[Cyclone_]

This kind of comment asking for it to be banned is always from an extremely uninformed person. Addictive poison, really? Wait til they see what's in fruit. Or just talk to a sports scientist about why it's in sports drinks. Of course in excess it's bad, but normal sugar consumption is not an issue.

[anoraca]

A 20oz bottle of Coke, which is a very common consumption choice given it's prevalence, has 65g of sugar. That is not normal sugar consumption. Fruit sugars are offset by the fiber content. Sugary beverages have no redeeming nutritional qualities.

WHO recommends no more than 50g per day for adults, and preferably less than 25g. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-gui...

[Fricken]

Just avoid eating sugar when sedentary, the specific amount isn't so important. When you eat, and what other activities you're doing also matter. Chugging Gatorade and playing basketball is no big deal. Sipping Gatorade while surfing the internet is not so great.

[mschuster91]

> This kind of comment asking for it to be banned is always from an extremely uninformed person.

Shifting the responsibility for solving a problem from the government towards individual consumers so that corporations can keep making money is a tried, extremely dirty and old PR strategy, originating at least with BP: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

[ntsplnkv2]

The PR strategy works because people believe in personal agency.

[minimuffins]

There is a book called Sweetness and Power by the anthropologist and historian Sidney Mintz with a thesis that the way we consume sugar is not actually so arbitrary.

According to Mintz, the production of sugar was at the heart of the transition from pre-modernity to industrial modernity. Pre-modern human diets all over the world varied widely but consisted of very little or no sugar. The production process required a ton of technological sophistication and intensive labor. Colonial era economic slavery regimes developed mostly in service of the production of sugar.

Sugar is now a huge part of diets in just about every modern culture. It really is addictive in a sense, both for individuals and in a collective economic sense (like oil, sugar consumption and production processes are dialetically self-reproducing, the argument goes).

Myself, I don't really know if we should try to constrain sugar consumption via law for moral reasons. Those efforts sometimes reek of a moralizing paternalism that I don't much care for. But the way we consume sugar, like everything else, has a history. We didn't always do it this way. We need not do it this way forever. And there's more to it than just disparate isolated individual consumption choices.

EDIT - To summarize, the way we consume sugar today is not arbitrary or "natural," but an outcome of the particular way that industrial modernity has developed.

[hh3k0]

> Addictive poison, really? Wait til they see what's in fruit.

Is that supposed to be a contradiction? It is in fruit and therefore it can't be bad? The poisonous fruit of Atropa belladonna comes to mind.

> Of course in excess it's bad, but normal sugar consumption is not an issue.

The thing is, though, that normal sugar consumption is borderline impossible in a modern diet. You have to go out of your way to avoid sugar, it requires informed decision-making and -- all too often -- purchasing relatively expensive products. Consequently, people who lack education and/or have a low-income are particularly vulnerable.

I agree with the original comment, these products should be outright banned.