The Making of Myths About Sugar
We’re in a full-blown moral panic about sugar. Are we ready to ask if it’s actually bad for us?
A content warning: this piece touches on diet culture, wellness myths, and calorie counting / macronutrient tracking, and may be a tough read if you’re on an eating disorder recovery journey.
When I was in college, I studied literature under a professor who warned us about the seductive quality of the personal narrative. I remember her clear, tense gaze as she explained to a room full of young people that it might feel good to talk about our experiences, but this wasn’t analysis. We could not substitute telling personal stories for debate: we had to think about the work more deeply.
Her words have stuck with me. I think of them when I read personal narratives about wellness trends. Carnivore dieters, raw milk advocates, or people who argue that seed oils are toxic will often insist that they know these menus work because they, personally, feel better. How can you argue with someone’s feelings? A good storyteller can convince a Tiktok audience of thousands to forgo fruit and vegetables in favor of beef, organ meats, and butter. Another might persuade you that removing all added sugars from her child’s diet permanently fixed his hyperactivity. Would it make a difference if I were to tell you that the link between sweets and behavior is one sugar’s most enduring myths? It has been decisively shown that sugar does not cause hyperactivity in kids, but many parents will insist otherwise, based on their personal experience. Stories about the dangers of sugar are easy for us to believe - so easy that we rarely, if ever, interrogate if they are true.
On Tuesday, April 22nd, the United States’ Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared “Sugar is poison, and Americans need to know that it's poison”1. We are cautioned that sugar is everywhere - a malevolent force hiding in plain sight in supposedly healthy foods. A 2024 article in the Atlantic was entirely devoted to what the author, Yasmin Tayag, perceived as the fraudulent health benefits of most yogurt:
“Sugary flavorings and additives are how you get something that’s in the ballpark of ice cream, such as squeezable pouches of cotton-candy-flavored yogurt (which several brands offer)... Even yogurt options that don’t look dessertlike can still be laced with sugar. A cup of blueberry Chobani might seem to be a solid breakfast option, but it packs 14 grams of sugar.”
The word “laced” is notable, like how a punch might be laced with alcohol, or a party drug laced with a more dangerous substance. It implies peril. How else could you justify publishing 900 words about dessert-flavored yogurt in a national politics and culture magazine? Similarly, in January, The New York Times Magazine devoted its cover to a tongue-in-cheek personal essay from a woman traveling to an Austrian spa to cure her “addiction” to sugar - despite the fact that the author, Caity Weaver, was perfectly healthy. The health professionals at the facility couldn’t quite believe that her test results were so benign. Surely, considering her self-reported diet, she must be sick!
Weaver describes herself as “a hard-core sweets junkie”. Her essay repeats another pervasive belief about sugar - that like drugs, it is addictive. Cramming desserts at an airport lounge before the privation of her spa stay, Weaver writes:
“I also recognized this as frenzied and unscrupulous behavior, rather like throwing on my hazard lights to shoot up heroin while double parked outside the rehab facility”.
Despite a widely publicized study comparing the consumption of sugar with cocaine in rats, there’s no clear consensus that sugar is addictive. Unlike other addictive substances, like nicotine or opiates, the body needs sugar - in the form of glucose - to survive. And while eating sweetened foods may trigger compulsive behaviors that resemble some forms of addiction, sugar does not share the chemical mechanisms of a genuinely addictive substance. A 2016 review states:
“We find little evidence to support sugar addiction in humans, and findings from the animal literature suggest that addiction-like behaviours, such as bingeing, occur only in the context of intermittent access to sugar. These behaviours likely arise from intermittent access to sweet tasting or highly palatable foods, not the neurochemical effects of sugar.”
A rat might press a lever to taste sugar instead of cocaine, not because the sugar is more addictive than cocaine, but because sugar in its pure form is a rare delicacy for a rodent. Unsurprisingly, lacking our own, more complicated human motivations, a rat might always prefer food to drugs.
