In recent decades, discussions about the reputation of sugar no longer seem to question its 'evil' reputation, which appears to be established in advance, but rather the multiplicity of moral judgments about whether or not to eat sugar.
In 1964, a song from the Disney classic Mary Poppins said something like, 'a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the bitter goes away and it will taste good.'
Today, 53 years after its release, the lyrics of that children’s song could well make many people tear their clothes, as it may seem incorrect and lead children down the wrong path—the path of sugar, the supposed culprit of all today’s ills.
To the multiplicity of medical discourses is added the multiplicity of messages that the media replicate, reformulate, and disseminate regarding sugar’s reputation. Repeatedly in this space, we have pointed out the difficulty, not only methodological but also epistemological, that the production of scientific knowledge represents. In addition, there is a research agenda shaped by economic, political, and social factors that govern an era. This quasi-obsession with sugar has produced a phenomenon that, to some extent, confirms the hypotheses posed by French philosopher Michel Foucault regarding the power of medicine in contemporary times. The medical discourse often falls into the temptation of moralistically shaping many dimensions of our daily lives, much like the power once held by the religion–Church binomial.
Nowadays, we are all more or less sensitized to which diseases are related to high sugar consumption. Sociologist Claude Fischler collected discourses about sugar that he found in the press. In the 1980s, there was an ambivalent discourse about sugar. Everything seemed to indicate that as long as sugar was consumed in a social context, there was no such stigmatization of its consumption, especially during ritual occasions like birthday celebrations, inherently involving cake, or giving sweets during certain festivities. Where consumption was condemned was in individual ingestion.
Empirically, I begin to glimpse a trend in the discourse about sugar, comparing it to a dangerous drug, especially due to claims that it activates similar neural mechanisms as cocaine. Curiously, this line of research originated in 1979 when a French pediatrician made statements to the media about how sweets in nurseries could lead to addiction. The pediatrician spoke rhetorically, but these statements were reproduced by media worldwide, giving rise to the line of research on the addictive effects of sugar.
Conversely, in the 1970s, there was a hypothesis that hypoglycemia—low blood sugar—caused criminals to commit crimes. This hypothesis was highly biologicist in explaining social phenomena, so it was quickly discarded.
It is evident that excessive sugar consumption can have direct consequences on our quality of life. What is less evident is that sometimes moralistic discourses seek to present a risk in a very latent way so that people become 'aware' of these risks. And what is even less evident is that we should reconsider that perhaps the construction of healthy habits does not come from stigmatization, but from true education and the promotion of habits from an early age for life.
Originally published in El Economista
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— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.