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Sugar: The Sweet Thief Of Life

"The taste of sweetness, whereof a little more than a little is by much too much." - Henry IV,

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

There's no doubt that Americans are addicted to sugar. We consume an average of 150 lbs. per person per year. (Appleton, p.10) For many of us, that means we eat our own weight in sugar every year! So it might be helpful to find out what that means - what sugar really is, what food value it has, and what problems it causes.

The sugar industry is big: $100 billion per year. As with any other billion dollar business, there's bound to be a ton of information that will support such an empire anywhere you look - the media, bookstores, advertising, etc. Boats like this don't like to be rocked.

On the other side is a group claiming that white sugar is poison, a harmful drug, barely differing from cocaine, etc. Some claims are true; others are unreferenced opinion, often bordering on hysteria. For our purposes, we'll focus on what we really can verify about sugar, and hopefully avoid the errors of disinformation on both sides of the fence.

WHAT IS SUGAR?

That's easy - it's that white stuff in the sugar bowl. Refined white cane sugar is only one type, however. There's also brown sugar, raw sugar, fruit sugar, corn sugar, milk sugar, beet sugar, alcohol, monosaccharides, disaccharides and polysaccharides. All these are also sugar.

Start with white sugar. It is made by refining sugar cane, a process involving many chemicals. Or from beets, whose refinement also involves synthetic chemicals, and charcoal. The big problem is that the finished product contains none of the nutrients, vitamins, or minerals of the original plant. White sugar is a simple carbohydrate, which means a fractionated, artificial, devitalized by-product of the original plant. The original plant was a complex carbohydrate, which means it contained all the properties of a whole food: vitamins, minerals, enzymes.

Refined sugar from beets and cane is sucrose. Up to the mid 1970s, sucrose was the primary sugar consumed by Americans. That changed when manufacturers discovered a cheaper source of refined sugar: corn. A process was evolved that could change the natural fructose in corn to glucose, and then by adding synthetic chemicals, change the glucose back into an artificial, synthetic type of fructose called high fructose. (Freeston)

High fructose became big real fast. In 1984, Coke and Pepsi changed from cane sugar to HFCS. True connoisseurs could tell the difference, but there weren't many of us.

Today high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is the preferred sweetener in most soft drinks and processed foods. Read the labels. As of 1997, worldwide production of HFCS exceeded 8 billion kilograms. (Freeston)

Remember, natural fructose is contained in most raw fruits and vegetables. It is a natural food. Moderate amounts of natural fructose can be easily digested by the body with no stress or depleting of mineral stores. Natural fructose does not cause rollercoaster blood sugar, unless the person overdoes it. Natural fructose is not addicting.

High fructose corn syrup, by contrast, cannot be well digested, actually inhibits digestion, is addicting, and causes a great number of biochemical errors, as we shall see. HFCS is artificial; a non-food.

In this chapter sugar means refined, synthetic sugar from beets, cane, and HFCS. The harmful physical effects are essentially the same from all three. More later.

WHAT ARE CARBOHYDRATES?

Everyone knows that food comes in three forms: fat, protein, and carbohydrate. Most foods have all three, in varying proportions.

Carbohydrates are made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The main carbos are sugar, starches, and cellulose. (Dorland, p121)

Sugars are sweet carbohydrates, either single or double molecules: monosaccharides or disaccharides.

Starches are the main form of carbohydrate storage in plants. Starches are polysaccharides, which means strings of more than two carbohydrate molecules. Starches break down to sugars - that's why if you keep a cracker in your mouth for a minute, it begins to taste sweet.

Cellulose is made of long, fibrous strings of carbohydrate, mainly for structural support of a plant. It is cellulose that provides us with fiber in the diet.

Fruits contain mainly sugars, while vegetables contain mainly starches. And both contain cellulose.

COMPLEX VS. SIMPLE

An apple contains natural sugar: fructose. A potato contains natural starch. But these are whole foods containing much more than just isolated carbohydrates. Apples and potatoes grown in good soil also contain vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. Such foods are complex carbohydrates, meaning that they are complete foods.

The problem comes in with processed sugar and processed starch. White table sugar has no nutrients. White bread is a processed, artificial starch. These are not foods - they do not nourish. We call them simple carbohydrates. Even when they are broken down to individual glucose molecules by digestion, it is completely different from the glucose end-product of a digested apple, for example. That's because apples don't simply break down into isolated glucose molecules. Other nutrients and co-factors are present, which are necessary for the body to make use of the glucose: enzymes, minerals, vitamins.

White sugar and white bread require enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and insulin from the body in order to act. And the action is one of irritation, removal, and defense instead of nutrition.

All enzymes and nutrients have been purposely removed from white sugar and white flour by processing. The result is a synthetic manmade carbohydrate, occurring nowhere in nature. The body regards such as a foreign substance as a drug.

