Many actually do, just not in a direct way. Change the word "sugar" to "carbs" or even "starch", and plenty of people will tell you that you need "good carbs" or the like. That's exactly what I and many others were taught in both high school and college level courses on human health. It's bogus because, for all intents and purposes, you can treat carbs and sugar the same. Lactose and fructose being partial exceptions, of course, and not in a good way.

Speaking of fructose, absolutely there are people promoting sugar as part of a "balanced" diet. You know what's in fruit, right?

Sugar actually was for a time touted as energy you either use or excrete, and that's an idea that's been discredited to the extent that most people know that sugar is considered harmful. They believe this because sugar is indefensible, hence the agriculture industrial complex have thrown it under the bus. Yet they insist that fruits, starchy vegetables, and whole grains are part of a "balanced" diet. What is a balanced diet? A diet with all the essential nutrients despite the presence of exogenous carbohydrates and other things that reduce bio-availability?

A "balanced" diet successfully rebrands sugar as an essential nutrient. As long as it's in the form of lactose and galactose in your "healthy" yogurt, fructose in your "healthy" fruit, and glucose hydrolized from the carbs of "healthy" whole grains, few are the wiser. Even better if you can dump refined sugar into these things anyway and call it "dextrose" to confuse people.

Yes, I know I wrap a lot of things in quotes. I do so because I must emphasize how incorrect these ideas are.