Sweet "Poison": The Evolutionary History of Sugar with Rashomon

Wen | Zhang Dehu

"Sugar reduction is becoming a trend in the development of global food production and consumption. In the Chinese market, sugar reduction, oil reduction and salt reduction are important starting points for the implementation of 'Healthy China' in the field of food consumption. ”

On April 22, at the 2022 Wudaokou Food Salon hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Zhang Yongjian, director of the Food and Drug Industry Development and Supervision Research Center, said.

In recent years, China is gradually becoming a big consumer of sugar, resulting in national health problems that have attracted great attention at the national level, and various high-sugar snacks and beverages have brought harm to the healthy growth of adolescents. At the same time, more scientific studies have shown that excessive sugar intake is positively correlated with the increase in the incidence of "obesity, dental caries, type 2 diabetes" and so on.

The World Health Organization also recommends controlling and reducing sugar intake, recommending limiting free sugar intake below 10% of total dietary energy throughout its life cycle. The Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2016) call for Chinese not to consume more than 50g of added sugar per day, preferably below 25g.

However, the surplus of materials brought about by industrial civilization was not expected by human ancestors, and in the long history, the energy brought by sugar has always been needed by human beings. This also leads to the fact that in modern society, human beings have never been able to get rid of this primitive desire carved into the bone marrow, and the brain's thirst for sweetness has never diminished. This is also the reason why "sugar generation" is popular in the context of the era of "sugar reduction and sugar control".

But what is "sugar" and "sugar substitute"? Compared with "sugar", is the "sugar substitute" that advertises "0 calories" healthy and safe?

Arguments such as these are once again on the table.

The development of sugar

What is sugar?

From a chemical point of view, carbohydrates are polyhydroxy aldehydes or ketones that, after hydrolysis, can become one of the above two organic compounds.

In prehistory, human ancestors already knew how to take sweetness from fresh fruits, honey, and plants. From the historical dimension, the history of sugar production has roughly gone through the three stages of early sugar making, handicraft sugar production and mechanized sugar production, and the extracts of sugar mainly include grains, sugar cane and sugar beets.

It can also be verified that China is one of the earliest sugar-making countries in the world.

As far back as the Western Zhou Dynasty, there are records about making caramel, and the Northern Wei "Qi Min Zhi Shu" has the most detailed description of the methods, steps, and main points of caramel production, but the status of caramel was quickly replaced by cane sugar.

To be sure, India and China were the world's first cane growers. After thousands of years of development, during the Tang and Song dynasties, a large-scale workshop-style sugar industry has been formed. In the New Book of Tang, Tang Taizong sent people to India to learn the method of boiling sugar, and the exchange of cultures promoted the progress of technology and technology, and new varieties such as white sugar and rock sugar taken by the local method appeared one after another. The sugar produced during the Tang and Song dynasties was exported to Persia and Rome.

While China's sugarcane sugar making technology spread outward, the Arabs also introduced India's sugarcane cultivation technology to Spain and Italy. In the 15th century, Europe entered the Age of Discovery, and sugarcane sugar production technology was developed in North and South America.

During the Industrial Revolution, the German chemist A. Maglav discovered that sugar cane sugar was contained in beet roots, and in 1802, A. Maglaf's student Ahard established the world's first sugar beet factory, and the process of sugar beet sugar was soon adopted by the sugar cane sugar industry.

In the early 19th century, vacuum crystallization (boiling sugar) tanks were successfully manufactured. In the medium term, the steam engine has begun to drive the press, and the centrifugal honey separator has been adopted. Since then, equipment suitable for industrial production has continued to appear, and the sugar industry has entered a stage of large-scale industrial production.

In 1878, the British merchant Jardine Matheson & Co. set up the Zhonghua Refined Sugar Company in Hong Kong. In 1905, sugar beets were grown in northeast China. From August 1933 to January 1936, under the contract of Honolulu Iron Works and Czech Staæl Factory, six mechanized sugar mills were built in Guangdong. By the 1980s, China had become one of the world's largest sugar producers.

Of course, to promote more sugar penetration into people's lives and consumption, it is still the consumption giants represented by Coca-Cola and Kraft.

The "Big Scam" of Advertising History

The ironic fact is that in order to allow industrialized, mass-produced sugar to be digested by the market, the high-calorie food "sugar" was once packaged as a high-grade "diet product", which is almost a "huge scam" in the history of advertising.

If you live in the 50s and 70s of the last century, you will most likely see advertising slogans such as "Sugar will quickly boost your energy, but also make you slim and thin", "3 spoonfuls of sugar a day, a good energy source for children", "Sugar can make you full of energy, lower calories than apples, but also reduce your appetite." ”

Of course, this "flickering" propaganda method also affected the policy of the time. In May 2017, at a research conference on nutritional sciences at UCLA, Cristin E. Kearns, an assistant professor in the Department of Oral Epidemiology and Dental Public Health at the UCSA School of Dentistry, unveiled a number of brainwashing operations by the sugar industry, most notably the "glycolipid wars" of the 20th century.

