Reducing sweetness

My views on this are not fully formed, so I would welcome other opinions.

Until recently, I thought part of the solution to calories from sugar should be a progressive 1-2% a year sugar content reduction across a wide range of food and drink products and this would work as well as it has done for salt.

But now I’m not so sure. Sweetness with calories can so easily be replaced by sweetness without calories. Sweetness reduction would depend on unprecedented government and industry co-operation. Even then, it would be unlikely to work unless consumer choice was massively curtailed.

Is anyone seriously suggesting that desserts and confectionery should be outlawed ? Let chocolate be chocolate.

The deciding factor in my change of heart was being told that the benchmark for sweetness in all our tastes is the natural sweetness of breast milk for babies. And no one has advocated changing that.