Pure, white and deadly: sugar addiction and the cultivation of urgency

ABSTRACT

Sugar is supplanting fat as public health enemy number one and is increasingly described in terms of addiction, particularly in relation to obesity. Drawing on newspaper reporting of sugar addiction, as well as the sources upon which that reporting draws, and conceptualizing sugar addiction as multiply enacted rather than singularly knowable, this paper explores the ways in which sugar addiction is “done” and to what effects. It argues that the enactment of “addiction” in newspaper coverage is mobilized rhetorically to fan the flames of crisis surrounding the “obesity epidemic”, solidifying the connection between sugar, ill-health and obesity and bolstering calls to action. The paper contributes to an ontological politics of sugar addiction, inserting doubt and multiplicity where singular certainties prevail, making visible the deleterious exclusions and harms that those certainties both rely on and generate and opening up spaces for thinking about how things could be different.

KEYWORDS:

• Sugar
• addiction
• obesity
• newspapers
• science
• ontological politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Reference number: RF-2017-382.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [RF-2017-382].

Notes on contributors

Karen Throsby

Karen Throsby is an associate professor in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds, UK, and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, health, technology and the body and she is the author of When IVF Fails: Feminism, Infertility and the Negotiation of Normality (Palgrave, 2004) and Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Embodiment and Identity (MUP, 2016).