THE bitter truth is that, as a species, we have a sweet tooth. No sugar tax or ban on junk food advertising will make it disappear. A liking for sugar is written into our biology – that's why we call those things that give us an easy hit of pleasure “sweet”. So resisting it is hard. It probably takes more than a few extra pennies on a soda to make us hold back from the easy surplus that surrounds us. That doesn’t mean a tax isn’t warranted; but it will take something bigger to save us from the obesity and diabetes epidemic that many scientists link with sugar overconsumption.

Some lucky people find it easy to resist sugar. I'm not one of them. In the course of researching this column I managed to get through three-quarters of a mint chocolate bar – despite the fact that diabetes has afflicted many in my family and I have a wariness of sugar that leads me now and again to attempt abolishing all sources but fresh fruit from my diet, or instate regimes of always cooking from scratch for my kids.

I chomped through that bar even while reading last week's Food Standards Scotland report calling for the food industry to be given 12 months to come up with alternative ways of reducing sugar consumption, and for the Scottish Government to consider a sugar tax. And an extra 50p on my bar would not have stopped me from eating it.

You don’t need to convince me that sugar is bad for me. I even made my children watch Jamie Oliver’s Sugar Rush in the hope that the gory details would avoid any further arguments about why their chocolate should be put away in the cupboard, only to be eaten late at night by the grown-ups. “Warning”, I might as well have been saying, while holding up a photograph of some gruesome pathology, "sugar can cause a slow and painful death.”

My instinct therefore is to applaud a sugar tax. Anything to rescue me from the continual sweet temptations of contemporary life; anything so I don’t have to have another one of those conversations with my kids about how juice can rot their teeth; anything not to peer at an unassuming cereal box and discover it contains over 20 per cent sugars.

But of course, a tax won't achieve all this. What’s required is a profound change to our consumer culture, as well as ourselves. By all means, let's have a tax, more for its symbolic effect than its immediate impact on consumption (one UK study found that a 20 per cent increase in price would result in only a 4 kcal per day reduction per person), but we need to try everything else too. We need smaller portions, less hidden sugars, a reduction in advertising, the elimination of end-of-aisle displays, a clampdown on promotions of sugary food, a widespread reduction in the sugar content of soft drinks and a clearer definition of what high sugar is and means.

That includes all natural sugars. Apple juice may be unsweetened, but it still contains more sugar than Coca-Cola.

Most of us don't need to be told that sugar is bad for us. We know it's the devil’s food. Yet we keep on consuming, gobbling up the products of sugar-happy food corporations. We parents keep on handing out handfuls of sweeties at children’s parties; and even those of us who complain about the sugary puddings served with school meals, are also churning out cupcakes for the school bake sale.

Predictably, the global food industry isn’t letting sugar taxes in without a fight. But while it's easy to draw analogies between sugar lobbyists and Big Tobacco, we should be cautious. Sugar is not tobacco. It is a natural part of our diet. And, while the links between smoking and cancer are inarguable, that sugar is the direct cause of diabetes and obesity is, though increasingly convincing, still disputed. What's more while smoking, with its second-hand fumes, was quickly caricatured as an anti-social habit, it's impossible to make such a case for sugar. If you each too much it's no-one's problem but your own.

The other question is whether such a tax would work. A soda tax introduced in Mexico in 2013, reportedly produced a 6 per cent reduction in sugary drinks consumption. But here in Britain, we consume around half as much soda per capita as global chart-toppers Argentina and the United States. As the Food Standards Scotland report noted, though sugary drinks consumption has fallen by a fifth, we have made up for it with sweets, biscuits, cakes and pastries. To tackle sugar, we have to look beyond just fizzy drinks.

Meanwhile, sugar is not our only problem. Saccharine has been linked to metabolic diseases and obesity. If we tax sugar, should we then tax sweeteners? Or processed meat, given a recent report compared it to smoking as a health risk?

Without a doubt, the food and drink companies sometimes referred to as Big Sugar need to change their ways. The culture, the national diet, the corporate food environment, all need to transform in order to help individuals. We live, love, work and eat according to the norms of our society. A shift in the norm has happened for tobacco. It could happen for sugar too, but there's no single action that will prompt it. That's why we need everything in the toolbox. Tax included.