From the article:

>“[Sugars] represent the single leading source of increased bad calories that are being promoted in our communities and pushed on communities of color,” Monning said during the floor debate, citing a “national epidemic” of diabetes.

>Senate Bill 347, which goes to the Assembly next, would require labels on drinks with added caloric sweeteners that contain 75 calories or more per 12 fluid ounces.

>The label on container would say: “STATE OF CALIFORNIA SAFETY WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) may contribute to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and tooth decay.”

I find the article surprisingly void of substance, just like the refined sugars it was supposed to report on.

Health warnings will achieve absolutely nothing, seeing how the problem lies in understanding how refined sugars impact the body and shape the sense of hunger to power the modern processed food market. In short, people who understand are powerless; people who have the power to do something are clueless; people who understand and have the power are in charge of food companies, making money hand over fist, at the expense of health of the entire nation.

Dr. Robert Lustig explains the danger of distilled and concentrated sugars, fructose in particular, in his "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" lecture [0]. The lecture is packed with chemical formulas but is extremely informative.

Fructose is a poison that disintegrates the liver. In nature, fructose is found in combination with other sugars and nutrients that lessen the impact; in processed foods, fructose is shoveled in to mask manufacturing defects and make the food more "marketable" i.e. addictive.

"Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss [1] goes into greater detail how scientists tweak foods such as cereal to make it as addictive as possible, using whatever chemicals aren't outright banned. The very last chapter of that book features Michael's interview with a IIRC Nestle CEO who says, paraphrased, "We envision the future where there's no other food than the goop we produce, and stomachs of people can't handle anything else because that's what they've been eating since childhood."

FDA helped out the processed food industry by making the definition of sugar [2] the following:

“Sugars shall be defined as the sum of all free mono- and disaccharides (such as glucose, fructose, lactose, and sucrose)"

Notice the trick? By involving fructose with all the other regular sugars, FDA absolved the processed food companies of the need to put sugar intake limits on packaging, which is why sugar is the only category lacking RDV.

"Reward-based stress eating" study [3] states that "treatment with Naloxone, an unspecific opioid antagonist, powerfully suppressed intake of highly palatable food". Sugary food is literally addictive, and yet it's peddled to children exactly to turn them into addicts that gorge until they die.

Slapping a warning label on products does absolutely nothing except appease the average consumer, who sees Something Is Being Done (tm). Unless fructose is controlled like alcohol (Dr. Lustig compares the damage of ethanol and fructose), the diabetes epidemic will become the norm. Fructose is already in nearly every processed product due to HFCS, high fructose corn syrup, gotten from government-subsidized corn.

Trying to reduce the amount of fructose in processed items makes them unpalatable; trying to remove it altogether makes the food taste like cardboard to the average consumer. Attempts to make mainstream processed food healthy will undoubtedly bankrupt large swaths of companies and crash the US economy.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15797397-salt-sugar-fat

[2] Code of Federal Regulations Title 21 subsection 101.9(c)(6)(ii)

[3] https://www.medicinasistemica.it/doc/biblioteca/Stress,%20ea...