It’s not concrete, asphalt, or even that godawful tar-and-chip guaranteed to give anyone going fast on two wheels nightmares. It’s good intentions.

And when you’re traveling on a road built with them, there’s only one place you can be headed.

One such road was constructed by the guy or guys who created the hybrid form of corn that now accounts for 95 percent of the yearly U.S. harvest.

Yes, as Mark Bittman concedes in “Animal, Vegetable, Junk” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), hybrid corn better resists pests and droughts, better tolerates the chemicals used in fertilizers and pesticides, and lasts longer in storage. In fact, these advantages led to such a surplus that by 1960 the U.S. government had nearly two billion bushels of corn stashed away.

Such an excess contributed to the experimentation that created what was intended to be “a sugar equivalent that’s virtually identical in taste, habit-forming properties, and treatment by the human body,” what is now called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Many now believe that the last intention never came to be and that the politics behind the quick ubiquity of HFCS bordered on the criminal. Lobbying, for instance, resulted in “price supports” for granulated table sugar that caused the price of it to triple, thereby making HFCS the “cheap alternative.”

But dirty political dealings are not the story on this day. And neither is the fact that consuming HFCS could quite possibly be the worst form of sugar for your health.

The story is that per capita consumption of HFCS in the U.S., which was zero in 1970, is now “around forty pounds per year.”

Combine that with the fact that the emergence of HFCS has only caused the consumption of table sugar to drop “slightly,” and you can see how guys getting creative with excess corn also provided the building materials to construct yet another road. Unfortunately, it leads to that place you’d rather not go - and makes you “sick” on the trip there.

“So sick,” by Bittman’s assessment, “that curtailing the consumption of sugar is [now] a public health priority” to such a degree “it’s likely that sugar will be thought of as the tobacco of the twenty-first century.”

Others have expressed similar views in the past.

In a commentary found in the February 2012 issue of Nature, “The toxic truth about sugar,” lead author Dr. Robert Lustig warns “[s]ugar’s not dangerous because of its calories, or because it makes you fat. Sugar is dangerous because it’s sugar.

It’s not nutrition. When consumed in excess, it’s a toxin. And it’s addictive.”

In “Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Foods, Obesity, and Disease (Plume, 2104), Lustig further explains that sugar is now added to “virtually every processed food” and estimates “80 percent of the 6,000,000 consumer packaged foods in the United States have added caloric sweeteners,” which makes any attempt to avoid consuming the stuff without doing virtually all cooking from scratch difficult.

But according to British scientist and nutritionist John Yudkin, what’s difficult in this case absolutely needs to be done. In fact, he feels such scorn for sugar his book about it is titled “Pure, White and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It” (Penguin, 2013).

In it, the second of his two “key statements that no one can refute” asserts that if “only a small fraction” of what is now known about sugar was found to be true about a new potential food additive “it would promptly be banned.”

And while only the most addicted sweet tooth would try to refute that, Yudkin’s first key statement should make any argument about his second irrelevant. “[T]here is no physiological requirement for sugar; all human nutritional needs can be met in full without having to take a single spoon of white or brown or raw sugar, on its own or in any food or drink.”

Despite that, the average American now eat about 265 calories of added sugars a day, a figure that well exceeds the recommendation issued in 2009 by the American Heart Association. The AHA advises men to consume no more than 150 calories of added sugars per day and for women to consume no more than 100.

So on the day before Independence Day, the celebration of our founding fathers constructing a far different road than the one the British tried to lead them down, ask yourself, “Do I need to declare my independence from added sugars?”

Your response is rather important. After all, isn’t what you really seek by watching what you eat, working out four or five times a week, and reading articles like this one a sort of sovereignty over yourself?

And while even Bittman admits a bit of the stuff every now and then is “probably harmless,” many people find any amount addictive - as addictive as cocaine if the research performed with Oreo cookies and mice bears out.