The burgeoning fight around sugar toxicity has two sides: public-health advocates and the private industry.

For the former, the clients are you and me. Not only do individuals suffer from the flood of processed-sugar injected into every corner of the American diet, but there are significant and mounting collective costs as well: shared health costs, lost worker productivity, even national security. Every American, of every political and social persuasion, is affected by these things.

Clients on the other side are in it for profit. Part of the profits the processed-food industry has already made, at the expense of public health, are plowed back into lobbying efforts to ensure they can keep on degrading the public health. It's not that they want to degrade the public health; it's that they want to prolong their access to those profits as long as they can. That's what corporations do.

Anytime you want to assess an issue, and one side is speaking for the public good, and the other is speaking for the private good, I say you really need not look further.

Yes, I point out the obvious, but at least I was brief(er), for a change.