On a cold November night in Manhattan, stick-thin women queue outside a late-night bakery so they can buy boxes of cupcakes groaning with so much sugar that you get a head rush just looking at them. The Magnolia bakery in New York’s West Village kicked off a cupcake craze when Carrie and Miranda visited it in an episode of Sex and the City. I’ve watched the clip of Sarah Jessica Parker pushing a rose-coloured cupcake into her face in slow motion, and it’s a faintly disgusting spectacle. But the truth is that there’s no elegant way to eat a cupcake, which is why customers adopt self-mocking smiles as the fluorescent globules of frosting tumble down their chins. The episode was screened 12 years ago, and still the craze rages. Yummy mummies in cosmopolitan cities can’t get enough of the things - yet they maintain their gazelle-like figures. I once heard a New York journalist suggest that there must be a parking lot at the back of the Magnolia where the thinnest customers threw them up. Bad taste, I know. But, as it happens, cupcakes are a favourite food of bulimics. Let’s be clear about this. We think we like cupcakes because they are “retro” and transport us back to our childhoods. Nonsense. The nostalgia thing is an excuse. We actually like them because they allow us to mainline sugar. Sugar is one of the substances and objects that are carving new patterns of addictive behaviour in a disorientated world. This behaviour is the subject of my new book, The Fix: How Addiction is Invading Our Lives and Taking Over Your World. Along with prescription drugs, internet porn, computer games and dozens of other consumer items, we are forming an intimate relationship with sugary snacks that supplements and complements the “traditional” addictions to alcohol, gambling and illegal drugs. These new objects of desire may not be drugs - though they have a drug-like capacity to stimulate the brain - but they mimic the addictive process of replacing the people in your life with things that yield guaranteed but short-term rewards. Year after year, the West’s love affair with sugar intensifies. But we pay very little attention to our compulsive attitude to the stuff. This is partly because we don’t like to think about it - and partly because we’ve been misled into thinking that our consumption of saturated fat lies at the heart of obesity and eating disorders. Increasing numbers of doctors think sugar does more harm to our arteries and our waistlines than fat. So does the restaurateur Henry Dimbleby, who runs the award-winning Leon chain of restaurants. “Sugar is our number one eating problem - I think 40 per cent of the population has some sort of addiction to it,” he says. “Watch what happens in an office when somebody walks in carrying a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. There’s a general squealing sound and everyone rushes over excitedly. You’d think someone had just arrived at a party with a few grams of coke. People descend on it in the same way.”

Is that because sugar is addictive? In February 2011, a team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, published a report in the journal Nature entitled “Public health: The toxic truth about sugar.” This dismissed the popular notion of sugar as “empty” calories. On the contrary, they were bad calories: “A little is not a problem, but a lot kills — slowly.” We’ve known for years that refined sugar is also implicated in damaging the liver and kidneys and is the main cause of the worldwide spread of Type 2 diabetes. “If these results were obtained in experiments with any illegal drug, they would certainly be used to justify the most severe form of retribution against those unfortunate enough to be caught in possession of such a dangerous substance,” writes Michael Gossop of the National Addiction Centre at King’s College, London. But is sugar actually a drug? Gossop thinks so. As he puts it, if a casual visitor from another galaxy were to drop in on planet earth, he would assume that human beings were even heavier drug users than we already are. Why? Because vast numbers of us ingest a white crystalline substance several times a day. We become agitated if we run out of supplies, and produce lame excuses for why we need another dose. We say we rely on it for “energy”, but we’re deluding ourselves. The energy rush from sugar is followed by a corresponding crash: it’s physiologically useless. But it is strongly reminiscent of the ups and downs associated with, say, cocaine. Evidence published by Princeton scientists in 2008 demonstrates that rats can get addicted to sugar in the same way that they get addicted to cocaine and amphetamines. In contrast, there’s no such damning data in the case of fat. You may have a deep love of Kentucky Fried Chicken and get fat as a result, but you’re less likely to eat it until you feel sick. Think back to the last office party you attended, and what was left over afterwards. I wonder if there has ever been an office “do” in which people had to clear away half-eaten boxes of chocolates — but didn’t need to throw away any sandwiches because they’d all been wolfed down. I doubt it. Cake is occasionally unfinished because it’s filling. Even then, however, it tends to be saved for later rather than discarded, unlike the poor sandwiches. Super-sugary doughnuts, however, never make it to the end of the party. It would be interesting to know what proportion of sweet as opposed to savoury food ends up in the world’s bins. Supermarkets are constantly ratcheting up our anxiety about fatty foods while pushing things called “mini-bites” at us. Speaking as a sugar addict myself, I can only describe these as an invention of the devil. Mini-bites are targeted at bored office workers. The manufacturers take the most indulgent cakes and desserts and distil them into morsels: chocolate cake, millionaire’s shortbread, raspberry doughnuts and rocky road — all shrunk to a size that absolves you of guilt. If you only eat one, that is. Unfortunately, they’re sold in buckets large enough to be visible from five desks away.