Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (16 page)

During the Dark Ages (around a.d. 500 to a.d. 1000), all contact with India was lost, so the crusaders in the 11th century became the first Europeans for over a millennium to come into contact with sugar. This was in Arabia and by this time extraction and refining had improved. Sugar came as a solid lump or “loaf” and it was as rare and expensive as spices. The source of sugar was a mystery, one that was closely guarded by the Arab merchants, but the returning crusaders were sufficiently enthusiastic (and entrepreneurial) to start trading sugar with the Arabs. In Europe, as is the way with rare and expensive commodities, wealthy households started to replace “cheap” honey by extravagant sugar. Then, in the 1390s, sugar cane was planted in southern Spain and Portugal by the Arab occupiers. The secret was out and sugar cane was carried to the Canaries, the recently discovered islands off the coast of Africa under Spanish control. In 1493, on his second voyage, Columbus stopped in the Canaries and took the first sugar cane cuttings to the New World.

An Elizabethan Overindulgence

Sugar was still beyond the means of the common folk, but it seems that the wealthy were already overindulging. Queen Elizabeth I of England in the 16th century received regal presents of loafsugar from the King of Morocco. In 1598, a foreign visitor remarked of Elizabeth that “her teeth were black, a defect to which the English gentry seem subject from their great use of sugar.”
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Perhaps unwittingly, the King of Morocco’s generosity was the cause.

In the 1550s, the Portuguese already had a strongly developed sugar industry in Brazil, with 2,000 sugar mills along the northeast coast.
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Even so, until the 1750s, sugar was still worth its weight in gold. Big profits could be made by those who could find new sugar-growing areas and more efficient means to extract the sugar. Speculators, entrepreneurs, and planters hastened to cultivate sugar cane in all suitable parts of the tropics and subtropics. During the 18th century, sugar plantations sprang up all over the Caribbean—in Haiti, Barbados, Cuba, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, and Guadeloupe. In the century from 1700 to 1800, British consumption trebled from 4 pounds per person per year to 12 pounds annually. By the end of that century, sugar was readily available in rural areas as well as towns and was within the reach of all classes in society. At first, most sugar in Britain was used in tea, but later candies and chocolates became extremely popular. Planting increased during the 19th century, expanding to Fiji, Hawaii, Australia, India, Thailand, and southern Africa. During the 20th century, Florida became a world-scale producer.

That was cane sugar, but in the middle of the 18th century, a German scientist devised a method of extracting sugar from another plant, mangel-wurzel, a type of beet. Fifty years later, another German improved the mangel-wurzel to the plant now known as “sugar beet” and erected the first beet-sugar factory in 1802. In 1811, Napoleon was worried about the British blockade of sugar imports from the West Indies (the same blockade that drove the French to eat potatoes), so he set up sugar-beet schools, factories, and plantations. Sugar-beet grows easily in temperate climates and most European countries quickly set up their own sugar-beet industry. The same techniques were adopted in North America, Russia, China, Japan, and other temperate zones of the world. Now, production of sugar from sugar beets rivals that from sugar cane.

Just in the last century, sugar has moved from being a luxury item to a cheap commodity. Annual consumption in America of sugar from these two sources rose to 61.5 pounds per person in 2004. Even so, supply outstrips demand and competition is intense. Farm prices have been driven down and each country is protecting its sugar industry by holding consumer prices high. This has led to yet another development: the extraction of sugar from corn (maize) starch. It might surprise you to know that sugar can be made from corn, but the marvels of modern technology have performed such a feat. This product is called “high-fructose corn syrup” (HFCS), although the name is a bit misleading, since it has exactly the same quantities of fructose and sucrose as table sugar. It is a lot cheaper than the artificially high price of cane sugar. Particularly in the U.S., HFCS has replaced table sugar in a great many foods. High-fructose corn syrup mixes well in many foods, is cheap to produce, tastes sweet, and is easy to store. It is used in everything from bread and pasta sauces to bacon and beer as well as in “health products” like protein bars. However, by far its greatest use is in carbonated soft drinks—the American soft drinks industry switched from sugar to HFCS in the 1970s. As a result, American annual consumption of HFCS has soared from zero in 1969 to 59.2 pounds per person in 2004.

