NEW YORK – According to Reuters, whether it’s bagged or boxed, brown or powdered, “Americans are buying markedly less sugar this year, a trend nowhere more noticeable than during the holidays when home-baking picks up.”

Citing Nielsen data, the news source notes that in the biggest decline in four years, sugar sales have dropped 4.4% in the year through October, a drop some grocers say is attributable to growing consumer sentiment toward health, obesity and diabetes.

Northeast retailer Stew Leonard Jr., CEO of Stew Leonard's supermarkets in New York and Connecticut, told the news source that his stores paired back shelf space devoted to sugar. "You can see that people are trying to cut back on it and not eating as much sugar as they used to,” he said.

Reuters writes that the shift from sugar comes in the last two years as the so-called “war on sugar” intensified in the United States, with the government, food companies and other anti-sugar and obesity advocates launching campaigns to add labels to products that contain added sweeteners.

"Sugar has become one of the new trendy enemies," Sean Lucan, a professor of family and social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, told Reuters. "It's almost become what dietary fat was in the 1980s and 1990s."

Meanwhile, some grocers have seen a surge in alternatives to traditional sugar, such as honey, agave, palm sugar and coconut sugar. "Customers are migrating toward less processed sugar, alternatively-sweetened products," Errol Schweizer, global grocery coordinator at Whole Foods, told the news source.

Ahold USA, which owns supermarkets including Stop & Shop and Giant Food, has not seen a decline in sugar sales, though its stores have begun reducing added sugar in private-label products like yogurt and cereal, a spokesman said.

"You're never going to eliminate it,” Leonard said of sugar, adding, “but you can see that people are trying to cut back on it.”