Sci-fi was right: sugar is a drug

It’s the new cigarettes, and last week’s adoption of the tax on sugar has come at the right time

It was the fictional Judge Dredd in the 2000 AD comic book who first warned me that sugar was a drug. As a child I read about this futuristic law maker in stories set in a far-off future world where sugar was the addictive substance.

Science fiction sometimes has an unerring way of predicting the future. The great writer Isaac Asimov envisioned Google (he called it Multivac) and set down safety laws for robotics and artificial intelligence. William Gibson coined the term cyberspace. Author Neal Stephenson’s vision of the Metaverse has evolved into virtual reality. And the British comic for kids revealed what society denied back then but is increasingly admitted now: sugar is one of the most dangerous drugs in our society.

Last week the National Council of Provinces’ select committee on finance adopted the sugar tax bill, which is a good thing for our society.

Alcohol produces more violence and road deaths. But it is sugar — to which we are individually addicted, and which the food and beverage industry simply can’t live without — that does the most damage to our long-term health, imperils our youth, causes tens of thousand of amputations because of diabetes, and drains the health-care budget.

Sugar is the new cigarettes.

Just like smoking, sugar is a selfadministered drug that we have the choice not to consume. But it’s far more insidious than cigarettes. The food and beverage industry hides sugar in everything. Read the now legally mandated nutritional label on any product and you’ll be shocked at the sugar content. A 200 ml can of tonic has 18 g of carbs (via sugar) in it. A slice of white bread contains 15 g of carbs. A can of cold drink, as we call it in SA, has 350 times our recommended daily sugar intake. That’s just one can. Coke says 100 ml has 10.6 g of sugar. A can is three times that, or

35 g, which Coke helpfully says is (only) seven teaspoons of sugar.

Earlier this year I gave up sugar and carbs. I’m sure it must be easier to come off heroin than to drop sugar. The key difference is that heroin is a known drug, and people who make bread, sauces, cans of food or anything else you’ll buy in a supermarket don’t hide heroin in their food to make it tastier. They want you to like their food, to buy it again, so they add sugar.

The effects of sugar are now becoming mainstream knowledge.

And they are horrific. The long-term damage of sugar addiction is obesity, diabetes and poor health. What is most worrying is why we aren’t all screaming with rage, protesting in the streets, marching on parliament, calling for police to chase the drug dealers away from the street corners. It’s because we’re all addicted. And the drug dealers are legitimate operations selling food. The corner dealers are registered businesses and garage stores.

In Judge Dredd’s future world, sugar junkies were at least acknowledged for their dangerous addiction.

We’re moving in the right direction with the sugar tax.

It’s more insidious than smoking — the food and beverage industry hides sugar in everything