No one would reconsider a Milky Way if they knew it had 70% of the recommended daily sugar intake. The people who care about sugar intake avoid Milky Ways and similar candies already.

IMO one great labeling victory has been restaurants that put calorie info on menus. Some of that has been by regulation, but regardless it's a good move.

> The people who care about sugar intake avoid Milky Ways and similar candies already.

This may be true, but this statement is also missing the (possibly large?) group of people that simply have no benchmark in their mind for how much sugar is acceptable.

I've read several competing articles about daily limits to added sugar, and the number I have in my mind is 80g/day max. Given that a teaspoon of sugar is roughly 4g, this amounts to 20 teaspoons of sugar per day! I've wondered if nutrition labels listing sugar in terms of teaspoons instead of grams would help people visualize exactly how much sugar they are consuming.

I would agree that those who care about sugar intake probably will avoid Milky Ways, but I'm also concerned that if we don't have a % DV on sugar, people will perhaps assume that there is no ceiling. Why do we have % DV for fat, carbs, etc., but not sugar? Hmm, well maybe it's that no amount of sugar you eat today will harm you.

As a curious experiment, walk down the street and randomly survey people for how many grams of sugar they think they should limit themselves to.

They don't exactly lie. This is the tricky thing with candy: it's damn hard to eat just one. Everyone (except possilby diabetics, I don't know) would be fine with eating a milky way every 2-3 days, but that's not how the brain works on sugar. I can and do rarely eat 300g of chocolate inside an hour. I'm pretty sure that's a little bit dangerous, but the only way to avoid it is to not buy the chocolate in the first place. Once I've given myself permission to start eating it's all gone real quick.

>Why lie? It's heavily-processed, high-fat, high-sugar candy

What part of claiming to be able to enjoy a chocolate bar if you eat otherwise healthy is a "lie"? It's only "unhealthy" in the context of your overall diet.

Would you say marmalade is healthy? It's certainly tasty. It has calories so in the context of starvation, it's absolutely healthy. What's so tacky about this is that there are only cynical reasons to discuss manifestly unhealthy candy in the context of a balanced diet. A candy bar has zero value in a balanced diet, like marmalade.