A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR: Part I

What’s in a spoonful of sugar besides 48 calories?

Disney’s Mary Poppins advised that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down in a most delightful way.” Medieval doctors and monks agreed – they used sugar as medicine.

Sugar and human history are married. For better and for worse.

We’re born with the passion for sweet. Meredith F. Small wrote in Live Science, that our love of sweetness is “the fault of our primate heritage.” Simply put, we came from apes – “animals that evolved eating fruit in the trees.”

Imagine swinging through the trees to grab an apple?

Nicholas Bakalar reported in Nature, “Since the 1970s, researchers have known that the introduction of sweet solutions into the amniotic fluid causes the fetus to swallow more frequently, whereas bitter solutions reduce the rate of swallow.”

Picture baby in mama’s belly guzzling sugar water.

Sweet is a big part of who we are. Before sugar was cultivated and refined, there was honey. Europe, Africa, and Asia had honeybees. The Americas had maple syrup, agave from cactus, and mashed fruits.

Sugarcane was probably first domesticated 8,000 years ago by the indigenous people of New Guinea. They chewed raw cane for the sweet juice [some still do that today]. Eventually sugar cane migrated to India and the Philippines. The first refined sugar – making granules from cane juice – was described in a two thousand-year old text from India.

Sugar was used in everything from desserts to drinks, reserved for royalty and the rich because it was so expensive. The ancient Greeks used honey and maintained hives. Grape juice, dried fruit, figs, apricots, and raisins were also used as sweeteners. Treats like cheese dipped in honey, figs, and olives were popular.

The ancient Romans used honey as their main sweetener. They also created sapa, a syrup made from boiling down unfermented grape juice.

The first “artificial” sweetener?

During the Middle Ages, the Arabs improved India’s sugar-making techniques. They increased production. Crusaders arrived and brought sugar back to Medieval Europe, eventually spreading it to Africa, the Americas, and Indonesia.

James Hancock wrote in the World History Encyclopedia, “Sugar cane cultivation became an economic powerhouse, and the growing demand . . . stimulated the colonization of the New World by European powers, brought slavery to the forefront, and fostered brutal revolutions and wars.” He called it the plantation system of agriculture designed to “maximize productivity and profitability.”

In the 1600s, the cultivation of cane sugar reached the West Indies and tropical Americas. Sugar production was tough – very labor intensive. Europeans didn’t want to do the grueling work. The American colonies, Cuba, and Brazil needed laborers.

They brought in slaves.

In 1619, a ship arrived in Virginia, carrying 20 African slaves to be sold to the colonists. It began a dark, horrifying period in American history, fueled by the “white gold” of plantation slavery. Over 10 million Africans were shipped to America until 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves.

Today there’s sugar in almost everything we eat from breakfast to dinner and in-between. It’s in sodas, candies, cakes, savory recipes, beauty products, and pharmaceuticals. We have sugar rushes and sugar highs; sugar crazies and sugar daddies.

According to the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the average American eats about 270 calories of added sugars each day (17 teaspoons). The American Heart Association recommends men should eat no more than 9 teaspoons a day (150 calories) and women, 6 teaspoons (100 calories).

Satisfying the human sweet tooth is big business. The global annual production of sugar is over 192 million tons, including white, brown, and liquid sugar, worth well over $78 billion.

That doesn’t include fake sweet. “Zero” or “reduced calorie” sodas and foods rely on artificial sweetness like Splenda, Equal, and Sweet’n Low or “natural” ones like monk fruit, stevia, and yacon. They’re big business too, valued at over $2 billion.

For better or for worse?

Wherever we turn, our lives are wired for sweet. Indulge . . . but not too much.

You want to keep that sweet tooth healthy.

Check out next week’s blog: A Spoon full of (boiled) Sugar: Part 2