Sugar doesn't cause kids to be hyperactive, if that's what you are referring to:

https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/busting-sugar-hyper...

I have to agree and disagree at the same time.

I used to be boy scout. A week long camp typically gets lot more tolerable around day 3. At the same time the kids typically run out of candy and cell phone battery.

I'd say the problem is not high blood sugar from eating too much sugar. The problem is low blood sugar about 30min after eating all that sugar. And kids are great at keeping themselves busy enough, so they don't notice being hungry. But they do get cranky without exception.

And even then the problem is not the candy. It's the fact that they supplement "real food" with candy. And the blood sugar seesaw starts to reverb.

I'm all for eating way less sugar, but you might as well say people are addicted to food. The body needs energy, of course providing it with energy alters its physical and mental state.

Totally agree that in current times food is an addiction. Since when do we need to eat 3 meals a day? At least 90 percent of modern humans history, we used hunting and gathering to survive. Only in the last 10 percent we have agriculture, and much much later, refrigerators, supermarkets and convenience stores. If we needed this much food our species wouldn't last a week before agriculture. Spoiler alert: we lasted 300,000 years.

Agreed - and it's been proven (citation needed) that a low calorie diet prolonges life.

But here we are, needing to consume more energy because we do things (good, bad, useless or wasteful) with our time (and these things aren't directly looking for food.)

Yes but it causes an immediate spike in blood glucose levels, which if unused, is stored as fat. That's what makes it dangerous - people generally seem to consume sugar when it is least needed, making it especially detrimental.

>drug: a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.

You basically made his point for him.

I think I saw a documentary where they showed that brain scans of people addicted to sugar looked the same as those addicted to cocaine, and in some lab-rat study where they got rats/mice addicted to both sugar and cocaine, and got the choice to picke between them, they chose sugar over cocaine 9 times out of 10.