The Problems with Eating Sugar

When we add all the sugar sources together (including minor sources such as maple syrup, molasses, and so on), annual sugar consumption in U.S. has shot up, just in 300 years, from around 4 pounds per person (as in the Savanna Model) to 141.0 pounds per person.
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We might suppose that such a dramatic move away from the Savanna Model in sugar consumption has consequences, and indeed it does. As is now commonly accepted, sugar intake is not healthy: it disturbs blood sugar control which, as with grains and potato, is linked to the tremendous increase in heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, cancers, bone disease, allergies, and many more conditions. This constellation of diseases is sometimes called “Syndrome X” or “sugar disease.” In addition, sugar is devoid of any other nutrients and it works yet more harm by displacing more nutritious foods from the diet.

SALT

Salt is a compound made up of two elements, sodium and chlorine. As a rule of thumb, 6 grams of salt contain 2.5 grams of sodium and 3.5 grams of chlorine.
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Put another way, 2.5 grams of sodium make 6 grams of salt. Often nutritionists talk about the “sodium content” of food rather than the “salt content,” because the body recognizes sodium in all its forms and sodium, not chlorine, is what has such a decisive effect on our health. Most of the sodium we consume comes in the form of table salt, although some people get additional sodium, for example, from the sodium bicarbonate in antacids..

We saw in Chapter 1 how the San’s diet was very low in salt, about 650 mg per day (Americans on average consume ten times this amount). The San have no sources of salt and the only sodium comes from what is naturally present in the plants they eat. Our understanding of this ancestral diet suggests that the situation was identical for the whole of our evolutionary past, as our ancestors lived inland and had no access to naturally occurring salt. The Savanna Model diet is very low in sodium and, significantly, rich in another mineral called potassium.

The USDA, both in its pyramid and dietary guidelines for Americans, subtly but insistently encourages people to reduce salt consumption. They point out that most salt is ingested from prepared and processed foods, so that much of the salt is so disguised that we do not realize it is there. Did you know that cornflakes are saltier than seawater?

But salt was not always so freely available. Homer related in
The Odyssey
that Odysseus should look for a people who had no knowledge of salt—these were the Epeirotes who, even after the capture of Troy, knew nothing of the sea. The Greeks themselves came late to the use of salt and they might have had a taboo against it. Early Indo-Europeans and Sanskrit-speaking peoples (early Hindus) had no word for salt. To the Romans, salt was a scarce commodity and they even paid their soldiers with it (our word
salary
comes from the Latin
salarium
meaning “salt-payment”). The same goes for many other civilizations: salt was a form of money and was treated with respect. Many Central American tribes knew nothing of salt until the Spanish conquest and the same was true of central Africa before European contact.

Of course, many peoples who lived close to the sea had access to salt. They created salt-drying beds along the shoreline and harvested the salt for consumption and trade. Nevertheless, this was a cottage industry until recent times, when salt production was put on an industrialized footing. In some areas, salt beds deep under the Earth were discovered. The Ancient Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks sent unfortunate wretches underground to mine salt by hand. Nowadays, it is either excavated by huge mining machines or extracted through boreholes using high-pressure steam. Suddenly, salt moved from being a rare, tradable product to a freely available, cheap commodity. Salt consumption rocketed in the U.S. from around 1 gram per person per day to 10 grams per day.

Researcher Boyd Eaton estimates that the typical daily consumption of sodium in Pleistocene times was no more than 0.7 gram per person.
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It was obtained purely from what was intrinsic to the foods they ate. The average American consumes 4 grams of sodium (10 grams of salt) per day, nearly six times as much. This heavy salt load poses a problem for the body: it is linked to problems such as high blood pressure, osteoporosis,
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and blocked arteries. We tend to think of our arteries as being like inert plastic plumbing, but in reality they are living tissue and high salt levels irritate and scar them. The blood pressure specialist Professor Louis Tobian has shown that salt damages arteries even if your blood pressure is normal.
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Also, over-consumption of salt drains calcium out of the bones and high salt levels cause our kidneys to malfunction, provoking abnormally high blood pressure.

