Sugar trade association official: Regulating sugar like alcohol is ‘foolishness’

Recent clamoring from some West Coast researchers to begin
treating sugar like alcohol and tobacco by instituting a
consumption tax on the commodity is nothing but “foolishness,” said
a sugar cane industry representative.

Calls for the regulation of sugar are nothing new in recent years,
with the most recent attempt coming in the form of a
2-cents-per-ounce soda tax in Philadelphia, according to an article
in Time Magazine.

A group of University of California-San Francisco researchers on
Feb. 1 published an article in Nature called “The Toxic Truth About
Sugar,” which lambasted the nation’s love of the commodity for
being a silent and slow “killer.”

That article led to one of its contributors, Laura Schmidt, being
interviewed on CNN, where she compared the dangers associated with
consuming sugar to those surrounding the use of alcohol.

“When you think about it, this actually makes a lot of sense,”
Schmidt said. “Alcohol, after all, is simply the distillation of
sugar. Where does vodka come from? Sugar.”

American Sugar Cane League President Jim Simon of New Iberia
described the statements from Schmidt and her colleagues as
“foolishness.”

“These are just off-the-wall proposals that don’t have any
footing,” Simon said. “It certainly creates big news stories when
people say sugar’s addictive. But it’s all just talk.”

The article, written by Schmidt, Robert Lustig and Claire Brindis,
all members of the Community Engagement and Health Policy program
at their university, said no good calories exist in sugar, which
they described repeatedly as “toxic.”

In a press release, Kelly Brownell, Yale University’s Rudd Center
for Food Policy and Obesity director, also described sugar as
“toxic,” saying “(T)his and other research suggests there is
something different about sugar … (and) it helps confirm what
people tell you anecdotally, that they crave sugar and have
withdrawal symptoms when they stop eating it.”

In a statement responding to the recent calls for sugar’s
regulation, the Sugar Association said one food is not to blame for
the nation’s obesity epidemic.

“There is an obesity problem … but it originates from the
combination of overconsumption of all foods and lack of exercise,”
the Sugar Association stated on its website at sugar.org. “To label
a single food as the one and only problem misinforms, misleads and
confuses consumers, and simply adds to the problem.”

For Loreauville sugar cane farmer Ricky Judice, including sugar on
the list of controlled substances is like opening Pandora’s Box,
meaning a lot of other substances would also have to be added to
that list.

“It’s a natural product, and if used in moderation it’s good,”
Judice said. “If you put sugar as a controlled substance, then
there’s a whole lot of other things you would also have to put on
that list. This all sounds like a left-wing idea. It’s not going to
happen.”