What started out as a food predilection somehow became an insidious addiction. An addiction that took me years to recognize, months to kick, and is now, I believe, under control.

Even so, it’s a monkey-off-your-back story I never expected to write.

Not because this column’s called “Fitness Master” and the addiction adversely affected my health. But because I knew there was no chance you’d ever feel the weight of this primate.

So why come clean now? Because of a cranium-crippling condition called “monkey mind.” That’s the Buddhist term for when — like a simian swinging from tree to tree — your mind jumps from thought to thought in an unsettling, seemingly uncontrollable way.

At its best, monkey mind makes it hard to focus. At its worst, it leaves you anxious and depressed.

Now you may or may not be suffering from this condition currently, but something else is just about a certainty. That you’re in possession of a smartphone.

That device has the potential to cause endless hours of monkey mind. Its part and parcel of smartphone addiction, something that can happen to you as insidiously as I got hooked on the sugar alcohol erythritol.

After the FDA approved its use in 2001, I read all I could about it and loved what I read.

Like it’s a plant-based sugar alcohol that can be labeled as fat free (there’s actually 0.2 calories in a gram) and is found naturally in many vegetables and fruits, including watermelon, pears, and grapes. That the World Health Organization had approved its use in 1999 and that Japan had done so in 1990.

That human body has the capacity to make its own erythritol and tends to do so when blood sugar levels are high.

Afterwards, I don’t recall intentionally purchasing products that contained erythritol, only that when my mentor from afar, exercise and nutrition expert John Parrillo, began adding it to all three of his food products that, as I wrote back then, “I absolutely live on,” a high-protein pudding mix, a high-protein pancake mix, and a carbohydrate-protein combination powder, I got an idea. To buy erythritol in bulk and use it in place of some of the other non-nutritive sweeteners I had been using.

It had such a good “mouth feel” — what a 2025 paper calls the “complex and multidimensional sensory experience that plays an important role in how people perceive flavor and accept food and beverages” — that I added it to just about every sweet food I made. Like my back-then breakfast featuring 16 ounces of plain, fat-free Greek yogurt, and my own version of protein pudding, not Parrillo’s, that I often snacked on twice a day.

You can see how my erythritol consumption began to add up, especially since I usually ate a teaspoon or two out of the bag each time I prepared either.

Soon this surfeit produced all sorts of gastrointestinal discomfort, but I only recognized this well after the fact. The reason I didn’t do so earlier, however, is understandable.

For I occasionally had experienced something similar long before ever eating a grain of erythritol. Its cause came from an addiction I’ll never — or ever want to — kick.

Exercising intensely.

In other words, a give-it-all-you-got workout in the A.M. often meant an upset stomach afterward and extra bathroom time in the P.M.

It was only after I decided to cut out erythritol for an entirely different reason that I made the connection between my use of it and the bloat, gas, and frequent bowel movements I had been experiencing. The reason: additional studies besides the one that caused quite a stir in 2023 had linked erythritol, in some way, shape, or form, to a higher risk of heart problems.

More research made me see that as a knee-jerk decision, and I reintroduced erythritol to my diet slowly. I discovered that as long as my daily use doesn’t go too far past the amount that the European Food Safety Authority deems safe, 0.5 grams per kilogram of body weight, I’m fine.

This idea of not going too far past a safe amount leads us back to smartphones and you — via Nicholas Kardaras and Peter Whybrow.

Kadaras is the doctor who wrote in a 2016 article for the New York Post that it’s been easier to treat heroin and crystal meth addicts than “Facebook-dependent social media addicts.” Peter Whybrow is the doctor credited with first calling smartphones “electronic cocaine.”

I mention these two and their views for I have no doubt that most smartphone users will accuse both of crying wolf. But I also have no doubt that smartphone addiction begins as insidiously as my addiction to erythritol did.

Nor any doubt that you’d do yourself good by giving at least a bit of thought as to whether or not your current smartphone use is helping or hurting your mental health.