James Hamblin takes a close look at the literature on sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and agave:
Barry Popkin, who was investigating fructose long before [Dr. Robert] Lustig, recommends caution. Popkin, a distinguished professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, co-authored a widely-read academic article in 2004 titled “Consumption of High-Fructose Corn Syrup in Beverages May Play a Role in the Epidemic of Obesity.” That paper was followed by many popular articles that cited it, and a lot of research down this road. But he didn’t mean for it to lead to all-out fructose terror.
All that Popkin really wrote in the original article was that metabolism of fructose, unlike glucose, favors production of fat in our livers. That leads to a fatty liver, a condition that affected at least 70 million Americans at the time, and affects many more now. Fatty liver is linked to insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease.
But the science is far from settled:
The amount of sugar Americans consumed before the late twentieth century was trivial compared to what we eat today, Popkin noted. “We’re in a whole new world of sugar consumption. It’s not just beverages; it’s in all the foods. And we don’t really know what that means to our health. We know that we face an epidemic of things like fatty liver disease. Not just obesity, not just diabetes, but many other problems that could potentially be related to all the sugar. We think from some studies that fructose could be responsible, but we don’t have slam-dunk evidence on any of it.”
Relatedly, German Lopez flags a report on the effectiveness of a soda tax:
A new study published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics found that adding a tax of 0.04 cents per calorie of sugar on drinks — the equivalent of nearly 6 cents for a 12 ounce can soda — would drive Americans to drink 5,800 calories less in sweet drinks each year. That reduction is roughly two days worth of the recommended number of calories.
The Dish 