Out today is a paper calling for taxes and regulation on the fructose added to sweeten foods making the stand that sugar is now responsible for deteriorating health conditions around the world. The paper is US-centric, but other countries, like Denmark, already impose a tax to limit the intake of processed sweets.
For starters, he and coauthors Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF aren’t claiming that sugar should be illegal or removed from the diet completely. They are focused on added sugars, which they define as “any sweetener containing the molecule fructose that is added to food in processing.” Source
Honey – half fructose, half glucose – is called Nature’s Perfect Food. Does this mean that adding Honey during processing would fail the safety test laid out in 2003’s Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity and deserve scrutiny? The test goes like this:
- It’s unavoidable in society.
- It’s toxic.
- It can be abused.
- It’s bad for society.
This is the litmus for regulating alcohol. The doctor also recommends improved city zoning to restrict the number of fast-food stores, especially near schools.