Nutritionists have demonized salt often enough, so what has been said so far is not a surprise. However, there is another factor that is important—the consumption of the mineral potassium. Sodium and potassium work as a team in tiny, yet vital, quantities in the electrical circuitry of body cells. They need to be consumed in a ratio of about 1 part of sodium to 5 parts potassium. Boyd Eaton finds that this is exactly the ratio consumed, quite naturally and without forethought, by humans in Pleistocene times.
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Potassium is abundant in fruits, salads, and vegetables. In the average American diet today, the see-saw is unbalanced the other way—1 part potassium to 2.5 parts sodium—and this has repercussions on the efficient working of every cell in our bodies.

BEVERAGES

In chapter 2, we introduced a new food group, Beverages. The reason is that the USDA in its dietary guidelines for Americans only makes passing reference to alcohol, sodas, fruit juice, and water, and no mention at all is made of tea or coffee. Nevertheless, beverages are an important factor in our food intake and we need to know how they fit into the scheme of things. We therefore make a food group of beverages and single out the ones that dominate our Western consumption pattern.

The main beverage for our Pleistocene ancestors was water, plain and simple. Or perhaps not so plain—often it came from a waterhole used by the other creatures of the savanna, containing all kinds of bugs, germs, and sediment. In addition, fluid was obtained from vegetation such as the tsama melon, roots and tubers, and even from rainwater collected in the hollow trunks of trees. Finally, some liquid was obtained from the mammals that were killed on occasion; the San would drink the blood and stomach contents of antelope, for example.

Alcoholic Beverages

It is an interesting thought that in ancient times, no one had a means of boiling water. It was not until the invention of kiln-fired pottery in Egypt around 6000 b.c. that water could be heated and infused with herbs to give it flavor. Within a heartbeat of learning how to make pots, these inventive people also discovered how to ferment beverages to make forms of beer and wine. In short order, most civilizations adopted, or discovered for themselves, local variations on these basic beverages. In 2100 b.c., Sumerian doctors prescribed beer for many ailments; Egyptian doctors in 1500 b.c. included beer or wine in 15% of their prescriptions. By 1170 b.c., Hammurabi of Babylon, in his code of laws, regulated drinking houses and pre-biblical Canaanites had a multitude of uses for intoxicating fluids.

Meanwhile, Indians and Chinese made intoxicating beverages from barley and rice. The 3,000-year-old Hindu Ayurvedic medicine teaches both the beneficial uses of alcoholic beverages and the consequences of intoxication and the diseases of alcoholism. Most of the peoples in India, as well as Sri Lanka, the Philippines, China, and Japan, have continued to ferment a portion of their crops. Japanese sake is a well-known drink made from fermented rice.

In Africa, maize, millet, bananas, honey, the saps of the palm and the bamboo, and many fruits have been used to ferment beers and wines, the best known being kaffir beer and palm wines. The Tarahumara of northern Mexico made beers from corn and agave, and the Papago Indians made a cactus wine. Throughout Central and South America, the Indians made alcoholic beverages from maize, tubers, fruits, flowers, and saps. In contrast, the San, the Eskimo, the Australian aboriginal, the North American Indian, and the Polynesian never discovered fermentation.

Today, the choice of fermented drinks has narrowed down to two main types, wine and beer. Wine is made from grapes and can have an alcoholic strength up to 13%. Beer is made from malted barley and has strengths between 4% and 6% alcohol; most varieties of beer are flavored with hops to give it a bitter taste. Consumption of wine in the U.S. has increased from 1.3 gallons per person per year in 1970 to 2.2 gallons annually in 2002. For beer, the figures show an increase from 18.5 gallons per person per year to 22.0 gallons annually. (These are figures covering the whole population, not just those of drinking age.)