sugar intake (Bad v Good)

I've been struggling with the good sugar vs bad sugar question myself. Won't sugar, even GOOD sugar turn into fat if not used?

All calories turn into fat if not used. That's why we count calories.

This. You really only need to pay close attention to sugar intake if you have a medical reason to. There's no reason you couldn't eat even a candy bar if you budgeted for it in your calorie allowance, it won't turn into fat if the body can use it. And if you're eating at a deficit, your body is going to use it.

Yeah. To be fair, there is a lot of semi-reasonable science and even (gasp!) consensus in the medical world that eating EXCESSIVE added sugar is bad for your health. But I also think a lot of the consensus is more around the idea that people eat too much junk food, junk food has a lot of calories, not a lot of nutrients, and the sugar : fiber ratio is such that insulin spikes can occur and insulin spikes are bad. People should eat less junk food. (This is not the same as saying people can never have junk food).

But even Robert Lustig, who is kind of king of the anti-sugar brigade, has recently been quoted in the NY Times as saying that sugar in whole fruit is NO BIG DEAL, we can chill about it. The worst thing he says about fruit is that we should be very skeptical of the healthfulness of fruit juice, but only because it's calorie (sugar) dense without any fiber to mitigate the insulin response.

Again, the kind of LIVABLE advice that just about everyone agrees on: eat all the whole fruit you want, really, but watch your calories. Get plenty of fiber. Try to eat much less junk food. It's okay to have junk food once in a while if you really "need" it.

The problem with sugar is no one is sure how to track it. Government regulation regarding food labels is in a particularly messed up place right now regarding sugar, because they want to give people advice about reducing sugar from processed junk, they want to incent manufacturers to sweeten packaged food less, but don't know how to create an enforceable, meaningful system. If Unilever came out with a cracker tomorrow that had sugar or corn syrup to flavor it, that would definitely be added sugar. But if Unilever sweetened the cracker with grape juice extract, that would also have sugar (probably the same amount, chemically), and no better for you. Could Unilever market that product "sweetened with fruit juice, no added sugar"? Compare that to Nabisco's Fig Newtons. Obviously the fruit filling has actual whole fruit in it. That's good, right? Less obviously, the filling also has additional sweeteners in it, and of course the cake around the filling is also sweetened. What kind of standard could governments create for tracking "added sugar" that was meaningful? And so they are currently in a place where all sugar is tracked on the label, even though the health people don't think we need to worry about sugar in whole fruit as long as we're counting the calories.