(1) Is sugar the world’s most popular drug? It eases pain, seems to be addictive and shows every sign of causing long-term health problems. Is it time to quit sugar for good?

(2) What about the possibility that sugar itself is an intoxicant, a drug? Overconsumption of this drug may have long-term side-effects, but there are none in the short term—no staggering or dizziness, no slurring of speech, no passing out or drifting away, no heart palpitations or respiratory distress. When it is given to children, its effects may be only more extreme variations on the apparently natural emotional rollercoaster of childhood, from the initial intoxication to the tantrums and whining of what may or may not be withdrawal a few hours later. More than anything, it makes children happy, at least for the period during which they’re consuming it. It calms their distress, eases their pain, focuses their attention and leaves them excited and full of joy until the dose wears off. The only downside is that children will come to expect another dose, perhaps to demand it, on a regular basis.

(3) There is something about the experience of consuming sugar and sweets, particularly during childhood, that readily invokes the comparison to a drug. I have children, still relatively young, and I believe raising them would be a far easier job if sugar and sweets were not an option, if managing their sugar consumption did not seem to be a constant theme in our parental responsibilities. Even those who vigorously defend the place of sugar and sweets in modern diets—”an innocent moment of pleasure, a balm amid the stress of life”, as the journalist Tim Richardson has written—acknowledge that this does not include allowing children “to eat as many sweets as they want, at any time”, and that “most parents will want to ration their children’s sweets”.

(4) But why is this rationing necessary? Children crave many things—Pokemon cards, Star Wars paraphernalia, Dora the Explorer backpacks—and many foods taste good to them. What is it about sweets that maces them so uniquely in need of rationing?

(5) This is of more than academic interest, because the response of entire populations to sugar has been effectively identical to that of children: once people are exposed, they consume as much sugar as they can easily procure. The primary barrier to more consumption—up to the point where populations become obese and diabetic—has tended to be availability and price. As the price of a pound of sugar has dropped over the centuries, the amount of sugar consumed has steadily, inexorably climbed.

(6) In 1934, while sales of sweets continued to increase during the Great Depression, the New York Times commented: “The Depression (has) proved that people wanted candy, and that as long as they had any money at all, they would buy it.” During those brief periods of time during which sugar production surpassed our ability to consume it, the sugar industry and purveyors of sugar-rich products have worked diligently to increase demand and, at least until recently, have succeeded.

(7) The critical question, as the journalist and historian Charles C. Mann has elegantly put it, “is whether (sugar) is actually an addictive substance, or if people just act like it is”. This question is not easy to answer. Certainly, people and populations have acted as though sugar is addictive, but science provides no definitive evidence. Until recently, nutritionists studying sugar did so from the natural perspective of viewing it as a nutrient—a carbohydrate—and nothing more.

(8) Historians have often considered the sugar-as-a-drug metaphor to be an apt one. “That sugars, particularly highly refined sucrose, produce peculiar physiological effects is well known,” wrote Sidney Mintz, whose 1985 book Sweetness and Power is one of two seminal English-language histories of sugar. But these effects are neither as visible nor as long-lasting as those of alcohol or caffeinated drinks, “the first use of which can trigger rapid changes in respiration, heartbeat, skin colour and so on”.

(9) Mintz has argued that a primary reason sugar has escaped social disapproval is that, whatever conspicuous behavioural changes may occur when infants consume sugar, it did not cause the kind of “flushing, staggering, dizziness, euphoria, changes in the pitch of the voice, slurring of speech, visibly intensified physical activity or any of the other cues associated with the ingestion” of other drugs. Sugar appears to cause pleasure with a price that is difficult to discern immediately and paid in full only years or decades later. With no visible, directly noticeable consequences, as Mintz says, questions of “long-term nutritive or medical consequences went unasked and unanswered”. Most of us today will never know if we suffer even subtle withdrawal symptoms from sugar, because we’ll never go long enough without it to find out.

(10) Sugar historians consider the drug comparison to be fitting in part because sugar is one of a handful of “drug foods”. Rum is distilled, of course, from sugar cane. As for tobacco, sugar was, and still is, a critical ingredient in the American blended-tobacco cigarette. It makes for the “mild” experience of smoking cigarettes as compared with cigars and, perhaps more importantly, makes it possible for most of us to inhale cigarette smoke and draw it deep into our lungs.

(11) Any discussion of how little sugar is too much also has to account for the possibility that sugar is a drug and perhaps addictive. However it’s defined, try to consume sugar in moderation in a world in which substantial sugar consumption is the norm and virtually unavoidable.

Which of the following statements about the effects of sugar is CORRECT?