As early as 1954, the Sugar Research Foundation (later the Sugar Industry Association) recognized that if Americans adopted a low-fat diet, per capita sucrose consumption would increase by more than one-third. So they bribed Harvard scientists to do research on fat and heart disease, and minimized the link between sugar and heart health, pointing everything to "fat", but not mentioning the association between excessive intake of "sugar" and the formation of fat.

In 1968, the Sugar Research Foundation funded another animal-related research project to assess the risk of sucrose and coronary heart disease.

But when the findings found a potential link between sucrose and bladder cancer, the foundation halted the project and withheld the results for a long time.

It is reported that Cristin Kearns found more than 1500 pieces of relevant evidence. She believes that this series of strategies, which fueled the low-fat boom that began in the early 1970s, also led to a surge in obesity rates since then. It was also during this period that high-sugar biscuits, donuts, Coca-Cola and other products became popular worldwide.

To this day, such operations are still visible in life.

For example, in the CDC's dietary advice booklet for diabetics, increasing dietary fiber and limiting saturated fat and salt are highlighted, but there is no mention of sugar restriction.

In 2003, WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization issued a joint report in which, for the first time, sugar intake was reduced to less than 10% of total dietary energy expenditure.

This undoubtedly touched the interests of the sugar industry and the interests of the giant consumer enterprises, who angrily said that this ratio had no scientific basis, and even threatened to withdraw $406 million from the United States in an attempt to use various resources to withdraw the report.

So, is sugar really innocent?

In the case of Coke, often referred to as "happy fat house water," in a survey by Professor Vasanti S. Malik of the Harvard School of Public Health, drinking an extra sugary drink a day would increase the overall risk of death by 7 percent, the risk of cardiovascular disease by 10 percent, and the risk of cancer-related death by 16 percent.

For women, consuming the same sugary drinks, the risk of death will be much higher than that of men.

A recent article published in the American Association for Cancer Research's Journal of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention also reveals this. Compared with women who never drank sugary soda, women who drank sugary soda five or more times a week had a 62% higher mortality rate.

It is worth being vigilant that compared with happy fat house water, women, especially young women in the mainland, have consumed more milk tea in recent years. Despite the current public opinion environment, sugar is a "sweet poison" has gradually become a consensus.

The best solution?

The prevailing view is that sugar substitutes or "sugar" are the best alternatives.

According to Wang Xufeng, president of the Capital Health Nutrition and Gastronomy Society, sugar substitute products can bring sweetness to food, but they are almost not digested and absorbed by the body, and do not participate in human metabolism, so the calories are very low or do not produce calories, which is a good substitute for sucrose.

Sugar substitutes have been around for more than 140 years.

In 1879, the first generation of sweetener "saccharin" was born, and it was put into commercial application five years later. Since then, cyclamate, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, sucralose, new sweet and other artificial sugar substitutes have come out and have been put into the market.

At the consumer product level, in 1984, Wrigley launched the first sugar-free chewing gum in the United States, and ordinary consumers began to realize the existence of sugar substitutes; in 2005, Coca-Cola launched Zero Degree Coke; in 2018, Yuanqi Forest launched sugar-free sparkling water using erythritol, and sugar substitute drinks became a boom again.

In line with this trend, more and more brands are also running to follow the sugar substitute track. According to the zhiyan consulting report, the size of the sugar substitute beverage market has increased from 1.66 billion yuan in 2014 to 11.78 billion yuan in 2020, with a compound growth rate of 38.7%, far exceeding the overall growth rate of the beverage industry. The sugar-free scale of yogurt, cereal, candy and other sub-categories is also growing significantly.

It must be noted that in the rapid development of sugar substitutes, the controversy about safety has never been dispelled.

In the early days, saccharin was suspected of insufficient safety and was "blocked" by many countries. It was not until the 1990s that the safety of saccharin was gradually demonstrated, and in 1991, the US FDA withdrew the proposal to ban saccharin.

The same is true of Aspartame, which is used heavily by Coca-Cola in Degree Zero. In 1981, the FDA approved the use of aspartame in certain foods, and many authoritative medical institutions also consider it safe, but there have been many controversies about aspartame for decades, and there are still reports questioning its safety.

An article published in the journal Public Science Library: Medicine claims that some artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and acesulfame potassium are associated with an increased risk of cancer. Although the article highlights that the current study has several important limitations, such as respondents' dietary intake as self-reported and requires further research to confirm their risks, it has been widely disseminated.

Not only that, but natural sugar substitutes are also difficult to dispel consumer doubts. For example, erythritol, which is widely used, is a natural active substance that is widely present in nature.

