How Much Harm Can Sugar Do?

If you want to wage a war, you have to have an enemy. By almost any measure—scientific reports, documentaries, government announcements, and nearly thirty million Google results—we have been waging a War on Obesity for many years. It is not going well. The most comprehensive recent data, from the 2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, found that sixty-eight million Americans qualified as obese, and sixty-five million more were overweight. Smaller but more recent studies show no easing of these numbers, which clearly amount to a public-health crisis.