英国卫报：此时蜜糖,彼时砒霜(3)（在线收听）

The critical question, as the journalist and historian Charles C Mann has elegantly put it, "is whether (sugar) is actually an addictive substance, or if people just act like it is".

正如记者兼历史学家查尔斯·C·曼恩优雅说过的那句优美的话：“问题的关键是，糖真的是一种会令人上瘾的物质还是人们在假装上瘾？”

This question is not easy to answer.

这个问题不好回答。

Certainly, people and populations have acted as though sugar is addictive, but science provides no definitive evidence.

当然，是人们自己表现得好像吃糖会上瘾一样，但科学无法提供明确的证据。

Until recently, nutritionists studying sugar did so from the natural perspective of viewing it as a nutrient – a carbohydrate – and nothing more.

直到最近，营养学家开始从自然的角度来研究糖，把它看作一种营养物质——一种碳水化合物——仅此而已。

They occasionally argued about whether or not it might play a role in diabetes or heart disease,

他们偶尔会就“糖在糖尿病或心脏病中是否起了一定的作用”进行争论，

but not about whether it triggered a response in the brain or body that made us want to consume it in excess. That was not their area of interest.

但不会涉及“糖是否引发了大脑或身体的反应使得我们想要过量摄入它”这一话题，这并非他们的兴趣领域。

The few neurologists and psychologists interested in probing the sweet-tooth phenomenon, or why we might need to ration our sugar consumption so as not to eat too much of it,

有少数对探究甜食现象或者对“为何我们需要摄入定量的糖以免摄入太多”感兴趣的神经学家和心理学家们

did so typically from the perspective of how these sugars compared with other drugs of abuse, in which the mechanism of addiction is now relatively well understood.

通常是从糖与其他滥用药物作对比的角度来研究的，如今人们对成瘾的机制已经了解得比较清楚了。

Lately, this comparison has received more attention as the public-health community has looked to ration our sugar consumption as a population,

最近这一比较受到了更多的关注，因为公共卫生界希望定量控制我们的糖消费

and has thus considered the possibility that one way to regulate these sugars – as with cigarettes – is to establish that they are, indeed, addictive.

并因此考虑了一种可能性，即一种控制糖的方式——就像控制香烟一样——就是确定它们确实会上瘾。

These sugars are very probably unique in that they are both a nutrient and a psychoactive substance with some addictive characteristics.

这些糖很可能是独一无二的，因为它们既是一种营养物质，又是一种精神活性物质，具有一些上瘾的特征。

Historians have often considered the sugar-as-a-drug metaphor to be an apt one.

历史学家们通常认为“糖就像毒品”的比喻是恰当的。

"That sugars, particularly highly refined sucrose, produce peculiar physiological effects is well known," wrote Sidney Mintz, whose 1985 book Sweetness and Power is one of two seminal English-language histories of sugar.

西德尼·明茨在1985年出版的《甜蜜与力量》一书中写道：“众所周知，糖，尤其是高度精炼的蔗糖，会产生特殊的生理效应。”

But these effects are neither as visible nor as long-lasting as those of alcohol or caffeinated drinks, "the first use of which can trigger rapid changes in respiration, heartbeat, skin colour and so on".

但它的影响既不像酒精或咖啡因饮料那样明显，也不像它们那样持久，“首次使用糖会引发呼吸、心跳、肤色等方面的快速变化”。