Another way to look at it is this: when complex carbohydrates are broken down, the result is a usable glucose molecule. When simple (refined) carbohydrates are allowed to ferment in the digestive tract because they can't be broken down, the results are alcohol, acetic acid, water, and carbon dioxide. (Dufty p 183) Not so usable, except for the water.

In addition to these by-products, simple carbohydrates do increase blood glucose by an unregulated, unnatural amount. And this is the real problem with refined sugar: the quantity of pure glucose suddenly taken in.

Most books, most doctors, and most nutritionists fail to make this simple distinction between simple and complex carbohydrates. They talk about apples and Coca-Cola both as carbohydrates, because they say that both ultimately break down to glucose, and that's the form the body needs. It's the standard medical approach. Same mentality that thinks vitamin C is ascorbic acid (see Chapter 11). The same mentality that thinks that milk is a good source of protein, or of calcium. Loads of information, very little understanding. These are the type of nutritionists who confuse organic gardening with organic chemistry, and talk about when you buy organic produce in the supermarket, that's the kind that is carbon-based. Or the type of "nutrition" mentality that has bypass patients eating mashed potatoes and gravy and canned sugar drinks the day after surgery so they'll "get their strength back."

Most nutritionists are trained to think that diabetes is genetic and therefore may have to be controlled with drugs.

Like any other area that concerns health, most of what is published about diet and nutrition is unfounded speculation. Worse if they have credentials. Don't get me started.

With sugar, ingestion is far different from digestion: just because you ate it doesn't mean you can use it. This is why counting calories and food combining and blood typing and the Zone and other passing fads are so irrelevant: it doesn't matter what you eat; it matters what you digest.

If you re-read the last three sections, you probably now know more about sugar than 90% of health professionals. This will become obvious when we get to diabetes.

MINI HISTORY

Sugar Blues by William Dufty was a classic book of the mid 1970s. In a compelling, informal fashion, the book provides a broad historical and political sketch of sugar economics from the 15th century to the present. Dufty thoroughly references his basic data with respect to the trade empires that emerged around sugar: molasses, rum, and slaves. The taxes on sugar alone brought great wealth to the rulers of England, France, Spain, and Holland, as well as to the slave traders, shipping merchants, and plantation owners. (p. 33) Many modern fortunes whose names we would recognize today were amassed at this time.

Dufty draws interesting parallels between opium and sugar, as both were things we don't really need, both became sources of huge revenues and taxes, both have some dark history involving immense human suffering, and both can cause physical degeneration and death after a long period of dependence.

REFINING CAME LATER

During the first centuries of the sugar industry, cane sugar was made into molasses and rum, for shipping across the oceans. Sugar itself was raw; light brown in color, and still retained some of the original nutrients. Natural sugar doesn't cause diabetes; if you eat too much natural honey, you just get sick.

The refining of sugar cane evolved gradually, and spread all over the world in a short time. Refining began with old stone mills, powered by rivers or windvanes, where whole wheat was ground into flour. As time went by, machinery got better and better at removing the outer husks from the wheat and leaving behind only the white inner simple carbohydrate, devoid of minerals and vitamins. Same with beets and cane. Processing methods, which stripped away all vitamins, mineral, and enzymes, got so good at making a consistent product of white crystals, that the price of sugar went down and down, all over the world.

Sugar consumption, however, went up and up. What used to be a delicacy only for the rich, evolved to becoming a staple for everyone. Most sources estimate that today sugar makes up about 20% of the calories of the average American diet! Just imagine - that means that on the average, 20% of what Americans eat has no nutrient content. Worse yet, it's physically destructive, as we will see.

Dufty offers layer upon layer of proof that modern mankind is degenerating, devolving as a race, becoming sicker and weaker decade by decade. Certainly nothing in the 20 years since Sugar Blues came out can dispute that idea: look around you. Seems like half our school kids are either on Ritalin, inhalators, or some kind of allergy medicine most of the time. Look at the rise of degenerative disease, cited in Chapter One.

In a more scholarly work, Dr. Weston Price had come to the same conclusions in his landmark journal Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. In the 1930s, Dr. Price travelled around the world examining the teeth and skulls of every primitive race he could find - American Indians, Swiss Alps villagers, Eskimos, aborigines, Scottish primitives, Fiji islanders, and more.

Price's conclusions are not subject to debate - instance after instance, when a people would become exposed to western foods - white sugar and white flour - within a very few years, they would be experiencing rates of tooth decay, tuberculosis and arthritis equal to the "civilized" nations. Price found that as long as a group of people could remain isolated and eat their 'primitive' simple foods, the rates of tooth decay and degenerative disease were practically zero.

Price's work has never been challenged.

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