[SomewhatLikely]

The BBC article gives a lot of reasons why sugar might be bad for you and then hedges to say we don't know if this just happened to correlate with increased calories. Dr. Robert Lustig used an analysis of countries' sugar consumption and diabetes rates over time to make these claims: If you consumed a 150 calories extra per day, in total calories, diabetes prevalence only went up by 0.1%, nothing. But if those 150 calories happen to be a can of soda, diabetes prevalence went up 11 fold, 1.1%, and we are not consuming one can of soda per day, we are consuming two and a half; so that’s 2.4%. Given that American diabetes rates are 8.3%, that means that 26% of all diabetes in America today is due to sugar and sugar alone, not due to obesity, not due to total calories, sugar and sugar alone. https://robertlustig.com/fructose2/

The article later makes claims about positive benefits of 'sugar' for elderly and athletes, but these cases are actually about glucose, not fructose which the article itself states is the culprit.

Now that I read it reference 2 is directly addressing Lustig's claims, so I thank you for providing it. I'll have to read through several of that papers references to see it the claims it makes are true. Even that paper does point out that multiple studies have shown that sugary beverages may be linked to obesity.

Edit: I read the relevant section of reference Hauner et al., 2012 (section 3.2.1 and 3.2.2) regarding effects of fructose and sucrose consumption on diabetes and there are several studies there which do indeed seem to have mixed results over large cohorts (tens of thousands of people). Thanks again for the reference, I'll probably dig into the individual studies, but it's not clear to me how meaningful results are where you just ask people what they were eating and then check two years later who got diabetes.