It's Time to Regulate Sugar

Fructose must be limited with taxes, age limits: UC profs
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 4, 2012 2:45 PM CST
It's Time to Regulate Sugar
A yummy sweet, or poisonous white powder?   (Shutterstock)

Tobacco, alcohol, and ... sugar? Yes, according to professors at UC San Francisco, sugar should be regulated like tobacco and alcohol in order to cut down on ailments like heart disease, high blood pressure, and fatty liver disease, the Los Angeles Times reports. “For both alcohol and tobacco, there is robust evidence that gentle ‘supply side’ control strategies" such as "taxation, distribution controls, [and] age limits" are beneficial to society, they write in the journal Nature.

Sugar also "meets the same criteria" as alcohol for government regulation, they say: It's unavoidable, it's toxic, it can be abused, and it's bad for you. Canada and a few European countries are already taxing certain artificially sweetened foods, and Denmark is considering a sugar tax. So the USDA should at least stop listing fructose on its "Generally Recognized as Safe" list, they argue: “The food industry knows that it has a problem. With enough clamour for change, tectonic shifts in policy become powerful.” (More sugar stories.)

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