But with the Industrial Revolution and introduction of various industrial techniques for purifying sugar, we have a situation in which what we are consuming is not good nutritionally or ecologically.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We could eliminate sugar across the board for all confectionary products and sodas, and we can replace it with all-natural fresh fruit.
Sugary drinks are blamed for increasing the rates of chronic disease and obesity in America. Yet efforts to reduce their consumption through taxes or other measures have gone nowhere. The beverage industry has spent millions defeating them.
We can create new food substances.
Taking in too much added sugar from highly marketed sugary foods and drinks displaces healthier foods in the diet.
The problem is not actual number of calories we are producing - we have food waste issues. The problem is industrial food.
Healthy, sustainable food production methods give us food that is nutritionally better and with fewer pesticides, antibiotics, and hormones.
In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, great progress was made in the study of the intermediary reactions by which sugar is anaerobically fermented to lactic acid or to ethanol and carbon dioxide.
Whenever I meet with nutritionists, we discuss the idea of having everything in moderation and that people should eat protein or fiber when they eat sugar.
Today, the world is so awash in sugar - it is such a staple of the modern diet, associated with all that is cheap and unhealthy - that it's hard to believe things were once exactly the opposite. The West Indies were colonized in a world where sugar was seen as a scarce, luxurious, and profoundly health-giving substance.
Biology is greener and, at scale, should be incredibly cost-effective: The cost of goods sold should be little more than the sugar water needed to brew almost anything.