Quick Reality Check Articles

Quick Reality Check – A Century of Sugar Damage to Society

October 15, 2009 on 1:49 am | In Food, Health, Quick Reality Check | No Comments

* The mass consumption of sugar began with the industrialization of Victorian England.
The British Empire has significant quantities of sugar available from plantations in the colonies.
The cities of Britain will filled with factory workers who needed to be fed cheaply.

* In the factories of Victorian Britain the “afternoon tea break” was born. The tea was primarily warm water and sugar to keep the workers “alive”. Some workers who were “well off” could also afford bread with heavily sugared jam.

* There was a 500 percent increase in per capita sugar consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the time when the life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years.

* By 1900 the average person in Britain was getting about one sixth of his total nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get today and which is DOUBLE what nutritionists recommend.

* The only thing which has changed in the last 100 years is that over half of our sugar comes from corn and sugar beets to create “high-fructose corn sweeteners” which are the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes.

* It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production over the past forty years

* We MUST create a viable means from growing and distributing a variety of affordable “unprocessed” foods to our population to restore health and vitality to our society.