Erythritol was first discovered in 1848 by Scottish chemist John Sternhouse. It is generally believed that erythritol is a filler food sweetener that does not cause elevated blood sugar and is highly tolerated.

From the production process, erythritol is the only microbial fermentation process of all sugar alcohols, the fermentation method is closer to the natural transformation and extraction, and the taste and texture are the best sweeteners in the sugar substitute.

In the 1990s, erythritol was widely used in Japan, and the cost price of erythritol was several times that of sugar substitutes such as aspartame. The United States FDA, Australia, Europe, China and other countries have also approved erythritol as an edible ingredient.

In September last year, Chen Junshi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at the forum that among the alternatives to sugar, erythritol is more high-grade and safer.

However, excessive intake of erythritol does have risks such as bowel sounds and diarrhea.

In its prospectus, Sanyuan Bio disclosed that excessive one-time consumption of erythritol may lead to certain adverse physiological reactions. If a very small amount of erythritol ingested by the human body is not absorbed by the small intestine, it will enter the large intestine and become a low-energy carbon source for intestinal bacterial fermentation, and excessive consumption may produce flatulence; for example, the consumption of erythritol in high doses on an empty stomach may also cause diarrhea in some consumers.

But in fact, for large brand manufacturers such as Nongfu Spring and Yuanqi Forest, in the process of product setting and research and development, they have considered the harm caused by side effects, so as to adjust the ratio of erythritol to other sugar substitutes.

Sugar substitute applications have become the key to the battle against sugar

A trend that is difficult to change is that the trend of sugar control not only affects the choice of more and more consumers and food companies, but also promotes the prosperity of the upstream sugar generation industry.

From the current sugar substitute market, as the main producer and exporter of about 70% of the global sugar substitute production, China's many sub-products lead the global market share, and the production of erythritol is mainly concentrated in China. 95% of the world's erythritol is supplied by 5 factories, of which 3 are located in Shandong: Binzhou Sanyuan Bio, Dezhou Bowling Treasure and Zhucheng Dongxiao.

In any case, people's innate need for sweetness will not change. This means that when the concept of health becomes a lifestyle trend, the application of sugar substitutes becomes the key to the battle to reduce sugar.

In recent years, important policy documents such as the Mainland's National Nutrition Plan (2017-2030), The Healthy China Action (2019-2030), and China's Medium- and Long-term Plan for the Prevention and Treatment of Chronic Diseases (2017-2025) have taken "sugar reduction" as an important content.

In September 2021, the Service Trade Fair released the White Paper on Sugar Reduction Actions for Healthy Chinese Beverages and Foods. According to the white paper, China's sugar consumption ranks third in the world, after India and the European Union. In 2019, China's sugar consumption was 15.8 million tons, accounting for 9.04%.

From the domestic market, China has become the world's third largest sugar consumer, in first-tier cities, there is 1 diabetic in every 10 people. Globally, the number of people with diabetes is rising year by year, reaching 463 million in 2019, of which 60% of the world's diabetic population lives in Asia.

In addition, the white paper also shows that in 2020, the prevalence of diabetes in the mainland 18-29-year-old population has reached 2%, and the prevalence rate in 30-39-year-old people has reached 6.3%. In 1996, the two figures were 0.56% and 1.36%, respectively. This means that the prevalence of diabetes among mainstream people on the mainland has increased by about 4 times over a 20-year period.

The data predicts that by 2040, the number of people with diabetes in China will reach 151 million.

Or because of this, there have been uninterrupted calls for sugar taxes on businesses. To be sure, China cannot wait until the obesity rate and diabetes trend "catch up with the United Kingdom and the United States" before taking action, and the forward-looking policy, the industry's call, and the self-drive of enterprises are all necessary.

As for the controversy over sugar substitutes, at least from the known results, excessive intake of any product is not advocated and unhealthy, but under the premise of controlling intake, sugar substitutes must be superior to sucrose.

The general view of the academic community is that "the question of whether the safety of sugar substitutes is harmful to human metabolism is a very complex problem, and it may take several generations of consumers to track and experiment for a long time to know the results of exploration." But before that, you can't waste food because of choking. ”

"Sweeteners are not a negative term and have become an indispensable part of the modern food industry." Chen Junshi also advocated that all beverage companies should keep up with the industry development trend of sweetener sugar.

Reference 1, sugar reduction high-level seminar: multi-angle correct "sugar recognition" multi-faceted science "sugar reduction" 2, sugar discovery, development history and chemical classification 3, eating sugar can lose weight, control scientists, threaten WHO, count those sugar industry riots 4, sugar and health 50 years of deception - sugar drinks those things 5, "sweet poison" battle, can sugar substitute win the final victory? 6, Chen Junshi: Mooncake "sugar reduction" caused a storm, "0 sugar" is not the goal 7, "sugar reduction white paper" released in Beijing Expert appeal: sugar reduction action is imminent