A small initiative
My interpretation from that appointment was that it was ok to continue what I had been doing but there was a little gentle pull inside of me to reconsider my habit. Alternatively, I decided to take a small initiative. I asked myself to keep an account of all my sugar bites since they were leaving marks in my mouth as well as other unintended places. The new plan ordered me to read the food labels, understand how many grams of sugar are recommended per day, and how many grams of sugar should be consumed per day.
While learning about the recommended allowances, a desire was born to dig into the history of sugar. What is sugar? When was it invented? How the heck did it get this far especially knowing it has chronic consequences?
What exactly is sugar?
Google generated 379,000,000 results as of May 2016 when you type in “what is sugar?” Many articles discussed different aspects of sugar but most agreed, including The American Diabetes Association that sugar is a carbohydrate and comes in two forms:
- Naturally occurring sugar – sources include milk, fruit, and vegetables.
- Processed sugar – sugar extracted from sugar cane or sugar beets then added to make cardamom cakes or peach pies.
According to the American Heart Association (AHA) “To tell if a processed food contains added sugars, you need to look at the list of ingredients. Sugar has many other names. Besides those ending in “ose,” such as maltose or sucrose, other names for sugar include high fructose corn syrup, molasses, cane sugar, corn sweetener, raw sugar, syrup, honey or fruit juice concentrates.”
The good news for me, at the time of the research, was that I was focusing only on ADDED sugars not the naturally occurring. In fact, I was not eating enough of the pure nature made, the good stuff. The bad news was that everything I ate on a regular basis contained the controversial granules.
History
My research revealed that the history of white sugar betrays a dark past. Sugar cane was known to man, dating back to 9000 BC in New Guinea (the exact date of origin is still debatable as I found different dates when I goggled). By 500 BC, India learned to process sugar from sugar cane. While invading India, Alexander the Great also becomes addicted to sugar in 327 BC and sent his new-found treasure to Persia and the Mediterranean. Some few thousand miles away, the Chinese emperor T’ai Tsung sends a team to India to learn more about sugar and found it was too good to keep to themselves and ends up trading it with the rest of the Asian countries, Middle East, and West Africa. In AD 641, the Arabs took control of Persia and found a way by irrigation to grow sugar cane on their new land. From Persia, sugar got shipped to its neighboring continents: East Africa and Europe. In 1493, Christopher Columbus introduced the little white granules called Zucchero or azucar or sugar to the new world, America.
In the late 1500s to 1600s, the British colonists referred to sugar as “white gold.” Sugar plantations were cultivated in the Atlantic islands, from the Canaries, Madeira, to Gulf of Guinea by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Some of the islands were close to the African coast, and the plantation owners began to use forced African slave labor in the plantations and then expanded the slave trade to their next settlement, the Americas. The Spanish established sugar plantations in Jamaica and Puerto Rico. The Dutch and Portuguese experimented in South America and noted that the sugar cane that was transplanted from Madeira to Brazil yielded a high supply of sugar. The high return on their investment allured the European settlers to do more of the same, even under the destructive conditions.
Watching the Portuguese and the Dutch, the British colonists saw that sugar was the next big cash crop and the demand for sugar in Europe was increasing. The colonists cultivated sugar plantations in the Caribbean in Barbados and Jamaica. Then after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in the 1800s, the British colonists started growing sugar cane in the southern United States. Growing and processing sugar was excruciating work; the colonists adopted the same model that they had been using from a century before for their other crash crops: cotton and tobacco. They imported slaves from Africa to work in the sugar plantation. Historians debate that “profit from the sugar trade was so significant that it may have even helped America achieve independence from Great Britain…Sugar slavery was the key component in what historians call The Trade Triangle, a network whereby slaves were sent to work on New World plantations, the product of their labor was sent to a European capital to be sold and other goods were brought to Africa to purchase more slaves.”
To continue One Teaspoon of Success part 4 – Clarifying one teaspoon of sugar click here