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From the 1980s onwards, manufacturers of products advertised as uniquely healthy because they were low in fat, or specifically in saturated fat, took to replacing those fat calories with sugar to make them equally, if not more, palatable – often disguising the sugar under one or more of the 50 names by which the combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be found. Fat was removed from candy bars so that they became "health-food bars", in spite of added sugar. Fat was removed from yoghurts and sugars added, and these became "heart-healthy snacks". It was as though the food industry had decided en masse that, if a product wasn't sweetened at least a little, our modern palates would reject it and we would purchase instead a competitor's version that was.
從20世紀80年代開始，那些因低脂肪，尤其是低飽和脂肪而被標榜為健康產品的制造商開始用糖來取代脂肪卡路里，使它們在含量降低的情況下同樣保持美味——將糖偽裝成50種名稱中的一種或多種，這樣就能發現糖和高果糖玉米糖漿的組合。人們把糖果棒中的脂肪去掉便使其成了“健康食品棒”，盡管里面還是添加了糖。酸奶中的脂肪和糖分被去除，就成了“有益于心臟健康的食品”。食品行業似乎有這樣一種共識，如果一種產品一點兒甜味都沒有，那么我們現代人的味覺就會拒絕它，就會去購買競爭對手的帶甜味兒的產品。
For those of us who don't reward our existence with a drink (and for many of us who do), it's a chocolate bar, a dessert, an ice-cream cone or a Coke (or Pepsi) that makes our day. For those of us who are parents, sugar and sweets have become the tools we wield to reward our children's accomplishments, to demonstrate our love and our pride in them, to motivate them, to entice them.
對于那些不以飲料來獎勵自己的人(我們中的許多人都是)，巧克力棒、甜點、冰淇淋或可口可樂(或百事可樂)就是我們的一天。對于我們這些為人父母的人來說，糖和糖果已經成為我們用來獎勵孩子取得成就時的工具，用來展示我們對他們的愛和自豪，用來激勵他們，引誘他們。
The common tendency is, again, to think of this transformation as driven by the mere fact that sugars and sweets taste good. The alternative way to think about this is that sugar took over our diets because the first taste, whether for an infant today or for an adult centuries ago, is a kind of intoxication; it's the kindling of a lifelong craving, not identical but analogous to the effect of other drugs of abuse.
人們再次普遍傾向于認為這種轉變僅僅是由“糖和糖果味道很好”這一事實驅動的。另一種理解方式是，糖占據了我們的飲食，因為無論是對今天的嬰兒還是幾個世紀前的成年人來說，第一次嘗到糖便陶醉其中了。它點燃了一種終身的渴望，與其他濫用藥物的效果不同，但類似。
Because it is a nutrient, and because the conspicuous ills connected to its consumption are benign compared with those of nicotine, caffeine and alcohol – at least in the short term and in small doses – sugar remained nearly invulnerable to moral, ethical or religious attacks. It also remained invulnerable to attacks on grounds of damage to health.
因為糖是一種營養物質，而且與尼古丁、咖啡因和酒精相比，糖帶來的能看得到的危害都是良性的——至少在短期內和小劑量內是如此——因此，糖在道德、倫理或宗教的攻擊下幾乎是無懈可擊的。它也不會因健康受損而受到攻擊。
