A ban on manufacturing and distributing alcohol, known as Prohibition, began on January 19, 1920 in the U.S. The law lead to, as laws often do, much more than its intended outcome.

Before its repeal on December 5, 1933, this one lost the federal government about $11 billion in taxable revenue while costing it more than $300 million to implement. State incomes were adversely affected, too. New York, for example, lost more than 70 percent of its prior tax revenue.

As a result, both the federal and state governments increased the personal income tax for all but the poorest Americans. That these tax increases were not — repeat, not — repealed along with Prohibition will probably come as no surprise to you.

Here’s something, however, that probably will. America’s consumption of sugar skyrocketed during Prohibition.

That America’s use of sugar did not decline after Prohibition, though, will not.

After all, if you legally eliminate one form of self-indulgence, American ingenuity will simply create another. And if it’s good tasting — and possibly addictive to boot — why would it ever wane?

For instance, in 1923 someone recognized that freezing sugar water with a bit of pureed fruit or fruit flavoring around a wooden stick tasted good and was also a great way to combat the summer’s heat. In 1924, 6.5 million of those things incorrectly called popsicles were sold. (Popsicle is the trademarked name of one specific brand of frozen sugar water on a stick and therefore should be capitalized and not used generically.)

Moreover, ice cream had only been mildly popular before Prohibition. A dramatic increase in sales occurred afterwards. Compared to 1916 figures, ice cream sales in the U.S. had increased by 55 percent after five years of Prohibition.

But the greatest increase in sugar consumption during this time probably came from those giving up booze guzzling soda. While there’s no definitive way to track this assertion, the yearly U.S. consumption rates of sugar surely suggest it.

By 1925 and the advent of the soda dispensing machine (another example of good old American ingenuity), the average American was ingesting more than 110 pounds of sugar yearly — about 35 pounds more per year than before alcohol became illegal. And there’s no way that the increase in ice cream and Popsicle consumption accounted for more than a few pounds of this overall increase.

Since Prohibition, only two events have temporarily curtailed America’s increasing use of sugar: the rationing of it during WWII and the improvement of artificial sweeteners during the middle 1970s. While current sugar use has decreased somewhat after topping out at a teeth-rotting rate of just more than 150 pounds per person per year in 2001, it still hovers around 130 pounds, nearly double the pre-Prohibition average.

That increase in sugar consumption is doing now what Prohibition did then: creating all sorts of unintended consequences — all of which adversely affect health.

For example, a study released in August by the journal Scientific Reports linked the use of sugar to depression. But don’t dismiss this outcome as more proof that a bad day at work often leads to that half gallon of Hagen-Daz being polished off after the kids are put to bed.

The researchers from University College London Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health in the United Kingdom employed a mathematical model that factored out situations like that — where prior feelings led to the sugar consumption — and dealt only with the feelings that sugar consumption produced. A prior study that used older women from the U.S. rather than men from the U.K. found that those with high levels of sugar in their diet had greater rates of depression than those who consumed less sugar.

Yet sugar consumption not only adversely affects your mental state immediately but it also seems to compromise your brain function eventually.

A study published this year in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia that used information on 4,000 adults over the age of 54 from the Framingham Heart Study determined that when compared to those who infrequently consumed sugar-sweetened beverages, those who consumed one to two per day had more brain aging and less ability to recall past events. Both are factors that have been linked to eventually developing Alzheimer’s disease.

And do not forget that a 2014 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that linked the intake of added sugars to an increase in cardiovascular disease prompted three researchers to write a letter to the editor published in January of 2015 urging all in the medical field not to dismiss the addictive quality of sugar. In their letter, they cited their studies with animals that demonstrated “druglike withdrawal when sugar is unavailable.”

They also let it be known that their research demonstrated that animals consuming sugar in laboratory settings exhibited reactions in the “reward-related brain regions similar to animals using substances like alcohol and nicotine.”