How about we just let people choose what to do with their body?
As a kid my parents didn't care too much about what I ate. I regularly had sweets of any kind as a kid. I certainly have no addiction to sugar because of that. I probably drink soda less than once a month and have cake/ice cream/chocolate/candy at about the same frequency. Meanwhile, people I grew up with who were never allowed sugar seem much more addicted to it, eating sweets with every meal or as a snack. Earlier this week I heard someone at work talking about how their child has never eaten any kind of sweets before and personally this just sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I don't think it's so much denying people what to do with their bodies, as much countering all the ways they were being manipulated into overconsumption.
The market and social forces, left unchecked, have resulted in a bleak situation: for instance, I've noticed that the frozen goods aisle in most urban supermarkets has slowly become dominated by ice creams and other deserts, pizzas and french fries, together frequently making up > 3/4 of the area, the rest being frozen vegetables, fish and meat.
I think this trend needs to be countered because I don't believe most people made the conscious choice "I'm mostly eating crap now".
The problem with this approach is, the vast majority of people pick the default option when presented with it (e.g., states that, by default, mark you as an organ donor have proportionally more organ donors).
Public policy has real, measurable implications. We don't need to treat sugar like smoking or alcohol, but when you find a way to move people away from it as their "default" setting, you will find, in aggregate huge savings in health care expenses and better outcomes (a sizable amount of health care spending is due to preventable conditions, like Type II diabetes).
I agree, in principle, people can still consume sugar, if they want. The occasional slice of birthday cake is not the problem with sugar. It's the consumption of a 2-liter of soda, multiple times per week, that's the problem (regular consumption). But we need to make it easier for people to avoid processed, simple carbohydrates.
One possible solution is increasing the ubiquity and ease-of-access to whole foods. Eating healthy needs to have the convenience of going to a fast food restaurant -- they're everywhere, they're cheap, and it's fast. We desperately need this as a society. Consider it more as a preventative, or we can pay for it on the other end (higher health care costs).
I do agree with you that access to cheap/convenient healthy foods is certainly lacking. This is definitely a problem I think we can and should tackle. I think giving people more choices is a great thing and I would happily support this. The "default" also makes a lot of sense here. Really at the end of the day what I'm skeptical of is trying to force people's hands into cutting sugar out of their diet.
There's varying degrees of "force". For example, we could "force" people to get their children vaccination, but that panders to fears of conspiracy theories. Instead, you can take away access to public education (e.g., vaccination mandatory for schooling). Then it comes at a steep price, yet you still maintain the freedom of choice. I don't think of vaccination as an analogous example here, since nobody really sees sugar as dangerous. In small quantities, it isn't. The danger is the context of the overall diet. Decades of lots of sugar consumption undoubtedly leads to negative health outcomes.
Yes. The fiction that sugar is somehow equivalent to hard drugs has continuously been pedaled without any basis in reality. Opioids have measurable and easily observable psychoactive effects and cause physical dependence. They limit one's ability to function as a normal human if consumed on a regular basis and an overdose of opioids can result in instant death. Even if you claim that eating sugar is "as addictive as cocaine" as the catch phrase goes, sugar lacks the power to cause you to nod off for hours, wake up with withdrawal symptoms like diarrhea/vomiting/flu-like symptoms, and kill you on the spot from an accidental overdose. Sugar also isn't regularly consumed in ways that destroy your arteries or nasal cavity. And when is the last time you've seen somebody crash a car because they were inebriated from eating too much sugar? The comparison between the two is complete non-sense and I believe that you can see just as clear as me why that is the case.
There is at least some evidence that the root cause of sugar addiction is limiting sugar consumption [1], and this definitely reflects my childhood experience. Blindly taking a position of taking sugar away from children could actually cause an increase in sugar addiction in the long-term.
As a kid my parents didn't care too much about what I ate. I regularly had sweets of any kind as a kid. I certainly have no addiction to sugar because of that. I probably drink soda less than once a month and have cake/ice cream/chocolate/candy at about the same frequency. Meanwhile, people I grew up with who were never allowed sugar seem much more addicted to it, eating sweets with every meal or as a snack. Earlier this week I heard someone at work talking about how their child has never eaten any kind of sweets before and personally this just sounds like a recipe for disaster.