Food is constituted from natural or processed products. It contains substances necessary for the body, structurally or energetically. In short, food keeps us alive. Basically, food is a combination in different proportions of the five basic nutrients: proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. In this article I will talk about the most controversial, sweet, addictive and ubiquitous carbohydrate: sugar.
A little history
Sugar is a food that has always been part of human nutrition. It is the most documented “goods” and appears in the oldest writings. According to them, cane sugar was first used by humans in Polynesia, from where it spread to India. In 510 BC, Emperor Darius of Persia invaded India where he found “the cane that gives honey without bees”. The secret of cane sugar has been well guarded for a long time. When the Arab peoples invaded Persia in 642 AD, they discovered sugarcane and learned how to make sugar. As their expansion continued, they also began producing sugar in other countries they conquered, including Spain and territories in North Africa.
Sugar was discovered by Europeans as a result of the Crusades in the 11th century AD. and sugar was first recorded in England in 1069. The following centuries saw a major expansion of Western European trade with the East, including the importation of sugar. At that time it was considered a luxury. In the 15th century, Columbus sailed to America, and in 1493 it is recorded that he took sugarcane plants to grow in the Caribbean. The climate there was so good for growing cane that an industry was quickly established.
Sugar beet was first identified as a source of sugar in 1747. However, it was kept secret until the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, when Britain blocked sugar imports into mainland Europe. By 1880, sugar beet had replaced cane as the main source of sugar in continental Europe.
What is sugar?
Sugar is a form of carbohydrate called “sucrose”. It is a disaccharide that breaks down in the body into glucose and fructose. What are glucose and fructose? Together with galactose (the “sugar” in milk), they are the three basic elements that make up all forms of carbohydrates. These three simple sugars are also known as monosaccharides. They bond with each other and with themselves to produce more complex carbohydrates, disaccharides or polysaccharides. All carbohydrates are made up of one or more monosaccharide molecules. Regardless of how complex a carbohydrate is to begin with, once in the body, all carbohydrates are broken down into these three simple sugars: glucose, fructose and galactose.
In one teaspoon of sugar, whether it is white, brown or raw, there are 16 calories of energy. The body (primarily the brain and muscles) uses the calories from glucose as its main fuel. Only if it does not have glucose, another form of food is used. On average, it takes 130 grams of glucose daily just to feed the brain.
The largest amount of sucrose is found in sugar cane and sugar beet, plants that are used to obtain what we know as “sugar”. But sucrose is found, in different amounts and proportions, in all plants: fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, leaves. Small amounts of sugar are also found in meat, especially liver, and, as we have seen, in milk.
If we need sugar, and it’s found in all whole foods, healthy foods, then why is sugar considered bad and everyone is avoiding it by adopting sugar-free diets?
What’s wrong with sugar?
It’s not the sugar itself that’s the problem. As we have seen, it cannot be avoided unless we feed on water alone, which is practically impossible. And secondly, we need sugar, it is the body’s main fuel. It is not the sugar that is naturally found in whole foods that we should avoid, but the added sugar, the so-called “free sugars”, the sugar that is not found in the cells of the food that we ingest.
Not only sweets, puff pastry, biscuits, ice cream, juices or other desserts contain added sugar. Almost all commercial foods contain it, even those in which, naturally, sugar has no business, such as meat products, yogurt, spices, salad dressings, pickles. It is added to food for preservative and binding property as well as for taste. And natural fruit juice contains free sugars, because once squeezed, the natural sugar leaves the cells of the fruit, it is no longer accompanied by the fibers of that fruit, and the amount of sugar ingested is much higher than if we had eaten the whole fruit.
Sugar is addictive, as I wrote in this article. Sweet taste preference begins early in life and remains throughout childhood and only begins to decline in mid-adolescence. This explains why children are at high risk of disease due to excessive sugar consumption. The empty calories from added sugar prevent proper growth and development due to a lack of nutrients.
The list of diseases triggered or maintained by excess sugar is long and we are still not fully aware of the havoc produced. These are chronic, debilitating, degenerative and painful diseases. To name just a few: cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, gout and a number of autoimmune diseases. Romania is among the leading countries in Europe in terms of sugar consumption, which says a lot about the level of health education in our country and about the large number of chronically ill people.
What amount of sugar is recommended?
According to the American Heart Association (AHA), the maximum amount of added sugar we should eat in a day is 150 calories per day (37.5 grams or 9 teaspoons) for men and 100 calories per day (25 grams or 6 teaspoons) for women. Another recommendation from the World Health Organization (WHO) is to keep added sugar consumption below 10% of daily caloric intake. And a further reduction to below 5% of total energy intake would provide additional health benefits.
We can hardly find commercial products that do not have, in varying proportions, added sugar. That is why it is difficult to calculate how much sugar we consume. It can hide in many forms on ingredient lists. As I said in this article, everything that ends in -in, -ol and -ose is sugar. Anything that has syrup in it is sugar. All low-fat products have added sugar to replace the extracted fat. In short, all highly processed products have added sugar.
What kind of sugar is healthier?
Sugar is…sugar, whether it’s white, brown or raw. All has around 16 calories per teaspoon.
White sugar is intensively refined and processed through various processes that include several stages of boiling, crushing, centrifugation, filtration, treatment with calcium hydroxide (slaked lime or lime water) and activated carbon or “bone charcoal”. All these refining stages remove the impurities, but also the nutrients present in the cane or sugar beet, making white sugar a product composed of “empty calories”.
Brown sugar is a partially refined product containing 3.5-6.5% molasses. Brown sugar is slightly moist due to the hygroscopic property of molasses, but to make it more commercial and drier it undergoes processing. The law also allows the addition of dyes or other chemicals, so that the final product loses its “unrefined” property. Brown sugar is often produced by adding cane molasses to fully refined white sugar to more closely control the ratio of molasses to sugar crystals and reduce production costs. However, compared to highly processed white sugar, brown sugar has some trace minerals and vitamins.
Raw sugar is described as unrefined and uncrystallized, which naturally contains molasses, without being added in processing, and is made up of an average of 85% sucrose, and the rest are minerals such as calcium, magnesium, iron, sodium, zinc, phosphorus and vitamins from the complex B.
Conclusions
We need sugar in our diet. We need natural sugar, contained in whole foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, tubers. Added sugar is not necessary, we can live without it.
In modern times it is very difficult to avoid added sugar completely. Sure, we can try. But constantly avoiding added sugar can make your life an ordeal. It can isolate you from society, which will look at you as an oddity that only consumes water and leaves. It can frustrate you, becoming moody or depressed. Humans are made to live among other humans, and humans in modern society consume sugar. Sugar gives a feeling of well-being, both by supplying energy and by intensifying the production of endorphins, the hormone of happiness.
Let’s consume sugar consciously. Let’s inform ourselves. Let’s read the labels. Let’s limit the consumption of intensively processed products. Let’s prefer water, not juices or sweetened teas. Let’s make cookies or cakes at home, using sugar in moderation, from which we can eat a piece with our loved ones, enjoying every bite. Let’s enjoy an ice cream sometimes on a hot summer day.
We can try to “trick” the body by using sweeteners instead of sugar. Are sweeteners more suitable to eat? Can we enjoy the sweet taste without the dangers of sugar? We will talk about this in the next article.
