It used to be only pretty little girls would be made of "sugar and spice and everything nice."
Today, everyone is made up of sugar, even big, ugly guys. Sweetness is everywhere.
We are all crystallized because there is no food that doesn't taste better with a dash of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in just the right magical mixture.
Sugars are carbohydrates. That means the carbon atoms are connected to a combination of hydrogen and oxygen. The ratio of two oxygens to one hydrogen is maintained even if there are 11 atoms of hydrogen and 22 of oxygen.
Sugars are divided into monosaccharide, a single molecule that if added to another saccharide creates the disaccharides like lactose and fructose etc. Sugars in long chains make starches and other complex carbohydrates.
Our bodies are fueled by glucose, the mother of all sugars. As a monosaccharide, glucose is a product of photosynthesis and is the start of the energy cascade in every cell of the body. We live because of the chemistry of sugar. No wonder we like it.
In the culinary history of man, sucrose, the common table sugar, is the star but not the first love of man. That would be honey made of glucose and fructose, the plant sugar. Sucrose became popular in India because it was transported as crystals. The word sucrose is derived from the medieval Arabic sakkar because of their exportation of this treasure to Europe. The Spanish, azucar, preserves the Moorish sounds.
It is not the ancient cultivation of cane sugar or the more contemporary harvesting of drought resistant sugar beet that is the story.
The challenge I find is how sugar in whatever form is used in our food as additives to attract us to buy and consume more.
The other day for lunch, in the effort to try eating healthy, I pulled from the shelf a can of split pea soup, not a childhood favorite. Still, as an adult I thought I should eat better. There on the label was sugar. Then I began looking around and found that ketchup has sugar. Beans have sugar, and of course cereal and treats are saturated with the stuff.
Foods not only have sugar, they have sucrose, fructose, modified corn syrup solids, molasses and even crystallized cane juice.
By breaking the different kinds of sugars into various names, instead of aggregating them as a whole, the food industry is able to string out the ingredients in labels so the unsuspecting public doesn't realize the amount of sweetener that seduces them.
So why all the fuss? We need glucose for our fuel and we are calmed and enticed with sugar of all forms.
The bother is there is an exploitive nature of food processors to create new products with the attraction solidified with sweetness.
Agro-industrial corporations know the appeal of sugar and how it can lead to what one author called "mindless eating."
Another authority, Dr. David Kessler, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, goes on to accuse food makers, not growers, of creating a potion of sugar, fat and salt to make eating a "conditioned response." It is the famous "see food" diet. You see it; you eat it. You certainly don't think about it.
Kids and adults are eating themselves into XXXL everything. That also means XXXL-sized problems with heart disease and diabetes.
Is sugar the new evil?
It would be silly to blame one thing, but if we are drawn to eating more by the disguised sugars in everything then perhaps that is one place to start.
Another target is the amount of money Congress and the Department of Agriculture allocate for sugar subsidies. While the nation gets fat the sugar industry grows fat from our tax dollars.
So I don't feel very sweet; I'm pretty bitter.
Joseph Cramer, M.D., is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, practicing pediatrician for more than 25 years and an adjunct professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah. He can be reached at jgcramermd@yahoo.com.