Short answer: You might!

Via Sugar Stacks, where you can compare foods, find out where sugar is hiding, and see how much of the sweet stuff you’re really eating.

In other sugar news, last week Daniel Engber had a piece in Slate on the decline and fall of high-fructose corn syrup:

High-fructose corn syrup first started trickling into our food supply about 40 years ago; by 1984, it was flowing from just about every soda fountain in the country. These days HFCS accounts for almost half of all the added sugars in the U.S. diet, but the corn Niagara may soon be over. Last week, PepsiCo became the latest manufacturer to turn its back on America’s sweetener, introducing three new soft drinks—Pepsi Natural, Pepsi Throwback, and Mountain Dew Throwback—sweetened with a “natural” blend of cane and beet sugars. Next week, Snapple will roll out its most expensive advertising campaign ever to promote a “natural” line of tea drinks brewed with “real” cane sugar. Pizza Hut, Kraft Foods, and ConAgra have also made the switch in recent months. Not even a $30 million multimedia campaign from the Corn Refiners Association has done much to reverse the trend.

He moves through a brief and overly narrow reading of Michael Pollan’s argument against corn. Setting aside the petrochemical and environmental costs of corn sugar, Pollan might even agree with Engber’s conclusion that HFCS isn’t necessarily any worse than other processed sugars. Remember, Pollan’s uber argument is against monoculture and for people eating food. (Not too much. Mostly plants.)

Still earlier last month, Slate’s William Saletan picked apart New York City health commissioner Thomas Frieden’s argument in the New England Journal of Medicine that we should tax soda to make us stop drinking it. Frieden is credited with ridding trans fats from the NYC’s restaurants and made them post calorie counts for menu items. Saletan concludes:

Three years ago, I thought the movement to legislate against junk food was politically futile. But that was before the successful assaults on trans fats, calorie counts, and opening fast-food restaurants. Those victories, apparently, were just the appetizers. The next course is behavior modification through taxation. And [Frieden’s] article is the recipe.

Ezra Klein is all for it. Robert Waldmann drills down on Saletan’s Adam Smith reference, simultaneously refuting and proving the point (Smith, Waldmon finds, “advocates taxing rum, sugar and tobacco because taxing them will not reduce labor supply”). He even ups the ante by throwing in some Mill (from On Liberty, “It is hence the duty of the State to consider, in the imposition of taxes, what commodities the consumers can best spare; and a fortiori, to select in preference those of which it deems the use, beyond a very moderate quantity, to be positively injurious.”)

Me, I prefer more subtle forms of persuasion. A fan of Cass Sunstein’s Libertarian Paternalism, I recall a review* he and Richard Thaler wrote for the New Republic on Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think. A taste:

People sat down to a large bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup and were told to eat as much as they wanted. Unbeknown to them, the soup bowls were designed to refill themselves (with empty bottoms connected to machinery beneath the table). No matter how much soup the subjects ate, the bowl never emptied. Many people just kept eating until the experiment was (mercifully) ended.

The general rule seems to be, “Give them a lot, and they eat a lot.” Those who receive large bowls of ice cream eat much more than those who get small bowls. If you are given a half-pound bag of M&M’s, chances are that you will eat about half as much as you will if you are given a one-pound bag. The reason is simple: packages “suggest a consumption norm–what it is appropriate or normal to use or eat.” In fact, most people do not stop eating when they are no longer hungry. They look to whether their glasses or plates are empty. […]

Names matter a lot. “Traditional Cajun Red Beans With Rice” is far more popular than “Red Beans with Rice.” You might well order “Home-Style Chicken Parmesan,” even if you would turn up your nose at mere “Chicken Parmesan.” People aren’t terribly enthusiastic about “Zucchini Cookies,” but they will happily eat “Grandma’s Zucchini Cookies.” Not only are people more likely to ask for, and to eat, appealingly named dishes; they will also rate those dishes as tastier. Those who have had restaurant items with the foregoing names are more likely to describe their meals as “great” or “fantastic.” The right names for dishes can even produce more enthusiastic attitudes toward restaurants as a whole, leading people to characterize them as “trendy and up-to-date.”

The antidote is not taxation. It’s gatekeepers:

In a brief but intriguing discussion, Wansink explores the role of “nutritional gatekeepers”–those in the family who select the meals and “have a huge day-by-day influence on their family’s nutrition.” It turns out that on average, gatekeepers control no less than 72 percent of what their families eat. Wansink contends that gatekeepers can play a large role in nudging their families toward more nutritious and less fattening diets, in part through choosing variety, in part through clever “marketing” to spouses and children, in part through using small serving sizes.

Many other private and public institutions operate as “decision gatekeepers,” or what might be better called decision architects, nudging people in particular directions. Restaurants are an obvious example, but the same point holds for hospitals, schools, and computer companies, which offer default packages of various sorts, imposing powerful contextual influences that move people in their preferred directions. Employers are decision architects, too, offering initial packages including one or another combination of take-home wages, savings plans, vacation time, health care, parking privileges, and more. If Wansink is right, these influences will sometimes be simultaneously invisible and strong.

One more sugar story before I go… Kimberley D. Mok writing in the Treehugger says, thanks to increasingly ‘weird’ and warming weather, Climate Change is Pushing Sugar Maple Out of Northeast U.S.:

It’s because the cycles of what is called ‘cold recharge’ – where weeks of below-freezing temperatures, followed by warmer temperatures – are shortening to the point where sugar maples are not producing the sap which is later boiled down to make maple syrup.

* The Sunstein & Thaler review is behind a pay wall. I quote more of it here.