How climate change is fueling your sugar addiction
Rising temperatures are feeding America's sweet tooth — and creating a new public health challenge in the process.
In the thick of summer, little else can seem more appealing than the promised respite of an ice cream cone or a chilled can of soda. Turns out that as climate change warms up the planet, that sugary siren song is getting louder: A new study published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change found that as temperatures have gotten hotter, Americans have been buying more artificially sweetened treats.
By examining a national sample of U.S. household consumer purchases between 2004 and 2019, and cross-comparing that with localized weather data, analyzing temperatures, precipitation, humidity, and wind speed, the researchers found that added sugar consumption for Americans has been rising in lockstep with average temperatures. They also used climate projections to predict how these trends could align with future climatic changes, finding that if emissions continue unchecked, excess sugar consumption would soar by the end of the century. It’s the latest piece of evidence in a mountain of research showing how climate change is reshaping what we eat and how we eat it.
“Rising temperatures do make a difference on what you eat and drink,” said Pan He, study author and a senior lecturer in environmental social sciences and sustainability at Cardiff University. “We don’t take much of a second thought on what we eat and drink and how that can be responding to climate change, but in fact, this research shows it would.”
For every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, added sugar consumption in U.S. households increased by around 0.7 grams per person per day between 2004 and 2019, the scientists found, with a notable escalation as temperatures hit between 68 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit. That tallies up to more than 100 million pounds of added sugar consumed in a year, when compared to how much of the stuff people ingested 15 years earlier. The spikes in sugar intake were concentrated when temperatures moved between 54 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with the highest surges in the form of sugar-sweetened drinks like soda and juice, while frozen desserts followed suit. (Pastries and other baked goods saw notable dips in consumer purchasing trends in the studied periods.) The international research team also predict sugar consumption nationwide could increase by nearly 3 grams a day by 2095 in a future of high greenhouse gas emissions.
This dynamic of rising temperatures feeding our cravings for sweet treats is hardly unexpected. After all, it’s well known that warmer weather makes bodies lose more water, causing people to crave sources of hydration, and that people generally tend to love sweetened things, especially in liquid form. The study charts a new course by connecting two distinct bodies of research by examining exactly what the human body craves when temperatures hike and people need relief.
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Inequities abound in the data, too. The amount of added sugar consumed during hotter spells is proportionally much higher for low-income American families when compared to the wealthiest households — even up to five times the difference. The health implications of this could be enormous, according to He, including increased risk of diabetes, poor cardiovascular health, obesity, and several cancers, among other complications.
“The importance is why this is so,” added He. She explained that while the researchers didn’t examine the motivating factors behind this in their research, they did find that different working environments associated with social class could be contributing to the economic divide. Lower-income households tend to have occupations where people are working outdoors, exposing them more directly to heat spells.
Other experts aren’t sold on the significance of the new paper. Andrew Odegaard, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UC Irvine, who was not involved with the research, called the findings and language used by the authors “overstated” and “limited, with extremely strong assumptions.” According to Odegaard, the findings, while of “statistical significance,” are “likely immaterial from a basic clinical nutritional or health perspective.” He argued that the results “also contradict other more granular, comprehensive and representative data on added sugar intake in the US population, which has actually gone down/leveled off.”
To put these findings into clearer context, it helps to understand just how much Americans already consume. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control approximates that the average daily sugar consumption for Americans falls somewhere around 68 grams per person — which is equivalent to roughly 17 teaspoons. Kelly Horton, senior vice president of public policy & government relations at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, noted that leading health authorities recommend a daily intake “significantly lower than this.” A 2023 study found that though added sugar consumption in the U.S. has declined in recent decades, “many Americans still consume too much,” while another recent study found one in three U.S. youths consume more than 15 percent of their daily total calories from added sugars.
“We have seen with this study, and other studies, that Americans, especially children, are consuming way higher amounts in terms of added sugars and their diet,” said Eric Crosbie, a political scientist studying public health policy at the University of Nevada, Reno, who also did not participate in the new paper.
Crosbie added that the scientists’ findings share connective tissue with a policy document out last week that has America’s public health community abuzz: the Trump administration’s long-awaited Make America Healthy Again strategy report. “So the way this ties into the MAHA report is there’s actually very little in [the MAHA report] about addressing the reduction of sugar with children. The stuff that is mentioned, it doesn’t seem like there’s a clear plan,” he said. “It’s a lot of lip service. It’s a lot of, they’ll say that they’ll address this, but there’s really no coherent plan or strategy.”
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Led by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the MAHA document advances earlier statements from the administration about the urgent need to reform the diets of Americans to reduce chronic illnesses in kids. Though the plan calls the average American child’s diet a source of “declining health” and identifies excess sugar consumption as one of the contributing factors behind the issue — “sugar is poison” has been a rallying cry of RFK Jr. this year — food and nutrition experts say the commission’s roadmap lacks regulatory teeth.
For instance, noticeably absent from the plan is any mention of increasing taxes on sugary drinks, a strategy that has been proven to be highly effective in reducing household sugar consumption, according to Crosbie. An excise tax enacted between 2017 and 2018 on sugary beverages in Seattle, Boulder, Philadelphia, Oakland, and San Francisco yielded dramatic results when beverage product purchasing rates in all five cities fell by about 33 percent after retail prices were increased by 33.1 percent in the same timeframe. “That’s a big, big mistake to miss that,” said Crosbie. “A lot of us in the public health community feel the report has been hijacked by the corporations.”
Now, it appears as though the Trump administration may be poised to ignore another contributing factor to the high amount of sugar in Americans’ diets — climate change. Without concerted action to mitigate emissions, the new study demonstrates how the health burden of global warming could be magnified by the growing amount of excess sugar Americans are on track to consume as average temperatures continue to climb.
“We know that climate change is an existential public health threat, but there’s no mention of that in the MAHA report,” said Betsy Southerland, a 30-year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency and former director of science and technology in the agency’s Office of Water. “The way the MAHA report is designed, it’s very much in line with the anti-climate scientists, the climate deniers in the Trump administration. There’s no mention of greenhouse gas at all.” Sutherland told Grist the report also omits any requests to regulate processed foods or dyes, and multiple pathways to toxic exposure — all of which affect the food supply.
“It’s a spin document,” said Southerland. “Don’t pay any attention to what it says, pay attention to what they do in this administration to protect children’s health.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How climate change is fueling your sugar addiction on Sep 18, 2025.
