Sunday, December 11, 2016

How sugar helped hook America on cigarettes...

The damage and death that cigarettes cause are well known. “We produce a product that causes disease,” Andre Calantzopoulos, the chief executive of Philip Morris International Inc., told the BBC last month in announcing an alternative cigarette the company says should be less harmful.

As the popularity of smoking has plummeted in the U.S., health advocates have turned to another adversary, which they say has taken tobacco's place: the food industry. Comparisons between the two show up with regularity, especially when it comes to marketing to children. The same arguments public health experts aimed at Joe Camel are now being wielded against food companies that use cartoons, video games, and other targeted marketing to reach the same demographic of loyal customers-to-be.

But the connection between junk food and cigarettes runs a lot deeper, as Gary Taubes details in a revelatory chapter of his book The Case Against Sugar, set to be released on Dec. 27.

Taubes—the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, and the recipient of three Science in Society Journalism awards from the National Association of Science Writers and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research—argues that sugar is the main driver of the chronic diseases plaguing Western civilization in the 21st century, including (but not limited to) diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Full story...

Related posts:
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  2. ‘Take out the sugar and everything changes’
  3. Doctors demand a 20% tax on sugary drinks to fight UK obesity epidemic...
  4. Suicide by soda: Sugary drinks kill 184,000 people a year, study says...
  5. The cinema popcorn with five days' worth of sugar...
  6. Starbucks' new Frappuccino contains 400% recommended daily limit of sugar...
  7. Parents are 'poisoning' their children with sugary food and drink...
  8. Is there a multibillion dollar conspiracy to make sure Americans stay overweight?

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