Should we regulate sugar like alcohol?

- Edit
- Delete
- Tags
- Autopost
Should we regulate sugar like alcohol?

I enjoy this idea, though I'm not sure I agree with it: if sugar has demonstrable harms, albeit with long latency, should we regulate it more tightly, like we do alcohol or cigarettes?
http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/should-we-regulate-sugar/
Nature piece:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7383/full/482027a.html
Open access by same guy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
- 2 February 2012
- Views
- Permalink
- Tweet
4 months ago TransformDrugs (Twitter) responded:

regulating riskiy products and behaviours is a legitimate role for government if the evidence shows that the interventions are effective, balanced against any costs. Not sure if this is the casse with sugar or other potentally risky foods but its certainly worth looking at. Fairly inoffensive interventions - like marginal taxes on less helathy products over more healthy ones, or restrictions on advertising of certain products to certain vulnerable groups can have signifincat effects.They can be cheap - or re tax - even generate revenue. Alcohol and tobacco are instructuve examples - with other drugs being a huge potential opportunity yet to be explored.

4 months ago Laptop Best Price liked this post.

4 months ago thewritertype responded:

I'm against regulation and criminalization in principle but I haven't seen enough of the research about sugar and health to draw a firm conclusion. But I'll tell you this. I have overcome substance abuse, including moderate to heavy use of cocaine, crack cocaine and heroin. I've given up smoking and I've been able to stop drinking for long periods whenever I've wanted to. But I've never been able to give up sugar. If I try, I experience cravings as strong as, or stronger than, any I've felt for drugs, tobacco and alcohol. Make of that what you will.

4 months ago trappedinthedrivethru responded:

Hi Ben - great book & blogs & I am finally moved to post for the first time.
thewritertype's description above is chillingly familiar. I too, have watched people - when they can seemingly beat anything else - struggle for decades with addiction to sugar. In taxing it, you start that very slow process of changing people's perceptions of what's good & bad. You show them what consequences their action will likely have, but without actually saying that they CAN'T have fags, booze, sugar, their big car, etc. I'm all for it.
But for me, sugar is just the thin end of the chocolate cheesecake wedge. Another parallel to tobacco is that the huge profit made by the multi-billion food industry incentivises them to obfuscate any health issues. Where are their profits largely made? In selling us, for as high a price as they can get away with, cheap rubbish (sugar & other refined carbs, starch, salt, fat) instead of (or added to) real food. This is not new - it's just the latest trick in a long line of them since before the dark ages, when chalk was added to food. Another parallel - just like the tobacco lobby years ago, the food industry's influence on society is just way too powerful right now.
To see how far-reaching their influence is, just look at the NHS nutrition advice. Surely most scientists can agree that our evolved diet is meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, and seasonal fruit and veg. At the very least, that diet cannot possibly kill us according to evolution - yet NHS advice gives a huge prominence to cereal, bread, potatoes, pasta & rice - things our ancestors didn't even have until exceptionally recently.
Our evolved diet should surely be the starting point for all nutrition questions. Does eating fat make you fat? Is it bad for your heart? Are people obese due to lack of exercise? Does 5-a-day work? Are vitamin tablets essential? Is a low fat diet healthy? Is a low-carb diet unhealthy? Are refined carbs good nutrition? Is sugar harmless?
I feel the answer to every one of those questions must surely be a default 'NO' - due to evolution if nothing else. Therefore the onus must be on industry/government to prove using systematic reviews/RCTs etc. that their 'YES to all' advice is based on solid science and not some 'common sense'.
I think the call for a tax on sugar will be largely ignored, but not entirely. My main reason to remain hopeful is because, after decades, the tobacco companies were forced to admit they were selling people products that were addictive and that killed them, and hopefully the time will come when the food industry will be forced to admit the same.
Sorry for the rant - I just feel this is the most important health issue facing us in the developed world. Besides, these obese people have names, and people who care about them.

4 months ago crunchycat responded:

This is idiotic. Is there anything that people consume that is not harmful in large quantity? And I have real reservations about applying the descriptive "addiction". If abstaining doesn't cause physical withdrawal symptoms, calling it addictive is not just misleading but inaccurate.

