Sugar crash

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1:02Jonquilyn Hill:You can try Claude for free at claude.ai slash explainitome. 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.

1:45Jonquilyn Hill: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 Gwynn-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.

2:25Sugar is poison, and Americans need to know that.

2:29Jonquilyn Hill:And you know, when I open up Instagram, I see all these influencers telling me to avoid it. Two weeks, no sugar. What would happen? The first thing is your mood would get a lot better. Why is excess sugar so bad for your heart? Well, let's break it down. Do you know that if you're overweight or can't lose weight, it's the sugar. If you're addicted to food, it's the sugar. What happened? Have we always been so anti-sugar? Well, I think sugar consumers and even political leaders have been kind of conflicted about sugar for a long time, but it is pretty unusual for people in power to oppose sugar this publicly on these kinds of health grounds.

3:06I think it's probably worth acknowledging or just starting off by acknowledging how much sugar American society consumes. So right now, it's about 120 pounds per person per year. Oh, wow. And this is actually a decline from the turn of the century. In 1999, it peaked at 153 pounds per person. Wow. And to put that in some kind of perspective, it was about 80 pounds in 1910, and it was like six pounds in 1800.

3:34Jonquilyn Hill:That is so wild. So how long has sugar been a big business? How far does this go back? Sugar has been consumed for a very long time, for many thousands of years. But until about 500 years ago, it was largely, at least in European society, an expensive, rare product. And then the big trend that you can see over the last five or six centuries is that the price of sugar has gone down. Because it was such a valuable commodity that empires wanted to find places they could grow it and then sell it. And so this really drove European expansion into islands in the Atlantic, in the Caribbean, in Brazil, and to North America.

4:14You know, in America, I think, in the United States at least, when we think about African-American slavery, we think about tobacco and cotton primarily. But if you look at it on a hemispheric scale, sugar was the most important driver of enslavement, right? Something like 75 or 80 percent of the Africans who were enslaved and brought to the New World were brought to work on sugar plantations.

4:34Jonquilyn Hill:Wow. And it was the worst work. Yeah, it sounds like sugar is wrapped up in all this economic and political power. Yeah. The sugar industry generated so much wealth for the people who owned plantations and the people who traded it that it was very politically influential in pretty much any sort of political system that we've been talking about in the West. I would say that the sugar industry's modern level of political influence really begins after the Civil War due to American industrial expansion and economic growth and the way that America became richer in the last part of the 19th century.

5:08But one thing that happened that was a little bit unexpected was sugar consumption went way up and the federal government happened to have a sugar tariff at the time. Like sugar was 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 industry is one of the sugar refining industry, I should say, is one of the largest employers in the big cities of the north.

5:43So it's very politically concentrated and it has its fingers in a lot of political questions.

5:48Jonquilyn Hill: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 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.

6:25By 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. Sugar turns into energy faster than any other food. Sugar helps keep your appetite down, your energy up, and helps you slip past the, quote, fat time of day. Sugar, only 18 calories per teaspoon, and it's all energy. Time Magazine, 1969. In the 1960s and 70s, the sugar industry paid scientists at places like Harvard to publish studies blaming fat and cholesterol for coronary heart disease while leaving sugar out of the picture.

7:16And we know this thanks to some work from researchers at UCSF who've dug into this in the same way that they dug into the tobacco industry. So you can see that the tobacco industry and the sugar industry are really like playing from the same book.

7:27Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah. So, you know, we saw the downfall of big tobacco. What's caused this backlash to big sugar? The concern about sugar now on health grounds, I think, comes out of the same opposition to sort of capitalist food systems that we see manifested in a lot of places. It's manifested in these Whole Foods bags that list everything that's not in your food. Like artificial sweeteners all the way to whale oil. It comes from a concern about like trying to emphasize local food systems and eating healthier and eating more simple things and less refined stuff in general, not just refined sugar. There's the sort of like trad culture influencers, right?

8:07And the idea that there used to be a more pure, like wholesome diet and we need to get back to that. In the 1970s, you had people like moving to Vermont and Maine to like to have maple syrup, right, as a kind of like countercultural sweetener. And then you also have this right wing, you know, skepticism of like elite medical science that fed it to sort of vaccine world. And it's weird that those have like come together in this modern Maha movement. It was really striking during the Super Bowl, right, to see the juxtaposition of Bad Bunny's halftime show, which everybody in my life was texting me because it began with, you know, the sugarcane field.

8:47Yeah, yeah.

8:51And then it was followed up by this realfood.gov ad. My sister's name was Denise. She died of obesity at 25. She had a heart attack. Mike Tyson talking about obesity and how Americans need to take their health more seriously. We're the most powerful country in the world, and we have the most obese, fudgy people. So that juxtaposition of like American empire and sugar cane and then this like right wing critique of capitalist food was a little jarring.

