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It is legal to sell unhealthy food, ie poisonous food. Sugar is a poison, drugs are poisons. You can legally sell escolar a fish that if eaten too much is poisonous.

What is poisonous food? You can sell plastic that breaks down into the environment and people are drinking it in water, eating it in fish. Is that legally sold poisonous food?



Sugar is not, in fact, a poison.

As for drugs:

> Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.

  - Paracelsus, 1538
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison


Sugar is indeed poison.

Personally, I like to add a bit more science and reasoning to my understanding rather than rely on quotes from someone in 1538.


Sugar is not poison. It can be, in certain situations, "bad for you". But sugar is found naturally in a variety of fruits and vegetables and has been a staple of the human diet for all of history and pre-history. There's no way to describe it as "poison".


The sugar being discussed is not natural sugars but refined processed sugars, that are absolutely poisons.

Booze has been a staple of diets for a long time too. Doesn’t mean it’s not poison just because society is stupid enough to embrace it.


Do you have any evidence of this or is this just your belief? I think, if it's just your belief, you should say that.


Do I have any evidence? As in have I performed studies on processed sugar and gathered evidence? No. I do not have evidence.

A quick web search will gladly provide evidence if you actually are interested.

Here’s a HN thread on an NPR article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183

Here’s a Canadian news agency article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/how-toxic-is-sugar-1.1894262

If you’re just going to knock everything off as “just your belief” then no amount of evidence will convince you.


Everything is a poison. It's simply a question of dosage.


I grokked the quote and my response is still that it’s a cute way to hand-wave away the fact that poisonous food exists.


Found the Hackernews who hasn't yet read Lustig's research into the hepatotoxicity of sugar. It's as bad for your liver as alcohol.




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