Todd Moody wrote:
>
> The important difference between sugar and these narcotics is
> that sugar is found in ordinary fruits, which are a natural part
> of the human food supply; the others are not.  The fact that
> sugar is refined means nothing more than that it is separated
> from the rest of the food, as olive oil is separated from olives.

But the refined sugar does contain things that in nature would not be eaten.  Proteins from the source plant do
find their way into the final product (refining them out completely would be prohibitedly expensive.  This
would include grass proteins from the sugar cane, or beet proteins from sugar beet.  Of course, sugar in this
concentration would never be found in nature.  Even the sweetest fruits contain highly diluted sugars - that's
why we don't extract sugars from them except in the form of fruit-juice concentrates.

Thanks to government policy in the U.S., most food products are sweetened with corn fructose.  It is far less
refined than sugar and thus contains even more "foreign" proteins.

Ray