Regulate Sugar! by gimleteye

The terrible costs of Big Sugar are a frequent theme of EOM. As president of Friends of the Everglades and an environmental activist for more than 20 years, I have experienced the pernicious, toxic effect of Big Sugar on public policy and governmental efforts to restore the Everglades, first-hand. (You can join Friends of the Everglades, by clicking here.)

 Last April we posted for EOM readers, "The Terrible Costs of Big Sugar", including Robert Lustig's "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"; a YouTube phenomenon with close to 2 million hits. (Click the link, to view.) Lustig explains that our bodies process fructose in much the same way they process alcohol and other poisons.


Sugar isn't just a source of empty calories, responsible for obesity and Type 2 diabetes, in this scenario: at high quantities, it is a full-fledged toxicant and contributes to many of the major fatal non-communicable conditions, like cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Lustig is one of the authors of a new commentary in the journal, Nature, that is getting a lot of press. A tax on sugar would help meet the growing-- multi-billion dollar costs-- of meeting sugar-related health problems and discourage consumption of a commodity that has deeply polluted Florida politics and wrecked the Everglades. (There are approximately 3000 news articles related to the report, according to a Google search this morning: not one, in The Miami Herald.)

The predictable litany of conservative commentators-- some of whom are likely paid off by Big Sugar, one way or another-- has risen in righteous indignation against the idea of imposing a tax on sugar. But for God's sake, we are already being taxed by sugar; we are just not capturing the costs! The $20 billion cost to fix what is left of the Everglades-- funded by taxpayers-- is little more than a work-around to keep Sugar Billionaires, their wealth and influence, intact. And if patterns of consumption, reinforcing the role the toxic sugar in our diets, isn't a form of unwanted taxation on health costs, I don't know what is.

These are sad stories (especially the Everglades angle) the mainstream media seems incapable of telling, in part because the influence of the sugar industry in Florida is pervasive. Their media hawks are on the look out for any hint of public dissent.

Poll Floridians, and you discover that a strong majority is in favor of bringing the polluters into line. Making the polluters fund 100 percent of the costs of their pollution was attempted through a Florida constitutional amendment by referendum in 1996: it has gone nowhere, NOWHERE, because of the influence of the Sugar Billionaires on Florida legislators who may or may not be entertained, wined, dined and otherwise primed in the Dominican Republic, where the Fanjul billionaires operate a non-stop shuttle service for American elected officials who might or might not blow off steam without paying a dime, far from the eyes of the prying press.

According to the authors of the commentary in Nature, the rapid increase in illnesses related to sugar use costs $65 billion in lost productivity and $150 billion in medical care per year in the United States. While corn fructose is the whale shark in the sugar debacle, Florida's Big Sugar billionaires sit atop an empire built of misery and spend tens of millions of dollars a year to thwart any objections in Florida; whether on the political front, where campaign contributions are ubiquitous (The Clintons are frequent fliers to Casa de Campo, guests of the Fanjul billionaires.), the environmental front, where Big Sugar has fattened land use and environmental lawyers for decades, working conditions for farm hands, their families and communities, and public health.

So yes, it is time to regulate sugar, for public health reasons and for all the ways this commodity pollutes and sickens.