Should we regulate sugar the way we regulate alcohol and tobacco?

Some say yes and they have some pretty good arguments for doing so.

If you have ever come in contact with a sugar cane then you know that it takes a whole lot of effort and chewing to extract a bit of sweetness.

Nature has a way of packaging calorie dense foods very well!

And for good reason. We all know what happens when you get too much of a good thing.

In this video below, Dr. Lustig offers some great reasons why we need to cut back on the sugar!

Paula Deen announces she has diabetes and has no plans to change her cooking.

Deen, who is famous for her use of copious amounts of fat, butter and sugar, encourages moderation in her defense.

Deen has also signed on as a paid spokesperson for Novo Nordisk proving that she is more interested in being part of the problem than a part of the solution to the diabetes epidemic.

While Deen’s recipes — which promote prodigious amounts of butter and fried foods — may not specifically cause diabetes, eating that kind of high fat and high sugar food regularly can make it very difficult to maintain a healthy weight.

And for people who did inherit a susceptibility, lifestyle can make a difference. That means they may stave off diabetes by maintaining a healthy weight and exercising regularly.

Could more than 2,600 deaths a year be prevented by taxing soda?

Some analysts think, yes.

In general, they assume that if the price of soda rises, people will buy less of it. “We assume that 40 percent of the calories saved by forgoing a sugary drink are replaced with other calories,” she says, meaning either calories from drinks such as milk or fruit juice or from food. “So for every 100 calories in soda avoided, only 60 calories are actually lost in the diet.”

This is not the first study to predict that a soda tax would be effective in reducing consumption. Yale University researchers concluded in this report that taxing sugary drinks would lead to economic benefits as well.

Using the funds that come from taxing unhealthy foods could be the answer to a host of health cost issues.

The overall cost of diabetes on society is greater than the dollars and cents spent to treat and care for patients.

A new study from researchers at Yale suggests that the disease, which currently affects nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population, could have significant nonmedical costs to society as well.

The study, which appears in the January issue of the policy journal Health Affairs, suggests that young people diagnosed with the disease are more likely to drop out of high school and to forgo or fail to finish college. As a result, they’re likely to earn less than those without diabetes.

Americans are fat and getting fatter.

And the solutions to the problem are a pretty tall order.

“Altering the way society is organized” may be effective in addressing the problem but is it a viable solution?

Consider all the special interests benefitting from the system as it is now, from factory farms to tobacco companies, who is willing to be “re-organized”?

First lady Michelle Obama has made healthy eating her special project and hopefully she can bring national attention to growing problem.

The problem for the country echoes the problem for individuals: Willpower is not enough. “(It’s a) basic instinct, even stronger than the sexual instinct, to store calories to survive the next period of starvation. And we live in an environment where there’s food every half mile. It’s tasty, cheap, convenient, and you can eat it with one hand.”
Thus says Martijn Katan of the Institute of Health Sciences at VU University in Amsterdam, author of one of the many studies on the limits of dieting, quoted in U.S. News & World Report.
If you as an individual want to change your weight, you must change your whole life. Likewise, to reduce obesity in modern society, we will have to alter the way society is organized.