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Sugar addiction is on the rise. Globally, sugar intake has quadrupled over the last 60 years, and it now makes up around 8% of all our calories.
This sounds like sugar’s keeping us fed, but added sugars are actually empty calories – they are bereft of any nutrients like vitamins or fibres. The result is massive health costs, with sugars linked to obesity around the world. Some estimates suggest that half the global population could be obese by 2035.
A limited 20% reduction in sugar is estimated to save US$10.3 billion (£8.1 billion) of health costs in the US alone. Yet, sugar’s impacts go far beyond just health and money.
There are also many environmental problems from growing the sugar, like habitat and biodiversity loss and water pollution from fertilisers and mills. But overall, sugar hasn’t received a lot of attention from the scientific community despite being the largest cultivated crop by mass on the planet.
In a recent article, we evaluated sugar’s environmental impacts and explored avenues for reducing sugar in the diet to recommended levels either through reducing production or using the saved sugar in environmentally beneficial ways.
By phasing out sugar, we could spare land that could be rewilded and stock up on carbon. This is especially important in biodiverse tropical regions where sugar production is concentrated such as Brazil and India. But a different, more politically palatable option might be redirecting sugar away from diets to other environmentally-beneficial uses such as bioplastics or biofuels.
