Anything can be addictive. If anything, broader use of the term would serve to disarm it, not strengthen it, and that's a good thing given how poorly the law ha

Anything can be addictive. If anything, broader use of the term would serve to disarm it, not strengthen it, and that's a good thing given how poorly the law handles addiction and addictive substances. I understand dependence as requiring something to feel "normal" for whatever definition of "normal" an individual has. By this definition, I am addicted to and dependent on food, sleep, caffeine, medication, socializing, novelty, and reading. I find that I have a hard time doing less of these things, and sometimes these things get in the way of my ability to do other, healthier, more productive things. For some of these things, doing less of them would directly harm my physical health. With this in mind, I have met many for whom sugar is an addictive substance far more deleterious to their health than even cocaine is, for example, to others I know. They've struggled with problems like diabetes and obesity, and they've even lost jobs because of their relationship with sugar. Moreover, some of them respond aggressively and defensively, much like any other addict, when friends and family try to raise the issue with them, and some of them have tried and failed to give up sugar countless times, again like anyone else struggling with addiction. Earlier this year, I lost my mom to diabetic coma, in part, because she couldn't stop herself from eating candy and cookies all the time. She tried to stop, but she couldn't kick the habit of having a "dessert" before bed followed by the insulin necessary to control her blood sugar. It was her way of calming herself down enough to fall asleep at night. Eventually, she accidentally took too much, and no one found her until morning, long after hypoglycemia had destroyed most of her brain. She died of overdose like any other addict, although the thing she overdosed on, exogenous insulin, was a sort of secondary dependency caused by her primary dependency on sugar. The medical staff at the hospital insisted on steering me away from this terminology when discussing what happened, but their reasons were politics and marketing, not anything truly descriptive or scientific. Their fear was similar to yours in that they worried that patients might refuse insulin treatment if it was at all associated with the labels of "addiction" and "dependence." I can't help but think that she might still be around if her physician had treated her relationship with sugar more seriously or if they had more thoroughly warned her about the dangers of exogenous insulin in the context of addiction and dependence. After all, the use of exogenous insulin leads to the downregulation of insulin receptors causing "true" physiological dependence by way of a mechanism very similar to that of benzodiazepines, opioids, and alcohol. The same could be said for sugar in its role as a causal factor of diabetes itself.