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From the 1980s onwards, manufacturers of products advertised as uniquely healthy because they were low in fat, or specifically in saturated fat, took to replacing those fat calories with sugar to make them equally, if not more, palatable – often disguising the sugar under one or more of the 50 names by which the combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be found. Fat was removed from candy bars so that they became "health-food bars", in spite of added sugar. Fat was removed from yoghurts and sugars added, and these became "heart-healthy snacks". It was as though the food industry had decided en masse that, if a product wasn't sweetened at least a little, our modern palates would reject it and we would purchase instead a competitor's version that was.
从20世纪80年代开始，那些因低脂肪，尤其是低饱和脂肪而被标榜为健康产品的制造商开始用糖来取代脂肪卡路里，使它们在含量降低的情况下同样保持美味——将糖伪装成50种名称中的一种或多种，这样就能发现糖和高果糖玉米糖浆的组合。人们把糖果棒中的脂肪去掉便使其成了“健康食品棒”，尽管里面还是添加了糖。酸奶中的脂肪和糖分被去除，就成了“有益于心脏健康的食品”。食品行业似乎有这样一种共识，如果一种产品一点儿甜味都没有，那么我们现代人的味觉就会拒绝它，就会去购买竞争对手的带甜味儿的产品。
For those of us who don't reward our existence with a drink (and for many of us who do), it's a chocolate bar, a dessert, an ice-cream cone or a Coke (or Pepsi) that makes our day. For those of us who are parents, sugar and sweets have become the tools we wield to reward our children's accomplishments, to demonstrate our love and our pride in them, to motivate them, to entice them.
对于那些不以饮料来奖励自己的人(我们中的许多人都是)，巧克力棒、甜点、冰淇淋或可口可乐(或百事可乐)就是我们的一天。对于我们这些为人父母的人来说，糖和糖果已经成为我们用来奖励孩子取得成就时的工具，用来展示我们对他们的爱和自豪，用来激励他们，引诱他们。
The common tendency is, again, to think of this transformation as driven by the mere fact that sugars and sweets taste good. The alternative way to think about this is that sugar took over our diets because the first taste, whether for an infant today or for an adult centuries ago, is a kind of intoxication; it's the kindling of a lifelong craving, not identical but analogous to the effect of other drugs of abuse.
人们再次普遍倾向于认为这种转变仅仅是由“糖和糖果味道很好”这一事实驱动的。另一种理解方式是，糖占据了我们的饮食，因为无论是对今天的婴儿还是几个世纪前的成年人来说，第一次尝到糖便陶醉其中了。它点燃了一种终身的渴望，与其他滥用药物的效果不同，但类似。
Because it is a nutrient, and because the conspicuous ills connected to its consumption are benign compared with those of nicotine, caffeine and alcohol – at least in the short term and in small doses – sugar remained nearly invulnerable to moral, ethical or religious attacks. It also remained invulnerable to attacks on grounds of damage to health.
因为糖是一种营养物质，而且与尼古丁、咖啡因和酒精相比，糖带来的能看得到的危害都是良性的——至少在短期内和小剂量内是如此——因此，糖在道德、伦理或宗教的攻击下几乎是无懈可击的。它也不会因健康受损而受到攻击。
