Modern Sugar

Sugar, as we know it, was largely unknown until the modern world. In the medieval world, sweetness came from fruit or honey. In the middle ages, sugar was so rare it was used as a pharmacy preparation. In fact, our word for confection comes from pharmacy preparation. Sugar was thought to encourage heat and moisture, as well as being a good way to stick things together.

Where Sugar Comes From

Growing Sugar

In Canada, 90% of refined sugar is imported from South America. The remaining 10% is sugar beets from Alberta. A sugar beet is about 20% pure sugar. Sugar beets make up 20% of the world’s sugar production, the rest comes from sugar cane.

Sugar Slavery

Sugar cane has a dark history. The plant was brought from Indonesia and planted in the Americas. Labour for the sugar fields came mainly from slaves kidnapped in Africa and brought to the tropics to work the fields. Sugar cane production was responsible for ⅔ of the 20 million enslaved Africans. They worked the sugar cane fields in the most brutally horrific conditions.

Teeming with Sugar Cane

Sugar cane is still one of the largest crops in the world. India and Brazil are the biggest producers, with Brazil being the largest exporter. Sugar cane is one of the fastest growing plants, producing 50,000 pounds of growth per acre in a year. Almost half of the world’s sugar cane is still harvested by hand. When hand harvesting, the fields are first burned to leave only the stalks.

Sugar Cane Processing

Once sugar cane is cut, it degrades quickly, so it must be milled immediately. At the mill, the stalks are crushed and boiled to extract sugar and molasses. The sugar forms granules or crystals in liquid. After the first stage, the raw sugar still has some molasses, giving it a brown tinge. The sugar is then further refined to remove the molasses. The molasses separated from the sugar is refined again to pull out more sugar. Once the molasses has been extracted three times, what is left is blackstrap molasses, which has 45% sugar. The first stage, ‘cane molasses,’ is more commonly used in cooking. Both sugarcane and sugar beets produce molasses, but not the same kind.

What is Sugar?

Chemical Sugar

Once refined, cane sugar and beet sugar are identical — both are 99.9% sucrose. Sucrose, the chemical that is sugar, is itself made from two sugar molecules. Sucrose is half glucose and half fructose.

Sugar Types

Brown sugar is refined white sugar with 3.5% to 6.5% added molasses, depending on how dark. Brown sugar feels soft because the added molasses holds water. It is easy to substitute for brown sugar in any recipe by adding a tablespoon of molasses per cup of white sugar. Turbinado or demerara or other raw sugars are sugars where all the molasses has not been removed. Icing or confectioners sugar is sugar that has been ground to a fine powder.

Honey

Honey is the original sweetener. Nothing is naturally as sweet. Honey has been gathered for thousands of years. People originally thought it dripped from the stars at night, but equally magical is honey’s link with flowers. Honey is very similar to regular sugar, but it has more fructose. This makes it taste a bit sweeter than sugar. It also has traces of pollen, minerals, and water. European honey bees were not introduced into North America until the 1600s. Before that, native bees produced unpleasant honey.

HFCS

High fructose corn syrup is a sweetener made from the starch in corn. If you break down the starch in corn, it converts to glucose. To make the glucose into high fructose corn syrup, an enzyme converts about half of the glucose to fructose. High fructose corn syrup was first made in the ’70s. It is often used in factory food as it is cheaper than sugar. Most pancake syrups are made with it rather than the more expensive maple syrup.

Sugar: What’s it Good for?

Preservative

Sugar is a natural preservative. In fact, pure sugar never goes bad if stored correctly. Sugar in jam helps to keep the fruit from spoiling. This also works with cheese. To keep your cheese fresh longer, throw a couple sugar cubes into the container. This also works with cookies or bread. Sugar also absorbs stale odours. If you have a rank container, put in a bit of sugar, seal it and then check it in a few days. Only do this with airtight containers because sugar attracts every living thing.

Feeding Flowers

Sugar keeps cut flowers alive longer. Adding a tablespoon of sugar to a litre of water gives the flowers some food, so they last longer. But sugar also feeds the germs. To offset this, add 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar to the water. The vinegar kills bacteria and makes the water more acidic, making the flowers take up water faster. Each flower reacts differently, so test it.

