It's a play on the term "syntactic sugar": Too much syntactic sugar leads to syntactic diabetes. And syntactic sugar generally refers to language features that

It's a play on the term "syntactic sugar": Too much syntactic sugar leads to syntactic diabetes. And syntactic sugar generally refers to language features that allow you to write things in neater ways. It is always possible to "de-sugar" such constructs by writing them in a more basic way, which is usually less neat. Examples would be e.g. list comprehensions, for .. in syntax, x += 1 etc.