Regulating Sugar: It's All About the Nudge

Sugar cubes

Originally posted on the UCTV blog

UCSF health policy Professor Laura Schmidt has plenty to say when it comes to the availability of sugar in the American diet. She agrees with the assement made by her UCSF colleagues in “The Skinny on Obesity: Drugs, Cigarettes, Alcohol..and Sugar?” that there is a definitive public health demand for regulation of the food industry in response to the obesity epidemic. Her research focuses on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to regulations and she made her case in  U.S. News & World Report editorial published on March 30, 2012. What follows is the unedited version:

“Regulating Sugar: It’s All About the Nudge,” by Laura A. Schmidt, PhD, co-director of CTSI's Community Engagement and Health Policy program, and professor, UCSF School of Medicine.

The overabundance of sugar in the American diet isn’t just making us fat.  It’s hurting our health.  We were all raised to think of sugar as benign “empty calories.”  But science shows that too much sugar—i.e., the amount consumed by the average American—leads to high blood pressure, dyslipidemia, fatty liver, insulin resistance and pancreatitis.  Excessive sugar consumption leads to metabolic disease, which leads to the main chronic illnesses that will eventually kill most of us: heart disease, stroke, cancer, as well as diabetes.  Sugar overload also creates a cascade of chemical changes in the body, turning off the hormones that tell us when we’ve eaten enough, and affecting brain neurotransmitters that leave us craving more sugar.

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