Frankly, this reminds me of my own childhood relationship to sugar. My mom, well-intentioned and in many ways ahead of her time, served my lactose-intolerant brother goat milk and garnished our oatmeal with spoonfuls of wheat germ and sunflower seeds. She also carefully moderated our access to sweets2. In turn, I became obsessed. After Halloween, knowing that most of my candy would be confiscated, I took to ripping holes in the seams of my stuffed animals and cramming them full of Tootsie Rolls and Sweet Tarts. My rat-like stashes of candy littered my room - I’d rediscover them well into my teens. I started baking from scratch at a young age, desperate to transform the raw ingredients in my house into cookies and cakes. In many ways this obsession has informed my whole life.
In my early twenties, broke and unemployed, I drifted into a job as a line cook. Women in kitchens, particularly those with a sweet tooth, are often shuttled to the dessert station. This has offered me a front-row seat to diner’s attitudes towards sugar. As a pastry chef, I’ve had my job compared to that of a drug dealer. I’ve been asked to work with alternative sugars, or as little sugar as possible. Patrons have interrogated me about the total gram amounts of sugar in a portion of a plated dessert. And at bake sales, I’ve been subject to the disapproving gaze of women who insist on telling me, unprompted, that they do not eat sugar and will not eat my cakes3.
In the past fifteen years, the panic around sugar has reached an even more manic pitch. Though discourse around the dangers of sugar has been around for some time, it reached new audiences with the increased popularity of detox diets. In Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness, Karen Throsby writes that the idea of sugar as actually toxic became more widely accepted in the early 2010’s. In fact, it was in 2010 that the European Food Safety Authority defined “added” or “free” sugars as those added to a product during manufacturing or processing (as opposed to the “natural” sugars inherent in a food). This marked a new era in the effort to understand the potential harms of sugar beyond the framework of “empty calories”. Sugar is not just a non-nutrient-dense or high-calorie food. It is transformed into a malign substance that slowly kills us through diabetes, heart disease, cancer, or the shadowy ailment of inflammation.
We see the sugar-as-toxic narrative take hold in the rise of otherwise healthy people using glucose monitors to track their blood sugar, the popularity of “healthier” sugar alternatives such as coconut sugar, dates, monkfruit, or agave, and the MAHA-adjacent movement to lower the Food and Drug Administration’s guidance on the recommended amount of added sugar in the American diet. Currently, the FDA and the World Health Organization advise that added sugars make up no more than 10% of calories. This comes to about 50 grams of sugar for a 2000 calorie a day diet, or four tablespoons. The other day I exceeded my recommended limit by putting a drizzle of honey in a smoothie, eating one Trader Joe’s Meyer Lemon and Cream yogurt as a snack, and finishing my day with a single Cadbury Creme Egg (eaten exquisitely slowly, while watching Bachelor in Paradise, as God intended). Some might see this as evidence for how much added sugar is unnecessarily crammed into our food supply. I’m struck instead by how anodyne these foods are in the larger context of my varied diet.
With the conflation of sugar and poison came the rise of the powerful communication tool of social media. Sugar is a buzzword among TikTok and Instagram clean eating influencers, and every detox diet plan I have found advocates for the elimination of sweets. Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder of supplements and wellness brand Moonjuice4, is an oft-parodied example. In 2016, she shared with her Instagram followers a strategy for indulging in a rare sugary treat:
“I recommend having probiotics on hand and taking them now and before bed (prep your system to handle the sugar shock), a zero glycemic protein shake for breakfast, this afternoon, and tomorrow morning (helps to stabilize the adrenals), and an unsweetened green juice to hydrate, alkaline, and flush! Don’t feel guilty if you chose to indulge just own it and support yo’ self!”
In her case, the dangers of a handful of Halloween candy must be handled by 6 different products, including two doses of probiotics, a green juice, and three “low glycemic” protein smoothies. For Bacon, managing her sugar intake in this way is interwoven with her brand’s origin story. In her cookbook The Moon Juice Cookbook: Cook Cosmically for Body, Beauty, and Consciousness, she writes of being plagued by chronic, undiagnosable health problems as a young woman, until a chance encounter gave her the keys to wellness:
“One day my family was shopping for groceries in a health food store when my hacking cough drew attention from a number of strangers, including a kind-looking man who asked me to stick out my tongue and took my pulse. He turned out to be an Aryuvedic physician from India, and within minutes he had made a diagnosis and delineated for my mother all the foods I should avoid -the primary ones being wheat, cow’s milk, and sugar”.
