[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.