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It's the sweetness, stupid... Last week I’ve added two more chapters to the website, ‘country living’ and ‘gardening’. The inaugural page for the ‘county living’ was meat curing and smoking, a skill well practiced and perfected in my family for many generations. So, I really was in no need to consult the literature on the subject but I did it anyway, just to see what the rest of the world is doing. As I should expect, but I didn’t, it complicated my task. I can easily ignore the artificial preserva-tives suggested in the literature, we never used them, but sugar is a bit confusing (we never used sugar either). They say that the sugar included in the cure is used as food by the lactobacilli and, in addition to reducing further the ability of the spoilage bacteria to grow, accounts for the tangy flavor of some cured products. It might be so, but I’m suspicious on the necessity of sugar curing. The foodstuff known as sugar delivers a primary taste sensation of sweetness; originally a luxury, it eventually became sufficiently cheap and common to influence what we eat. In the US, sugar has become increasingly evident in food products, as more food manufacturers add sugar or high fructose corn syrup to a wide variety of consumables. Candy bars, soft drinks, chips, snacks, fruit juice, peanut butter, soups, ice cream, jams, jellies, yogurt, and many breads have added sugars. Do you notice all those reports on obesity and diabetes?

sugarloaf

A sugarloaf was the traditional form, a tall gently-tapering cylinder with a conical top, in which refined sugar was exported from the Caribbean and eastern Brazil from 17th to 19th centuries; pieces were broken off with special iron sugar-cutters, shaped like large pliers with sharp blades.

Like most other warm-bladed creatures, humans have inherited a preference for energy-dense foods, a preference reflected in the sweet tooth shared by most mammals. Natural selection predisposed us to the taste of sugar and fat (its texture as well as taste) because sugars and fats offer the most energy (which is what a calorie is) per bite. Yet in nature - in whole foods - we seldom encounter these nutrients in the concentrations we now find them in in processed foods. You won’t find a fruit with anywhere near the amount of fructose in a soda, or a piece of animal flesh with quite as much fat as a chicken nugget.

You begin to see why processing foods is such a good strategy for getting people to eat more of them. The power of food science lies in its ability to break foods down into their nutrient parts and then reassemble them in specific ways that, in effect, push our evolutionary buttons, fooling the omnivore’s inherited food selection system. Add fat or sugar to anything and it’s going to taste better on the tongue of an animal that natural selection has wired to seek out energy-dense foods. Animal studies prove the point: rats presented with solutions of pure sucrose or tubs of pure lard - goodies they seldom encounter in nature - will gorge themselves sick. Whatever nutritional wisdom the rats are born with breaks down when faced with sugars and fats in unnatural concentrations - nutrients ripped from their natural content, which is to say, from those things we call foods. Food systems can cheat by exaggerating their energy density, tricking a sensory apparatus that evolved to deal with markedly less dense whole foods.

It is amped-up energy density of processed foods that gets omnivores like us into trouble.

Michael Pollan: The omnivore’s dilemma, A natural history of four meals, Penguin Books, New York, 2006.

 2008-05-18 

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