Bacon is easy to spoof. Her story is reminiscent of many wellness influencers who cherry-pick bits and pieces of ayurvedic or indigenous practices and re-package them to be more palatable to white audiences. But her story has also made her rich, and her brand has since spawned countless knockoffs. Narratives like hers often feature the same themes: a pervasive ailment that Western medicine can’t diagnose, a wide range of vague and troubling symptoms, and a sweeping dietary change that resolves the illness. In telling her story, an influencer like Amanda Chantal Bacon presents herself as bravely countering mainstream health advice.
In the book Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, the feminist author Mellisa Febos makes a political case for the importance of storytelling - especially for women. In the essay “In Praise Of Navel Gazing”, Febos describes leading a writing class where her (mostly female) students shrink from including too much of themselves in their work, fearing that their essays will be dismissed as frivolous self-absorption. She describes moving through rarified writing circles, where everyone agrees that:
“Stories like hers belonged on talk shows, not in the hallowed realm of literary prose. Everyone knows we don't need another one of those. The genre of victimhood is already so crowded. So gauche.”
Febos counters this attitude, drawing on a 1986 study by Dr. James W. Pennebaker that showed writing about personal experiences can be therapeutic, even benefitting the immune system. Whether such therapeutic writing, a field that Pennebaker essentially created, is the same as art is besides the point. Febos argues:
“But to oppose the very idea of it is nonsensical, unless you consider what such bias reveals about our values as a culture. Knee-jerk bias backed by flimsy logic and pseudoscience has always been a preferred disguise of our national prejudices. That these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, and the relational are all undervalued in intellectual literary terms, and are all being associated with the female sphere of being, is not a coincidence. This bias against personal writing is often a sexist mechanism, founded on the false binary between the emotional (female) and the intellectual (male), and intended to subordinate the former.”
I find the linking of bias and pseudoscience a fascinating element of Febos’ argument. It made me immediately want to ask the question- does writing about one’s own traumatic experience actually strengthen the immune system, or is that another example of an idea that we don’t need a whole lot of evidence to believe - because it feels right?
The truth is, it’s complicated! Pennebaker’s original studies were quite small, and while they have occasionally been reproduced, a more recent meta-analysis states “that expressive writing has minor or no effects on the subject’s health contrary to earlier findings”. I find it ironic that this potentially faulty premise is used to underline the power of personal narrative as a weapon against bias. If anything, science has shown the opposite: that our stories are riddled with cognitive bias, and despite the undeniable appeal of storytelling, we may not be the best arbiters of our own experience. We see this in critiques of eyewitness testimony. We also see it in the field of dietary science, a notoriously tricky place to find good data (more on that soon). This feminist push to elevate the personal narrative might unconsciously create an environment that allows misinformation to thrive.
Febos’ mention of the immune system reflects a broader cultural interest in the workings of this complex bodily function, particularly when it comes to the idea of inflammation and anti-inflammatory diets. A sustained immune response that can damage cells in the body, chronic inflammation can be tricky to diagnose. The symptoms are vague, including sleeplessness, weight gain, weight loss, joint pain, and even depression5. In the #1 bestselling diet plan and cookbook The Whole 30, the authors Melissa Hartwig Urban and Dallas Hartwig write of inflammation:
“Are your energy levels inconsistent or nonexistent? Do you have aches and pains that can’t be explained by overuse or injury? Are you having a hard time losing weight no matter how hard you try? Do you have some sort of condition (like skin issues, digestive ailments, seasonal allergies, or chronic fatigue) that medication hasn’t helped?”
They then claim, without citation, that “systemic inflammation starts in your gut”, and the first foods that must be eliminated to combat inflammation are “added sugar and artificial sweeteners”:
“We refer to your brain’s unrelenting demand for sugar, junk food, or simple carbs as your ‘Sugar Dragon’. The more you feed it, the more fire it breathes, and the stronger it gets. The only way to slay your Sugar Dragon is to starve it, which is why the Whole30 allows for no added sugar - not some, not less, but none.”
