Sugar is as damaging and addictive as alcohol or tobacco and should be regulated, claim US health experts.
In a comment in the journal Nature, Prof Lustig, a leading child obesity expert, says governments need to consider major shifts in policy, such as taxes, limiting sales of sweet food and drinks during school hours, or even stopping children from buying them below a certain age.
The professor of paediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, told the BBC: "It [sugar] meets all the criteria for societal intervention that alcohol and tobacco meet."
"Take, for instance bans on smoking in public places and the use of designated drivers, not to mention airbags in cars and condom dispensers in public bathrooms.
"These simple measures - which have all been on the battleground of American politics - are now taken for granted as essential tools for our public health and well-being. It's time to turn our attention to sugar."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16822533
2 comments:
Good article here, thanks for posting it.
When I was young we certainly never had sugary, fizzy drinks. Sweets were a once a week treat, if we were lucky, a rare treat may have been a biscuit with a glass of milk for an afternoon 'in-betweeney' as my dear mum used to say. Now adverts and displays are put right in front of you and in particular young children. My goodness they even advertise cereals as a coming in from school snack, whatever happened to a nice crisp apple, carrot or celery sticks perhaps with some cheese ?
Sugar is not doing anyone any good, except of course the companies who keep getting us to buy it.
Joe
Lustig's paper is an informercial. It is full of exaggeration and weak on data. He is not an expert on biochemistry, he is certainly not an expert on policy and if he is a good pediatrician why is throwing up his hands on obesity and trying to punish rather than educate?
We tax sugar. Price of soft-drinks goes up.
You are a bottler of water for which there is now increased demand. Will you keep the price of your product the same or will you increase price. We could be back where we started except for a new revenue stream to the government.
The government will say the money is being used for research. Guess who is going to get the grant?
And if we get unintended consequences (think margarine, trans-fats), what will we do? Stop the revenue stream? Yeah, right.
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