I’m going to concede in advance a key point that those who defend the role of sugar in our diet will invariably make. The sugar industry and purveyors of sugar-rich products are right when they say that it cannot be established definitively, with the science as it now stands, that sugar is uniquely harmful—a toxin that does its damage over decades. The evidence is not as clear with sugar as it is with tobacco. This isn’t a failure of science but, rather, an issue of its limits.
As is later pointed out, this is a function of how pervasive sugar is in our society and how unfeasible it would be to run a sufficiently large, controlled study to come up with definitive evidence.