One of the original founders of Whole30, Melissa Hartwig Urban, has now published eight additional bestselling books and an app on the subject. She has since expanded the original concept into a brand about the power of boundary-setting - both around food and in your personal life. Urban even credits healthy eating as helping her overcome drug addiction after two stints in rehab.
I’m reminded of Febos’ earlier point - that "these topics of the body, the emotional interior, the domestic, the sexual, and the relational are all undervalued”. I know few women who feel like they get a fair shake at their doctor’s offices, and fewer still who feel heard at work, or, often, in their domestic partnerships with men. How easy is it to take the reactionary stance- to affirm the power of personal narrative above all else? Influencers like Amanda Chantal Bacon and Melissa Hartwig Urban have spun their personal stories into powerful brands. But is all of this time, money, stress, and effort put towards managing our access to sugar even necessary?
In her cookbook Bright Cooking, the chef Camile Beccara writes:
“I dislike consuming refined sugar, as I find it heavy on the palate and very bad for your body, so I take it upon myself to bake my own cakes, cookies, and pies so I can control the sweetness. Usually when I bake using a recipe I didn’t develop, I swap the white sugar for natural sweeteners, such as granulated cane sugar, honey, or maple syrup, cut the sugar by a quarter, and increase the salt by a pinch or two more. I find the sweetness becomes much more balanced, and I can taste the other elements better”.
I won’t argue with Beccara about finding sugar heavy on the palate: that is subjective. But what does it mean when a well-meaning chef can suggest replacing white sugar with the chemically identical granulated cane sugar without pushback from editors? Both are sucrose, while the latter, sometimes marketed as evaporated cane juice, turbinado, or “natural” sugar, may have a more caramel color and the slight presence of added minerals, so small as to be nutritionally obsolete6. The word natural, itself so seductive, here means less refined, but it doesn’t offer a meaningful level of micronutrients. Nor does the frequently heralded agave nectar bear much difference to its reviled cousin, high fructose corn syrup. Honey and maple syrup might have slightly different chemical structures, but once metabolized they remain simple carbohydrates, and neither offers a meaningful health benefit over cane sugar7.
What about the idea that sugar is “bad for your body”? You will rarely find a double-blind study in dietary research because of the enormous expense and emotional hardship involved in trapping large numbers of people in a lab and strictly controlling their diet. Instead, scientists frequently rely on survey data - and people are unreliable narrators of what and how much we eat8. One scientific review suggests that reports based on self-reported survey data- otherwise known as “memory-based dietary assessment methods” or M-BMs- are “fundamentally and fatally flawed”. I think the full quote bears reading:
“First, the assumption that human memory can provide accurate or precise reproductions of past ingestive behavior is indisputably false. Second, M-BMs require participants to submit to protocols that mimic procedures known to induce false recall. Third, the subjective (ie, not publicly accessible) mental phenomena (ie, memories) from which M-BM data are derived cannot be independently observed, quantified, or falsified; as such, these data are pseudoscientific and inadmissible in scientific research. Fourth, the failure to objectively measure physical activity in analyses renders inferences regarding diet-health relationships equivocal. Given the overwhelming evidence in support of our position, we conclude that M-BM data cannot be used to inform national dietary guidelines and that the continued funding of M-BMs constitutes an unscientific and major misuse of research resources.” (emphasis mine)
And yet, many of the studies referenced when discussing the dangers of sugar are based on self-reported assessments like these. Further, even the strongest studies in this area can only show association between high levels of added sugar and, for instance, heart disease - not causation. A deeper dive into these studies rarely suggests the need to totally eliminate added sugar from one’s diet. In an essay titled “Sugar and Health: a Deep Dive into the Science”, dietician
writes:“According to the evidence that we have linking added sugar with cardiovascular disease, the people in the quintile with the lowest added sugar consumption, who, remember, have the lowest risk of dying from heart disease, consume an amount of added sugar equivalent to eating some sweetened foods at every meal and every snack, and having dessert every day” (emphasis mine).
