By dkl9, written 2024-175, revised 2024-175 (0 revisions)
Sugar, in the amounts many people eat it today, is clearly harmful. Most foods with lots of sugar (>10% by mass) are high-sugar fruits, or processed foods with added sugar, the latter being especially bad. People naturally tend to enjoy sugar and foods containing it (citation needed), so if we could destroy this natural enjoyment, we could decrease sugar consumption and improve health.
Getting gastrically sick is (ancestrally) a signal of toxic food. In some cases, it quickly teaches you to avoid what you ate around the sickness (conditioned taste aversion). Emetic drugs cause roughly the same effects as these kinds of gastric sickness. If you eat some sugar mixed with emetics, then — in theory — you will quickly come to hate the taste of sugar. This would hopefully generalise to hating any food containing a lot of sugar.
For now, this is all hypothetical. I see several ways this can go wrong, for some of which, I offer fixes.
Perhaps the aversion you learn is centred on the emetic — its taste or appearance — rather than the taste and appearance of sugar itself. To reduce this risk, use an odorless, tasteless emetic, in the form of white powder, to blend in with the sugar.
Perhaps, as you eat the sugar-emetic mix, and experience the subsequent illness, it will remain clear in your mind that you mixed that emetic in. Had you skipped that step, it would have remained pure, innocent sugar. You learn to avoid, rather than "sugary things", instead "stuff where I know I just put in an emetic". You might solve this by eating a bit of pure sugar several times over some days. Have an assistant surprise you with an emetic mixed in on one of those days.
Perhaps the natural preference for sugar is too deep to fully condition away. Evolutionarily, it is very old: primitive animals enjoyed sugar long before any of them had digestive tracts like that of mammals. Best case, the radical cure fails. Worst case, you learn the association with the opposite valence, and start enjoying vomiting.