Interesting article, and Prof. Mann has some valid points, but I am not entirely convinced.
My experience is that while sugar cravings may be less intense than alcohol cravings, they are certainly powerful enough. Fructose and ethanol have a lot of parallels: for one thing, they are metabolized in the liver, and by the same pathway, and they both cause fatty liver disease. For another thing, they both affect the brain’s reward center in the same way. They both affect the judgment, and create a sense of euphoria. They both dull pain.
For me, the effects of sugar addiction were perhaps subtler than the effects of alcoholism (which only allowed me to prolong the denial), but they were there, nonetheless, and it took the same kind of spiritual transformation to overcome the one addiction as it had taken me to overcome the other.
It is true that fructose differs from alcohol—and heroin—in not causing immediate cell damage, but the long-term physical effects of sugar and alcohol are the same: fatty liver disease, steatohepatitis, cirrhosis, and death, if untreated.
The most interesting point that Prof. Mann makes is her worry that trying to restrict consumption of a food might lead to bingeing on that food. This is certainly true in the case of alcohol, and it is one of the reasons that alcoholism is so hard to treat. But advising sugar addicts to continue to eat sugar, because stopping might cause them to binge, is exactly the same thing as telling alcoholics to keep on drinking, because stopping might lead them to get drunk. Excuse me?
I think it’s safe to say that this is one of the very diagnostic signs of addiction—normal drinkers don’t have trouble passing up a glass, and normal eaters have no trouble passing up chocolate—hell, they can even leave a doughnut untouched! Me, I drank till I was drunk, I ate fig bars and chocolates by the box and candy by the bag, and I rarely stopped at less than a dozen doughnuts or the equivalent.
Sugar isn’t the new heroin? You certainly couldn’t prove it by me.