By this metric, my own intake of sweets - which our health secretary would probably characterize as extreme - puts me squarely in the lowest risk category for dying of heart disease. Regardless, in 2018 the WHO recommended that, while a 10% total calories from added sugars remains the official recommendation, we should in fact aim for 5% to “provide additional health benefits”. This means I could exceed the new recommended amount by eating three tablespoons of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, a single Odwalla strawberry banana smoothie, or just one of my beloved Cadbury Creme Eggs.
And what of diabetes, the disease so frequently name-dropped by NYT food section commentators demanding that recipe developers stop pushing sugar? Harrison writes:
“When it comes to the link between sugar intake and diabetes prevention, all the same issues we’ve been discussing still apply, but the evidence is even spottier than that on CVD [cardiovascular disease] and sugar. Yes, there are some studies that show a correlation between higher intake of sugar-sweetened beverages and the development of Type 2 diabetes (T2D), but there are also quite a few studies that find no link between overall or added sugar consumption and T2D incidence—and a few studies have even shown that higher sugar consumption is associated with a lower risk of T2D.”
The link between sugar and inflammation also falls apart under scrutiny. Immunologist
(who does terrific work debunking wellness scams in her own newsletter) writes in the article “Autoimmune Diets are Not Based in Science” that the popular understanding of inflammation would have us believe that it causes various diseases. Dr. Love argues that these systemic immune responses are symptoms, not instigators. The actual causes tend to be a complex web of interacting forces, from the environment, genetics, or previous illness. The idea that one strict elimination diet, such as Whole30, could address a complex list of autoimmune or inflammatory disorders is reductive. She writes,“In general, the diet demonizes sugars, even those which are found in healthy foods like fruits and vegetables… Sugar is sugar, no matter the source. All carbohydrates are inevitably broken down into simply monosaccharides to be shuttled into that cellular respiration pathway. Ultimately, sugar from white sugar (sucrose, a 1:1 ratio of glucose:fructose) and sugar from honey (also a 1:1 ratio of glucose:fructose) (or fruits) get processed very similarly by our bodies. Our body doesn’t differentiate the source of a macromolecule.” (emphasis mine)
The links between sugar consumption and dementia are equally shaky. And of particular note is the dangerous idea that sugar “feeds” cancer. It doesn’t, but a person’s passionately-told story about curing their cancer through diet can have fatal consequences if it discourages people from seeking proven treatments. Dr. Love writes:
“It’s long past the time for “politeness” on these topics. Health misinformation is a tangible danger to society. That’s incredibly evident in the cancer space, a category of diseases that are already poorly understood and incredibly difficult to treat. Endorsing, elevating, and legitimizing falsehoods is harmful. Collective effort is needed to combat it. In the case of cancer, truth is a matter of life and death.”
Learning that much of our popular beliefs about sugar are based on a shaky foundation has felt personally unmooring. Even as someone who has been curious about body liberation and anti-diet culture for years, understanding how little real consensus there is has made me feel so much anger. I’m angry at my primary care doctors for routinely offering diet advice that has not been proven to work for the majority of people. I’m frustrated at my fellow chefs and food writers for casually repeating that sugar is addictive and bad for you without curiosity or introspection. And yes, I’m indignant that people insist their personal stories about the toxicity of sugar are valuable enough to merit population-level dietary interventions.
In Diet and the Disease of Civilization, culture critic Adrienne Rose Bitar traces how modern diet plans reflect broader ideas about the failures of contemporary society, contrasting the diseased present with an idyllic, pre-industrial past. Many low-or-no added sugar diet plans, such as paleo, keto, and Whole30, warn that chronic disease results when we stray from how we originally evolved to eat. Bitar writes,
“By recalibrating the palate away from industrial foods, these foodways redefine pleasure as checked desire—not euphoric abandon. To borrow Ruth Levitas’s language, the diet promises to “re-educate desire” by teaching the palate to resist the extreme flavors of modern foods and, instead, value and desire “natural” Paleo foods.”