9:17Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah, I'm curious. You know, you've got these like this sort of like, I don't know, this odd group of people who probably would not be aligned in any other way. You know, you have RFK Jr., you got your granola moms, you got everyone all in alignment on sugar. But can they defeat big sugar? I mean, no one's taken it down yet. No, I would say the sugar industry is doing all right. The sugar industry remains politically powerful and it's concentrated, you know, in a couple of key states. The cane sugar growing industry in Florida has been powerful for a very long time. So I don't think sugar has that much to worry about.

9:51What they might have to worry about is the decline in sugar consumptions, right? So as I said, Americans are eating 120 pounds per person per year, and that is going down. It's going to take a long time to get it back to something that seems like a humane or comprehensible number. But that is the trend that if you were the sugar industry, you might be concerned about.

10:21Jonquilyn Hill:So we may be eating a little less sugar than we used to, but that doesn't change the fact that we love it. Coming up, the chemistry behind our cravings.

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13:07Jonquilyn Hill: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 and beans, every single plant food.

14:00So 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.

14:26Jonquilyn Hill: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. Cooling drinks are delicious, sweetened with caro. They worked on that process and they learn to refine and extract that fructose until now they can make a fructose syrup that is 90 % fructose. And they use this fructose syrup to make any formulation of high fructose corn syrup they want.

15:28You know what they say about it? Like what? That it's made from corn, It's natural, and like sugar, it's fine in moderation.

15:38Jonquilyn Hill:How do our bodies react to these different kinds of sugar? Like, what are they doing? When sugar, any sugar, leaves our intestine, it goes into the portal vein. And the first stop for the portal vein is, now beg a surprise, based on the name, the liver. Now, the liver can use whatever sugar is in that blood, pull it in and turn it into energy, or it can let it stay in the blood and get delivered to the rest of the body. Now, in the case of glucose, if the liver doesn't need that sugar, because let's say at the very same time you're drinking the glucose, you are also consuming a Big Mac and French fries.

16:36The glucose in that beverage or whatever is going to go past the liver and go to the muscle, go to the fat cells, go to the brain, and the rest of the body gets to use it up. With fructose, even in situations where the liver absolutely doesn't need the energy, all the fructose is pulled into the liver. 86 % of the fructose you consume in a big drink is going to end up in the liver. Wow. And that is way too much substrate for the liver to deal with. So it does the best it can, but the leftover gets turned into fat. And it's that extra fat making in the liver that mediates this chain of bad events that follows the consumption of fructose.

17:41that increase liver fat. Some of it gets sent into the blood where you get more triglyceride and more cholesterol because they get sent out hand in hand. And the results are increased risk for cardiovascular disease, increased risk for diabetes, increased risk for liver disease.

18:07Jonquilyn Hill:Okay, so the side effects of having too much of the wrong kind of sugar are clear. But we do need sugar for energy, right? I mean, what's the healthy way to get it? Certainly, we need fruit and vegetable for their incredible nutrient profile. And the amount in fruit and vegetable would cover any need we absolutely have for sugar. With regard to being an energy source, If you're eating a whole wheat grain, you're going to get lots and lots of glucose, and that will provide your energy. Your whole grains are your safe source of carbs. And in my mind, your fruit and vegetable are your required source of carbs.

19:00Jonquilyn Hill:Okay, I need to know for once and for all, is it true that sugar is addictive? It's certainly not addictive in the way cocaine is addictive. However, they are similar in both you eat it that first time, your reward center is going to be activated. But in the case of drugs, the award center is saying, oh, this is really bad for me. Let's not respond. Therefore, the drug-addicted person keeps escalating their dose to get back to getting a reward out of their drug. Sugar isn't like that as much as, yes, the reward goes down when you consume, let's say, the donut the first time. But what we think is going on is our food has become so palatable.

20:01we are completely overriding the homeostatic controls on food intake. What's a homeostatic control? It is basically your appetite being shut off when you have consumed enough calories. But when you have hyperpalatable food, you are getting reactions that we call hedonic reactions. You're eating for the pleasure of eating. You're eating because the food is causing such a great sensation of reward.

20:42Jonquilyn Hill:Is our food too tasty? Is this our problem? Our food is too delicious? Yes, absolutely. And it's not accidental. Our food processors do test after test after test to come up with the formulation of fat, sugar, and salt that produces the most people, taste testers, saying, this one's the best.

21:16Jonquilyn Hill:Sugar has a powerful hold on us. Up next, how to break free.

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