La dolce vita – WISDOM

How sweet something tastes is obviously dependent on habituation.

If you eliminate sugar from your diet, your sweet tooth will decrease within a few weeks. Sweet things are often tasted afterwards too sweet

So, I have a plan to solve, or at least make a significant dent in, the obesity crisis.

If all food companies use less sugar, soon it will taste the same to everyone and everyone will be healthier. Total victory.

So why hasn’t this been done and why is there so much sugar in everything? Why was the sugar content set so high when using half the sugar would subjectively taste the same?

There is a stimulus/coordination problem.

If you’re a food company and you use more sugar than your competitors, you get more sales because your stuff is relatively sweeter, which is perceived as a good thing by people’s limbic systems. The programming is simple and stupid: “sugar = good, more sugar = more good.” This is how we got high fructose corn syrup in everything – it’s an arms race of food companies hacking your inner monkey.

The result is like the famous example of one person at a concert standing on tiptoe to see better, and the next person doing so to see above them, and soon everyone is standing on tiptoe to see exactly as they did before, but now everyone’s feet hurt – a win-win, crappy equilibrium. Except the flip side of the sugar arms race is an obesity epidemic and skyrocketing health care costs, not just sore toes (unless they’re about to fall off due to diabetes).

This is a good target for regulation. Not with idiotic sugar taxesbut the sugar content is limited.

Then again, it won’t be long before everything tastes the same to everyone, the food companies are where they were, and as far as the sugar producers go, the excess sugar can be made into rum and we all win again.

Of course, food companies will inevitably try to cheat, so it’s important to carefully draft the rules to cover all the different types of sugar, for example. It is also important to avoid “consultation” with “interested parties” such as sugar manufacturers and confectionery companies and their “legitimate interests” expressed through fat brown envelopes and more brown underage prostitutes for regulators and legislators. This is how regulation is often done.

But assuming we get it right, it’s a net win for everyone and one of the most important wins we can score right now.

Sugar is sweet, love is sweeter.