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Comment by Fishkins | Hacker News Reader

Of course sugar is literally a poison. So is water. I think what you mean is in practice it doesn't really matter.

No, it really isn't. "Sugar" is not a poison. "A very large dose of sugar" is a poison. It's a very important distinction. Small or moderate amounts of sugar do not cause problems, and in fact give the organism more energy to work with. If you take the position that the substance is a poison simply because it's possible to hurt yourself if you take ridiculous amounts of it, then the term 'poison' becomes meaningless. Everything then becomes a poison, and it's then completely redundant to label something a poison.

Besides, sugar is the primary fuel for your brain; without sugar, we don't exist. It's a funny sort of poison that is necessary for our existence.

I'm not saying it's useful to call sugar a poison, and I don't generally refer to it as one. I'm saying it fits the definitions I've seen of poison, and that makes it literally a poison.

> Besides, sugar is the primary fuel for your brain; without sugar, we don't exist. It's a funny sort of poison that is necessary for our existence.

Arsenic, along with several other low-dose poisons, is also necessary for our existence[0]. Do you disagree it's a poison?

0 - http://www.chemicool.com/elements/arsenic.html

Let's stop being silly. No substance is or is not a poison. You have to talk about concentration and mass relative to everyday exposure when you claim something is poison.

Your definition of poison includes literally everything and isn't very useful, or what anyone means when they use the word "poison".

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