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In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the crusade against sugar rose to prominence as an urgent societal problem about which something needed to be done. Sugar was transformed into the common enemy in a revived ‘war on obesity’ levelled at ‘unhealthy’ foods and the people who enjoy them. Are the evils of sugar based on purely scientific fact, or are other forces at play?
Sugar rush explores the social life of sugar in its rise to infamy. The book reveals how competing understandings of the ‘problem’ of sugar are smoothed over through appeals to science and the demonization of fatness, with politics and popular culture preying on our anxieties about what we eat. Drawing on journalism, government policy, public health campaigns, self-help books, autobiographies and documentaries, the book argues that this rush to blame sugar is a phenomenon of its time, finding fertile ground in the era of austerity and its attendant inequalities.
Inviting readers to resist the comforting certainties of the attack on sugar, Sugar rush shows how this actually represents a politics of despair, entrenching rather than disrupting the inequality-riddled status quo.
'Are we asking the wrong questions about sugar? This smart and excellent book argues that we are.’
Jayne Raisborough, author of Fat Bodies, Health and the Media
'While sensitive to the personal impact of emotionally charged health messages, Throsby challenges the presumed innocence of celebrities whose anti-sugar campaigns, sparked by uninterrogated fears animated by slapdash thinking and social privilege, enact and endorse inequitable harm. This call for accountability is even more pertinent to dietetics, where anti-fatness, nutritionism and ableism remain prevailing ill-winds.'
Lucy Aphramor, The Sociological Review
'Throsby avoids giving easy answers in her discussion of sugar; in fact, her book is essentially a plea that we should see issues of food and health as complicated. In this she is undoubtedly correct, but we could perhaps take it as another illustration of the failures of capitalism, that something that should be simple becomes so complex.'
Elaine Graham-Leigh, Counterfire
Introduction
1 What’s wrong with sugar?
2 Hanging together
3 Hidden
4 Giving up sugar
5 Entertaining sugar
6 Taxing sugar
7 Sweetening austerity
8 The (in)visible inequalities of sugar
Conclusion
Index