Chapter 1: Why are we so obsessed with sugar?
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Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. I crave sweet foods when I wake up. I crave dessert after every meal. And I usually like sweet snacks instead of salty. I'm a server and I eat sugar packets throughout the shift. I'll reach for a sweet treat to make me feel better emotionally, even if it physically makes me feel worse.
I don't think I realized how much sugar was in my life until I gave up sweets for Lent. I go on a walk and outside the grocery store, I see the Girl Scouts pushing their product. I go to a friend's birthday party and the cake just stares at me from across the room. I head to the coffee shop, but that matcha latte just doesn't hit the same without a little simple syrup.
Sugar is a boogeyman ready to leap out behind every corner. But is it really as bad for us as we've been led to believe? I'm John Glenn Hill, and today on Explain It to Me from Vox, we're going to find out.
I'm David Singerman. I'm an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia, and I'm the author of a book, Unrefined, How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar.
Lately, it seems like America has fallen out of love with sugar. I think of RFK Jr. on his crusade against it. Sugar is poison, and Americans need to know that. And you know, when I open up Instagram, I see all these influencers telling me to avoid it.
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Chapter 2: How has the perception of sugar changed over time?
Sugar imports are one of the ways that the federal government made its money. And as the sugar imports kept going up and up and up, the government kind of got addicted to sugar tariffs in the same way that Americans got addicted to sugar. And so by the late 1870s, early 1880s, sugar revenues are accounting for a huge part of the federal budget.
But also, the sugar refining industry, I should say, is one of the largest employers in the big cities of the North. So It's very politically concentrated and it has its fingers in a lot of political questions.
It reminds me a little bit of like Big Tobacco.
Yes.
Like both of these crops just becoming so powerful and having such industry.
There's a pamphlet that the Philadelphia Sugar Company put out in the 1920s. And this is completely representative of the kind of marketing around tobacco. sugar for most of the 20th century. So if I can just read you a little quote from this, it says, the food value of sugar is surprisingly high. Per pound, it contains almost twice as many calories as beefsteak.
The high dietary value of sugar is universally recognized by scientists and physicians.
That is wild. Like what?
It is. By the 1950s and 60s, what you see in sugar industry propaganda is really pushing back on concerns about like dental health, diabetes. There's an outfit called the Sugar Research Foundation, which is sort of like the pro industry PR shop.
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Chapter 3: What are the historical impacts of sugar on society?
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Chapter 4: How does sugar consumption affect our health?
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I'm J.Q., back with more Explain It To Me. The sugar industry is huge, in large part because they're able to tap into one of our most basic desires.
I'm Dr. Kimber Stanhope. I'm a research scientist at the University of California, Davis. And she says the way our bodies react to sugar depends on what kind it is. So let's start with the natural sugars first. The three important ones are glucose, fructose, and sucrose.
Glucose is not only in fruits and vegetables as a glucose molecule, but you put it together in chains, you get starch, and then you have glucose in every single grain, in beans, every single plant food. So glucose is massively important. It has chemically the exact same chemical composition as fructose. However, the two are shaped different.
And then we have sucrose, and sucrose is simply one glucose bonded to one fructose. Fruits have all three.
Okay, so those are the sugars in fruits. How about the ones in, like, Oreos?
So let's move on to the processed sugars. It was probably around the early 1800s that scientists learned they could take the starch— from corn and add enzymes to it and break the chains down into a glucose syrup.
Eat it with biscuit or spread on bread. Use it for a tea punch, hot or iced coffee.
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