Sugar costs way more in health consequences. It's easier to recover from abuse from most drugs than sugar, which is a slow poison, yet available everywhere and given to us since early childhood (actually, in the womb).
People addicted and regularly consuming alcohol, meth (smoked, snorted, or injected), street heroin, and cocaine all suffer from significantly worse side effects than people addicted to sugar.
I’ll grant you that sugar has a higher total social cost, because more people are addicted to it.
Sugar is a dangerous drug masquerading as a macronutrient. It is probably as dangerous as cigarettes and alcohol, and more deleterious to you health (although not as acutely dangerous) than hard drugs like opiates and amphetamines.
Some people much smarter than myself, like Dr. Robert Lustig at UCSF, believe that sugar is the main cause for "diseases of affluence" like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. I've been on the Paleo diet, which eschews refined sugar, for over four years. I've lost a lot of weight and feel better than I have felt in many years. I know this is just an n=1 study and doesn't vilify sugar in isolation, but I believe it played a huge role in making me healthier. Sugar is just as bad as those other drugs and maybe more so. Eating it is like shooting yourself, but with a very slow moving bullet. It'll catch up to you at some point.
Sugar triggers the same parts of your brain as cocaine, while also causing severe health problems when overconsumed.
Please don’t say “you made the choice” when talking about substance abuse, regardless of the substance. While I’d advocate outlawing tobacco, I think products based on sugar should carry a hefty tax to fund healthcare costs and dissuade their consumption.
Refined sugar is an absolutely lethal addictive drug with no plausible nutritional justification.
The health costs - from dental problems to heart disease to diabetes to other fatal illnesses - are beyond tragic.
My dentist told me she regularly has to extract some or all of the milk teeth from kids because they've been rotted by sugary soft drinks. She doesn't like doing it and the parents don't like watching it done. But cause and effect is a thing and she's at the wrong end of it.
Ending massive sugar addiction is going to be the next big social project for medicine.
Sugar is! AND it causes great long-term harm, hard to quantify how much since there is basically no control group, since it's given to children early on, it's put in near everything, and it's cheap as dirt.
Since we’re here I would like to see a study linking sugar to the increase of health problems (including mental health). Other drugs are small change compared to sugar.
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