I want to tell you that I rarely touch sugar.

It's what I tell myself. After all, I mostly cook from scratch. I keep no biscuits in the house. Water is the only fizzy drink I consume and I can't remember the last time I filled a sugar bowl.

My expanding waistline has been a mystery to me - until today. I took a close look at my sugar intake yesterday. It was an unusual day because I was driving a long distance, but still. Breakfast included a crunch oat cereal and two helpings of home-made raspberry jam with toast. For lunch, I stopped at a motorway service station for a panini with a sweet beetroot relish and a chocolate brownie.

Thirty miles later I ate two boiled sweets from the glove compartment (sticky with age). At home, supper was virtuous fish and greens but then I went and spoiled it by having a gin and tonic and rounded off the evening with two squares of dark chocolate.

It's not hard to see how the sugar mounts up. It's concealed in so much of what we eat. The average Briton's intake is one kilogram of sugar a week. That's right; a whole kilo, the equivalent of 34 teaspoons of sugar every day. This is despite a dip in sales of bags of sugar and products such as honey. Much of it is in everyday items like bread, yoghurt, cereal or soup.

So when we read that doctors are warning about the need to cut down, it's not some reckless and feckless section of the population they are speaking to. It's you and me.

We are the addicts. It's our fix that is threatening to bring the NHS crashing to its knees. In 2013, two thirds of Scottish adults were overweight. More than a quarter were obese. No wonder obesity costs the NHS in Scotland £600 million a year.

Obesity is associated with a whole range of other ailments. There is a greater risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoarthritis and, of course, the alarming increase in type 2 diabetes. It's a ticking time bomb for the NHS, which is already facing an impossible squeeze from health inflation, an ageing population and dementia.

So what are we going to do about it? Should we be made to pay for our unhealthy sugar indulgence? Should sugar be taxed to deter us from eating so much and to provide extra money for the NHS? Or should we demand legislation to strike hidden sugars from our diets completely, a fight that would make getting rid of Trident look like child's play.

Sugar, in syrup form, was added to processed food in 1980, when fat content was reduced. The aim was to make the food palatable. And how we loved it. Food producers and fizzy drinks manufacturers profit from our addiction. Meanwhile we grow lardy and unhealthy. This, in turn, fuels a profitable diet industry.

Basically we, the consumers, have been conned. We went through a parallel process when we discovered the addictive qualities and health risks of "relaxing" cigarettes. One of the differences this time is that sugar is said by some experts to be more addictive than nicotine. In one experiment rats were more attracted to sugar than to cocaine, even when they were cocaine addicted.

Just think what could happen to our society if we did quit the sugar habit. Instead of the cost of putting children in hospital children to remove their rotting teeth, undertaking bariatric surgery to reduce stomach size or providing drugs to the diabetic, we could redirect that money to improve cancer survival rates and invest in research to prevent or cure Alzheimer's. Imagine the pressure in money and time that could be lifted from our hospitals.

With poor diets causing 70,000 premature deaths a year across the UK, it's no wonder doctors are calling for a 20 per cent tax on sugar. They want the money redirected to subsidise fresh fruit and vegetables. The Food and Drink federation say the move won't work (surprise, surprise). But a similar tax in Mexico cut sugar consumption.

But is a 20 per cent tax enough? I don't think so but it would be a start. Later this week the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition is expected to recommend that sugars in our diet should be derived from natural products such as fruit and honey and that they should not exceed five per cent of our energy intake.

At present, toddlers typically have twice that amount in their diet. Sugar accounts for 15.6 per cent of the average teenage diet and falls back to around one tenth of a pensioner's.

So we consume at least double the recommended daily intake almost from birth.

Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at the University of California who wrote the book, Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth about Sugar, has studied the subject for 17 years. He is clear that we metabolise sugar differently from a carbohydrate like flour. He says; "Added sugar is 11 times more potent at causing diabetes than general calories. It creates an appetite for itself by a determinable hormonal mechanism that you could no more break with will power than you could stop feeling thirsty through sheer strength of character.'

Sugar is the habit we need to break. But is it right to go down the route of taxing or even banning it?

After all, the NHS spends its time fixing what we have broken yet we don't levy a fine on amateur sportsmen who crowd into A&E or have a toll on mountains where people ski or a health levy on those who like horse riding. Any attempt would trigger accusations of a nanny state and an erosion of civil liberty.

But this issue is so serious and so costly in terms of lives blighted or lost that its challenge is more comparable to minimum pricing for alcohol or above-inflation tax rises on cigarettes. The Scottish Government's website states: "The alcohol problem in Scotland is so significant that ground-breaking measures are now required." Change the word alcohol to obesity and the statement holds.

For the few - and I am hoping to be one of them - there is a route out of the vortex of eating hidden sugar, craving more of it and climbing ever higher on the scales. It's a challenge that confronts addicts of all varieties and it's called complete abstinence.

I'm fortunate in that I don't have to eat in a canteen or cook for a family. The only thing standing between me and my goal is grit, or the lack of it. What spurs me on is the example of friends who have tried it. Without dieting, they each watched their weight drop. They also lost the desire to eat sweet things.

It requires diligence. It necessitates reading the small print on every single item in the supermarket basket. And it shouldn't be necessary. The vast majority of people can't fit this sort of behaviour into a busy life. If the state needs to interfere it should be to remove at source the unhealthy ingredient and thereby lower the nation's intake of sugar. It will involve all-out war with the food industry just as it has with the tobacco giants. But it's a just war.