A CUP OF SUGAR STORY FANTASY FULL

I no longer eat sushi – the rice has usually been sweetened. Some of these are obvious: cakes, cookies, ice creams, doughnuts, muffins, candies. In my new life, I don’t eat foods with added sugar. Repeatedly consuming vast quantities of these substances – as when you eat lots of sugary food or drink lots of sodas – could thus cause a double whammy of metabolic disturbance. When you consume table sugar, you get both fructose and glucose, because the sucrose is chopped into its component parts. Indeed, evidence is mounting that fructose is a major player in metabolic illness. Fructose, instead, is metabolised in the liver, where it is turned into fat. Intake of glucose directly stimulates the production of the hormone insulin that of fructose does not. To see this, look no further than sugars. We have changed the world to suit our appetites but our bodies cannot accommodate the change.ĭifferent foods have different effects on the body. The present sugar glut is an anomaly in human experience. Over the past 300 years, sugars have thus gone from an occasional luxury to a substantial component of the average western diet. Today, the figure is 10 times that amount. In 1700, the average sugar consumption in the United Kingdom was around two kilograms per person per year. When cane sugar first made its way to Europe around 1,000 years ago, it was treated as a spice, a medicine and a preservative. For most of human history, after all, milk, honey and fruits have been the main sources of sweetness. But as an evolutionary biologist, as well as someone who has felt the immediate benefits of a sugar-free lifestyle, I find the claims persuasive. Such connections are, of course, disputed. In short: the recent medical literature about sugar makes alarming reading. Some researchers have even linked the eating of sugar in childhood to the development of myopia, arguing that the spikes in insulin secretion caused by sugar consumption interfere with the normal development of the eyes. These include diabetes, obesity, hypertension, heart disease, gout, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, many cancers and perhaps even Alzheimer’s. A growing number of doctors blame sugar consumption for a long list of medical woes. How? Because the tobacco in blended cigarettes has typically been soaked in sugar syrups this makes the smoke easier to take into the lungs. The European appetite for sweetness drove the slave trade according to one estimate, in the Americas, two-thirds of enslaved Africans worked on sugar cane plantations.

A CUP OF SUGAR STORY FANTASY FULL

The history of sugar is full of darkness. So is honey – though honey is a complex concoction that contains many other compounds. High-fructose corn syrup, the most common sweetener of non-diet soft drinks, is a mixture of glucose and fructose. When most people speak of “sugar”, they mean sucrose. Sucrose is extracted from sugar cane or beets, and is usually encountered as the white crystals of table sugar. But you can also find it, along with fructose, in fruits and vegetables. Glucose is synonymous with blood sugar, since it is transported in the blood and delivered to cells to fuel their energetic needs. The human tongue detects this: fructose tastes sweeter. Interestingly, the two simple sugars have the same chemical formula – six atoms of carbon, 12 of hydrogen, six of oxygen – but different chemical structures. That is, each molecule of sucrose is one glucose linked to one fructose. But in daily life, the main sugars one meets are glucose, fructose and sucrose – which is a marriage of the other two. Lactose, for example, is found in milk deoxyribose gives the “D” to DNA. To a chemist, sugar refers to a class of molecules made of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen some of these serve particular biological roles. But when I discovered how much better I felt without it, I became curious – and began to read.

Back then, aside from its role in tooth decay, I knew little about its possible effects on health. My decision to stop sugar was taken on a whim. But as I started to feel better – calmer, happier, more even-keeled – a more sinister thought began to nag at me. At first, I attributed this to the darkness and gloom of the winter days. For the first two weeks of my unsweetened life, though, I was in a foul temper.

A cup of sugar story fantasy