Bitar shows how our stories about diet and nutrition aren’t static. They have their own narrative thrust and internal logic, and the way these stories change over time reflects our values as a culture. The moral panic about sugar isn’t solely about the societal fear of being fat - though fatphobia certainly plays a part, regardless of if a meal plan is framed as a “diet” or a “wellness journey”. I don’t think it is hyperbolic to compare it to the project of fascism and its obsession with allegiance and behavior, its intolerance for weakness, and its rejection of modernism. As Melisa Febos wrote,
“Knee-jerk bias backed by flimsy logic and pseudoscience has always been a preferred disguise of our national prejudices”.
Much of the allure of MAHA is its populist promise to restore a better, healthier way of life. This myth-making about the lost promise of the past actively obscures the dismantling of the institutions that protect public health. Explicitly pro-MAHA social media influencers, like Vani Hari and Casey Means, function as the propaganda arm of this effort.
The nationwide push to ban the purchase of candy and soda with food stamps is one example. Reporter Michael Hobbes recently traced this effort to the conservative think tank the Foundation for Government Accountability. The FGA’s stated goal is to not just restrict the amount of added sugar people on food stamps can buy, but to ultimately eviscerate SNAP, the Supplemental Food Assistance Program, entirely. The slippery slope metaphor might be a bit tired at this point, but we cannot compromise with authoritarians, even on these supposedly minor points. On May 1st, my own governor, Jeff Landry of Louisiana, signed an executive order seeking to ban the purchase of candy and soda with SNAP. RFK Jr. was on a victory lap this past week celebrating similar MAHA legislation by other states. These efforts were lauded in another Atlantic article, written by the nominally liberal health policy reporter Nicholas Florko. Florko enjoins that “Republicans are right about soda” even while describing the work of the FGA and outlining the (justified) concerns of SNAP advocates. His reasoning? Limiting SNAP could be a useful test case:
“Rather than opposing these efforts outright, Democrats should see them as an opportunity. There’s very little research testing the effects of such a soda ban, so a pilot program would help “identify unintended consequences or questions we will later wish we asked,” Jerold Mande, a former USDA and FDA official who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations, told me. Maybe then we can finally get to the bottom of the decades-long debate over whether soda bans are a good idea.”
The message is: defunding SNAP would be bad, but the hypothetical, unproven benefits of limiting added sugar purchases outweighs the proven, demonstrable fact that SNAP lowers healthcare costs and improves nutrition for poor families. So we should let the Republicans win on this one! It makes me feel completely insane. We can criticize our food systems without parroting stupid and cruel ideas in the name of public health. We do not need to do the work of the fascists for them!
There are people, many of them women, who have found low-or-no sugar diets personally transformative. It can feel grotesque to point out that an anecdote is not evidence. But I think the truth matters, even if that truth is messy and unsatisfying. If our attention is diverted by seductive stories of transformation through diet, we avoid the sticky, uncomfortable work of asking ourselves what health really means in an America so ruthlessly committed to denying basic care. I find the characterization of sugar as toxic as particularly pernicious because the barrier to entry is so low. In the past few weeks I’ve seen otherwise compassionate people applaud the administration’s demonization of sugars, an essential macronutrient that provides energy to every cell in our body and brain. What does this framing of sugar really say? That we value the denial of pleasure above all else. That our health is entirely in our hands. And if we are not well, then we have only ourselves and our imperfect desire for sweetness to blame.
Writer Virginia Sole-Smith has an excellent guide to alternative ways you can guide a child’s relationship to sugar.
There are obviously serious medical reasons why some people can’t eat a lot of sugar, but in my experience those people do not advertise this unless strictly necessary. A friend with T1 diabetes will politely decline dessert without stating why.
Excellent and thought-provoking piece! I read 'Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative' awhile ago and am astounded by how pervasive it is now that I'm more aware. I appreciate the opportunity to have hard discussions about how personal narrative is wielded, especially through social media/consumerism, and as a historian of science and technology I think it's also important to recognize the uncomfortable notion of the fallibility and limitations of science. Very good job articulating the flimsy logic at play in our day to day!
Wow, Bronwen, this is amazing, and I've only half-read it so far. "natural sweeteners, such as granulated cane sugar" WHAT