![]() This means the Army did all the transportation and helped build bottling plants.” By the end of the war, a global infrastructure was in place to deliver Coke all over the world, “and they had a whole generation of GIs and their families totally devoted to Coke,” she added. Coke made a deal with the Army to provide a Coke to any soldier anywhere in the world at a nickel apiece, and they got the Army to support that. As Marion Nestle, author of the book Soda Politics, told Vox: “. The food industry’s savvy marketing and distribution efforts, meanwhile, made their sugary products omnipresent. Javier Zarracina/VoxĪs journalist Michael Moss elucidates in his book Salt, Sugar, Fat, the addition of sugar to our food (along with, ahem, salt and fat) was a key strategy of food companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé to engineer their products for maximum “bliss” and get us hooked. Breakfast slowly became more like dessert, as food companies added more and more sugar to cereals, yogurts, and other morning favorites to heighten their appeal. The snack food industry exploded in popularity, becoming a leading sugar delivery mechanism. The low-fat movement of the 1980s meant that more sugar was added to many packaged foods (to boost the flavor when fat content was lowered). “In the 13th century, a pound of sugar would have cost the equivalent of about 360 eggs,” Taubes told Vox. Government subsidies for crops like corn also helped make sugar more ubiquitous than, say, fruits and vegetables. A boom in the production of sugar beets and corn to make high-fructose corn syrup, both cheaper alternatives to cane sugar, lowered the cost and increased the availability of the sweet stuff. In The Case Against Sugar, Taubes takes the long view, explaining how sugar consumption crept up in the 19th and 20th centuries with the rise of the chocolate, soda, candy, and ice cream industries. The sweetening of the American diet didn’t happen overnight, though. Some three-quarters of packaged foods and drinks in the US now carry caloric or low-calorie sweeteners (or a mixture of both), a study in The Lancet found. It’s loaded into our granola and our juice, our BBQ sauce and salad dressing. 1) We’re so hooked on sweetness, it’s now in three-quarters of our packaged food Here are 11 facts to clear up the confusion. The backlash against sugar, and the science behind it, is a lot more complicated than it seems. ![]() Other health experts will tell you that focusing on a single nutrient like sugar is outdated, that the causes of obesity are complex and multifactorial, and that overemphasizing sugar’s harms could even be dangerous for public health. Other anti-sugarists go further, suggesting we should call it an addictive drug and regulate it as such.īut that’s just one side of the debate. In his compelling book, The Case Against Sugar, journalist Gary Taubes argues that we should view the sweet stuff as toxic - in the same league as cigarettes or alcohol. Food companies are trying to cut back on it in a few of their products. New York Times columnists and svelte celebrities are eliminating it from their diets to retrain their palates or detox for the new year. We’ve started to tax it in our beverages and remove it from our schools. ![]() Sugar is being blamed for the obesity and diabetes epidemics. In health policy and nutrition science circles, this single nutrient is taking up a lot of oxygen these days. Now there’s a full-on war on sugar, our latest dietary enemy No.
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