Story highlights Researchers seeing similar effects from too much sugar and too much alcohol

Alcohol is simply the distillation of sugar, she says, and sugar should be taxed and regulated

Schmidt: We may be thinking about obesity and chronic disease in the wrong way

She says tackling obesity and chronic disease will be hard, but concerned people can do plenty

Laura Schmidt and her colleagues, Robert Lustig and Claire Brindis, are the authors of "The toxic truth about sugar." To read the full commentary, visit the science journal Nature.

(CNN) I am a medical sociologist, which means I study the health of whole societies. I've spent more than 20 years studying the best possible ways to address alcohol problems in societies -- what works and what doesn't to protect people from harm.

I work as a professor in the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine and at the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute. This allows me to connect with other scientists who come from very different backgrounds but who want to work together on big problems -- think of a Manhattan Project, only one focused on protecting health through the collaboration of scientists who study everything from tiny cells to entire societies.

So three years ago, a pediatric endocrinologist named Rob Lustig walks into my office and asks for my help. Rob tells me that he's finding many connections between the metabolism of fructose (sugar) and ethanol (alcohol) in his work on metabolic functioning, liver damage and the obesity epidemic.

Rob runs the obesity clinic at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, where he spends his days trying to help morbidly obese kids who feel hungry all the time. One of the saddest effects of sugar overconsumption is to dampen the natural hormones that tell kids' bodies when they've eaten enough, leading them to feel hungry even as they overeat.

Rob says he's also seeing that too much sugar in these kids' diets causes severe liver damage -- they have even started doing liver transplants on some of the kids in his clinic.

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