We already prefer it, that’s why it costs more.

But sugar is both heavily subsidized and a preservative, so it’s both cheap and useful for producers to use, and they’re not going to stop. At least, not while it keeps being so heavily subsidized.

The dumb idea would be the sugar percentage is a VAT on the product.

Your product has 20% sugar by mass/volume well the item is now taxed at 10% regular GST and now has an additional 20%.

On the surface it incentives lower sugar in products but as a complex issue a simple solution like that will cause more problems then it really solves.

A synthesized alternative that has all the useful properties of sugar — sweet taste, raising the freezing point of water, stability under heat for baking, no aftertaste, being able to form a melts-slowly-in-water hard substance — without the calories of sugar or drawbacks of some artificial sweeteners, like being a laxative.

I’m going to be honest, though — for most uses, we don’t really need sugar today. We have alternative sweeteners.

The main places I know of where we don’t have a great alternative established is:

• Hard candies (xylitol tends to be used IME in the candies I’ve seen, which is a laxative).

• Slushies (where raising the freezing point of water is necessary to achieve the consistency); vegetable glycerin has been used for this, but it causes blood sugar to crash. There have been some instances in the UK — where this has been used — of where a very small kid is given a large slushie, and it causes their blood sugar to drop so far that it reaches dangerous levels.

  www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0l196l2k8ko

  The brightly coloured drinks are designed to appeal to children - but most contain the naturally occurring sweetener glycerol, instead of sugar, to stop them freezing solid and give the slushy effect.

  Current Food Standards Agency (FSA) advice says under-fives should avoid the drinks and under-11s should have no more than one.

  The advice is due to concerns that if a young child drinks a slushy too quickly, glycerol intoxication could cause shock, hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar) and loss of consciousness.

  Arla, two, and Albie, four, both ended up in hospital after drinking slushies.

  All of the children in the study, published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, needed accident-and-emergency (A&E) treatment after becoming acutely ill within an hour of having the drinks, mostly between 2018 and 2024.

A sugar tax. After that was introduced in Britain, food producers reduced the amount of sugar in their products to maximize profit.