"What Can We Get Away With?"
That's not the kind of question about the current state of medical science that you'd expect to hear from someone charged with understanding and promoting public health. On the other hand, if the point is to demonize food, in this case a drink with sucrose (glucose + fructose), it makes perfect sense.
The NYTimes has gotten a look at the e-mail exchanges between New York's anti-soda crusading health commissioner and his subordinates and published some of them in "E-Mail Reveals Dispute Over City's Antisoda Ad". The email conversation reveals a determined effort to ignore, dispute and ultimately fudge the science in order to come up with an ad campaign that the commissioner hoped would "go viral". The meme he sought to develop was an equivalence between soft drinks and gooey disgusting fat. The ad is propaganda in its purest and, considering it's governmental origin, most disturbing form.
The demonization of sugar is a head scratcher. Your brain burns glucose and during periods of real starvation your body will start to cannibalize itself so that the brain can have that with which it cannot do without - sugar in the form of glucose. On a typical day of normal brain functioning the brain alone burns as much sugar as is found in three cans of sugary sodas.
Too much of a good thing is never good for you but those people who've joined the anti-sugar crusade and who are pledging to lead "sugar-free lifestyles" are either brain dead or are soon about to be.
