty crazy how effective he was for years with the addiction and how he has always been able to maintain his impressive physique.
If only he was as addicted to shooting free-throws as he was to sugar…
