A boom in the production of sugar beets and corn to make high-fructose corn syrup, both cheaper alternatives to cane sugar, lowered the cost and increased the availability of the sweet stuff. In The Case Against Sugar, Taubes takes the long view, explaining how sugar consumption crept up in the 19th and 20th centuries with the rise of the chocolate, soda, candy, and ice cream industries. The sweetening of the American diet didn’t happen overnight, though. Some three-quarters of packaged foods and drinks in the US now carry caloric or low-calorie sweeteners (or a mixture of both), a study in The Lancet found. It’s loaded into our granola and our juice, our BBQ sauce and salad dressing. 1) We’re so hooked on sweetness, it’s now in three-quarters of our packaged food Here are 11 facts to clear up the confusion. The backlash against sugar, and the science behind it, is a lot more complicated than it seems. Other health experts will tell you that focusing on a single nutrient like sugar is outdated, that the causes of obesity are complex and multifactorial, and that overemphasizing sugar’s harms could even be dangerous for public health. Other anti-sugarists go further, suggesting we should call it an addictive drug and regulate it as such.īut that’s just one side of the debate. In his compelling book, The Case Against Sugar, journalist Gary Taubes argues that we should view the sweet stuff as toxic - in the same league as cigarettes or alcohol. Food companies are trying to cut back on it in a few of their products. New York Times columnists and svelte celebrities are eliminating it from their diets to retrain their palates or detox for the new year. We’ve started to tax it in our beverages and remove it from our schools. Sugar is being blamed for the obesity and diabetes epidemics. In health policy and nutrition science circles, this single nutrient is taking up a lot of oxygen these days. Now there’s a full-on war on sugar, our latest dietary enemy No. All rights reserved.First it was too many calories. The Epoch Times does not provide investment advice. Employees were able to submit written questions for the event. Musk’s interaction with Twitter employees took place ahead of a planned buyout of the social media platform.

And if one can use it to make convenient payments, that’s an increase in usefulness,” said Musk. “My goal would be to maximize the usefulness of the service-the more useful it is, the better. Musk labeled news, entertainment, and payments as three critical areas for Twitter, Vox reported.

Musk said that Twitter could have currency as well as crypto for such transactions, according to Vox. “I think it would make sense to integrate payments into Twitter so that it’s easy to send money back and forth.”

Musk also touched on the role of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin in Twitter’s future.Ĭalling money an “essential form of information,” Musk pointed out that money is fundamentally digital at this point and has been for a while. “In order for people to have trust in Twitter, I think it’s extremely important that there be transparency,” said the Tesla CEO. Musk said there are people who operate hundreds of accounts trying to make them look like individuals but they’re not. It’s gotten better, but there’s still a fair bit of that,” according to a transcript of the interaction published by Vox. The entrepreneur said, “There’s quite a lot of crypto scams on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk addressed cryptocurrency scams and payments in his interaction with Twitter Inc.

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