Sugar and Diabetes

In the last 20 years, sugar consumption has gone down. You would guess the rates of diabetes would go down in the past 10 years---and they have. That is, if you adjust for the age of the population. An older population will have more diabetes. But if we adjust for the age of the population, the rates of diabetes have actually declined. That doesn’t mean that diabetes is no longer a problem. Still, almost a quarter of adults over 65 have diabetes.

Slanted Sugar Studies

The sugar lobby has long been active behind the scenes. They were one of the first to fund studies that would point to fat as the prime cause of heart problems. Documents prove that in the ‘50 and ‘60, the sugar association spent millions of dollars promoting low-fat diets, knowing that would cause people to eat more sugar. Behind the scenes, they funded studies that were set up to show fat as the main health culprit. In the last 20 years, more research has pointed to sugar as a cause of heart disease. Industry groups often fund studies so they can design their test to get the results they want.

Where is Sugar?

Packaged Food Sugar

Most of the sugar we eat is not what we add but what comes in the products we buy. Most packaged food has added sugar, partially because it helps it keep longer. Sugar often hides in items that don’t taste sweet. Tomato sauces are a common hiding spot. A half-cup of pasta sauce can have as much sugar as a cookie. A side of coleslaw has even more sugar. Most salad dressings have sugar, often as much as a cookie. Ketchup and BBQ sauce both have significant amounts of sugar.

Wake up to Sugar

Yogurt, while healthy, can have a lot of sugar, sometimes as much as ice cream. Obviously, sugary breakfast cereals have a lot of sugar. Still, even ones that seem healthy, like whole-grain cereals, can have a lot of sugar. This is true for granola bars, as well. Some have almost as much sugar as a chocolate bar. Canned fruit packed in syrup has a lot of extra sugar. Eat fresh fruit instead.

Drinking Sugar

Almost all drinks, except water and diet drinks, have sugar. That includes soft drinks, juices, energy drinks, sports drinks, and flavoured coffees. Even milk has naturally occurring sugar. A single soft drink contains more sugar in one can than you should have all day. A can of coke has more than 10 sugar cubes, and a medium Tim Horton’s hot chocolate has more than 12! Drinks can easily make up ⅓ or even ½ of our total sugar intake. Cut back.

Problems with Sugar

Weight Gain

I think we all know that sugar can make you fat. Sugar calories are easy to overdo and have a way of not filling us up. When it comes to sugar, we can down cokes and donuts forever, or so it seems. Eating a high-fat, high-protein meal makes us feel full.

Heart Disease

Sugar can also impact our heart health. High amounts of sugar can overload the liver, which converts sugar into fat that clogs the arteries.

Mood

Sugar might make you feel good for a few minutes, but it saps your energy and makes you sad in the long term. A higher intake of sugar increases your risk of depression.

Diabetes

And of course, diabetes; it’s the sugar sickness. There is a link between excess sugar and diabetes. Prolonged excess sugar intake can increase your cells’ resistance to insulin, so you need more and more to keep your blood sugar level in control. Eventually, your body can’t keep up.

High Blood Sugar

High levels of blood sugar can mess with your sleep and cause damage to organs and to nerves. High levels of sugar damage the cells that help produce insulin, and insulin is what lowers blood sugar. A bad cycle. High blood sugar can also cause nerve damage.

Sugar Action

Limit Sugar

The first place to look at cutting back sugar is in liquids. Soft drinks and even juice are huge sources of sugar. The next big area is baked sweets. Cookies, donuts, cakes: all are full of sugar. Eat these in tiny portions and only occasionally. Another big area is breakfast cereal. Look at the sugar content of your cereal. And of course, ice cream. If you regularly eat ice cream, you are getting a good dose of sugar with the fat in ice cream. Especially avoid ice cream with a syrup topping. Any kind of syrup is almost pure sugar. Desserts are universally sweet. Try to limit desserts to fruit, so at least there is some beneficial fibre with your dessert.

Shift Off Sugar

Don’t try to cut sugar all at once. Try to lower the amount you add to your coffee every week. Cut out sugar slowly and permanently. You’ll feel sweeter, even without the sugar.

See the Fall 2017 Issue for more detail on choosing a sweetener.