Nanny Staters everywhere swoon uncontrollably.
Via Vox:
Robert Lustig is a medical expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who has written extensively about the major health problems attributed to sugar. He’s written two major papers — “Fructose: it’s ‘alcohol without the buzz'” and “The toxic truth about sugar” — laying out the case for treating sugar like a controlled substance, similar to alcohol and tobacco. I spoke with Lustig on the phone on June 2014 about the issue. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. […]
German Lopez: One potential hurdle is that controlled substances are typically seen as drugs. Do you consider sugar a drug?
Robert Lustig: Of course it’s a drug. It’s very simple: a drug is a substance that has effects on the body, and the effects have to be exclusive of calories.
So in order to qualify it as a drug, the negative effects of sugar have to be exclusive of its calories. Is 100 calories of sugar different from, say, 100 calories in broccoli? The answer is absolutely.