In the early 2010s, the “war on obesity” found a new enemy: sugar. That role had been filled by dietary fat, but a growing understanding of “healthy fats” led to a partial rehabilitation – and, therefore, a vacancy. Amid stories of “benefit scroungers” and austerity’s hit to public services, sugar – with its connotations of greed, laziness, “empty calories”, sinful enjoyment – was the perfect candidate. And so were born the caricatures of armchair-bound, sugar-fuelled fat people that litter the anti-sugar domain.
Its position in the public imagination as the primary cause of ill health and obesity was cemented by the declaration of Action on Sugar’s founder member Simon Capewell in 2014 that “sugar is the new tobacco”. Ever since, sugar has found itself the subject of a raft of newspaper articles, popular science books, self-help guides and national and international policies. This outbreak of “sugar talk” reached a frenzied peak in the UK in 2016 with the announcement of plans to introduce the soft drinks industry levy (“sugar tax”), maintaining momentum well past the launch of the tax in 2018 and into the pandemic.
The moral panics about fat and then sugar form part of a pattern of sustained attack on fat bodies. But they are also a story of failure. The “war on obesity”, focused as it is on individual culpability and a “lack of willpower”, and in the absence of effective public health policy, is beset by the inability to achieve its declared goals – which means that it requires constant renewal to maintain momentum. The war on sugar took hold not just against a background of austerity, but amid optimistic hopes that a 2012 summer of London Olympic sport would reignite public commitments to cost-saving weight loss in straitened times.
This narrative of individual blame serves multiple interests. The focus on individual fat bodies and behaviours provides political cover for the underfunding of public services, as demonstrated in 2020 with Matt Hancock’s declaration that if everyone in the UK lost five pounds it would save the NHS £100m over the next five years. And for rightwing commentators, the attack on sugar heralded the welcome arrival of new enemies to blast for the ills of British society.
In August 2015, the Telegraph commentator Philip Johnston invoked people who “waddle through life in elasticated 50in-waist leisure pants and subsist on a diet of pizza and cola” to justify his support for the sugar tax. In the current cost of living crisis, this moralising conflation of economic and dietary choices persists.
The political journalist Isabel Oakeshott outraged This Morning viewers in October 2022 by recommending, while clad in expensive designer shoes, that those struggling with the cost of food should buy porridge, carrots and potatoes. In May 2023, the former MP Ann Widdecombe advised those unable to afford the ingredients for a cheese sandwich to simply go without.
Just as we were urged to “tighten our belts” under austerity, and now in the current cost of living crisis, we are exhorted to police our sugar consumption by the teaspoon and the gram to render ourselves the responsible and disciplined citizens the political moment demands.
But we should be wary of the commonsense appeal of an attack on sugar. For a start, the perennial impulse to categorise foods as either “good” or “bad” is flawed, since the reduction of food to its nutrients and their presumed effects erases the rich social and cultural significance of food and eating. Just as the dangers of fat were over-simplified, so is the threat of sugar, and a single-nutrient public health campaign can never capture the complexities of food, eating and its impact on our bodies.
Second, the targeting of any given food inevitably brings those who are imagined to eat that food into the crosshairs, and the cultivation of disgust about those foods – for example, as nutritionally empty or not “real” – attaches that same stigma to its imagined consumers. Stigmatising someone for their body size or food preferences achieves nothing but harm – a fact recognised even by those organisations advocating most strongly for obesity reduction.
The Obesity Health Alliance acknowledges that weight stigma can have “psychological, behavioural and social consequences” and the World Obesity Federation links it to the avoidance of medical care, disordered eating patterns and stress-related illness. The attack on sugar is complicit in this harm. The demonisation of both sugar and fatness comes dressed in declarations of shared endeavour, but the reality is that the stigma sticks primarily to those already most disadvantaged.
Third, whatever else food is about, it is always about gender. Entangled with expectations of care, health and the family, what, where and how we eat is inescapably gendered, with food work and all its accompanying responsibility and shame falling disproportionately on to women. As eaters, women are seen as uniquely vulnerable to the pleasures of sugar in ways that simultaneously infantilise them and authorise the close surveillance of their bodies.
In his 2013 book Addicted to Food, James Ehrlichman argues that women find refined carbohydrates “especially seductive”, including “the ultimate seduction – chocolate”. And in his 2010 book The Sweet Poison Quit Plan, the popular science writer David Gillespie suggests anecdotally that while men can withdraw “cold turkey” in just a couple of weeks, women struggle for months to shed their sugar cravings, requiring meticulous self-surveillance to avoid backsliding.
Additionally, the extra food work needed to achieve everyday sugar reduction falls quietly but inexorably on to women. They are exhorted to find pleasure in implementing sugar-reduction techniques (decoding labels, cooking from scratch) for the sake of their families.
The focus on sugar keeps attention squarely on a narrowly defined problem of food choice, blurring out the wider social and cultural context. For example, for those living under conditions of poverty, feeding a hungry child a palatable and familiar meal that will fill them up without food waste is an act of healthcare in the present. But the relentless foregrounding of sugar not only discredits that act of care but also depoliticises poverty. It is an act of political forgetting that places the most disadvantaged on the losing side of every exchange and then holds them responsible for those losses.
This won’t end with the war on sugar. After all, it is increasingly being folded into the next iteration of the war on obesity: ultra-processed foods. And as the proliferation of anti-UPF books, articles and policies gathers pace, the lessons from sugar caution us against the erasure of the social inequalities and lived realities of those who most easily end up in the line of fire when foods become our enemy.
Karen Throsby is author of Sugar Rush: Science, Politics and the Demonisation of Fatness