4 months ago Sally Findlay responded:

It's all quite interesting, but needs to be taken with a pinch-of-salt.
The Nature article is by Robert Lustig who is a MD and a Professor of Paedeatrics in Endocronology at the University of California, San Francisco.
The open access article in the New York Times is by a different guy. Gary Taubes is a science writer with a history in applied physics who is currently punting his book called Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. In this book he asserts that consumption of carbohydrates leads the body to store excess energy in fat cells and he himself lives on a very high-fat and high-protein diet and he consumes very few carbohydrates and practically no fruit or vegetables. More Atkins really. As a public health message - that's pretty dangerous, no?

4 months ago muscleguy responded:

@SallyFindlay An Atkins type diet is indeed pretty dangerous. Taubes is right in that eating a diet rich in high GI carbs will make you fat, especially if you don't exercise. When you eat say a packet of crisps or some white bread or mashed spud your blood glucose will spike and if you don't exercise your muscles won't have space for any of it and your liver will have a limited ability to deal with the peak and convert it to glycogen. So the excess can only go to fat. So if I eat 1,000 calories in vegetables or wholegrains and you eat yours in any of the above, all other things being equal, you will lay down more fat than me. Because the graph of my blood sugar over time will be long and low.
If you do endurance exercise then your muscles will be hungrier so your capacity to cope with high blood sugar will be enhanced, but fuelling yourself for exercise is still about low GI. This also explains in part how the first stage of Type 2 diabetes works. When your muscles are full of both glycogen and fat (they store fat too) they will actively exclude more glucose leading to insulin resistance.
Dr Atkins got the culprit right, but he threw the baby out with the bathwater in his prescription. The answer was not to exclude carbs, it was to eat the right sort of carbs in the right sort of proportion.
Note that none of my high GI examples were actually, formally 'sugar' (though the white bread will be full of it), they are still high GI though. Eat whole grain bread, wholemeal is not really sufficient and 'fibrewhite' only better than the other sort of white. Buy a good book on the GI diet, there are lots of GI tables online. Note that acids, protein and fibre eaten at the same time can lower high GI carbs. So putting cottage cheese or tuna on your baked potato lowers it (always eat the skin too).
Eat 2-3 times more vegetables in a meal than carbs like spud, pasta, rice which means in effect eating a lot less in the form of those carbs. Also beware of fruit juices, juicing a fruit raises the GI (it breaks the cell walls so you don't have to). And exercise. To the point of breathlessness and sweating for at least 3 hours a week, walking other than racewalking is insufficient, though better than nothing.
Keep your muscles hungry to act as sinks for what you eat, keep emptying the sink to make room for more.

about 1 month ago raisinbred (Twitter) responded:

Fructose is a problem because it is not metabolized like glucose. It does not satisfy hunger and, while small amounts can be processed safely in the liver, large amounts (from the increasingly huge amounts of soda that are served, for example)cannot.

about 1 month ago raisinbred (Twitter) responded:

I noticed on medscape.com studies comparing sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. What is the point of that when they are so chemically similar? Muddying the water..

about 1 month ago raisinbred (Twitter) responded:

We should not regulate tightly but we shouldn't be subsidizing it either as US does for the corn growers for the production of HFCS. Educate parents should be the number one priority!

about 1 month ago muscleguy responded:

@Raisinbred
I suggest you do some basic chemical and biochemical reading. Sugar and HFCS are not the same chemically. For one thing sugar (sucrose) has more fructose than HFCS. 50% of sucrose is fructose. High Fructose Corn Syrup is only high in fructose relative to raw corn syrup which is largely just glucose. Increasing the fructose level makes it taste sweeter. HFCS has much less than 50% fructose in it.
The problems in the US are not due to fructose, they are because you guys eat so fucking sugar period. It is that simple.
Ben Goldacre's Space

I like stats. I'm a doctor. I write about dodgy scientific claims in my spare time.
This isn't my main blog. Find me here:
Blog:
www.badscience.net/
Book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bad-Science-Ben-Goldacre/dp/000728487X/?tag=bs0b-21
Tweet:
www.twitter.com/bengoldacre
TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html

bengoldacre - secondary blog

Should we regulate sugar like alcohol?

Ben Goldacre's Space

About Ben Goldacre

Archive

Follow Me