Imagine for a moment a life without ever having tasted ice cream, candy, or a dessert sweetened with sugar. That little cube, which for many represents a guilty pleasure, has also, for others, been one of the major causes for which the British Empire lost its thirteen American colonies when trying to protect its sugar islands in the Americas. What would the world be like without sugar? Simple sugar is one of the classic examples that illustrate how, through the ages, a food can be perceived as either hero or villain.
Sugar arrived in Europe from the Middle East in the eleventh century. Because it was a rare and scarce product, especially in England and France—the great powers of the era—it was considered quite precious and was mostly accessible to the upper classes. Claude Fischler notes that even in the twelfth century, although sugar was included in cookbooks, it was also sold in apothecaries, as it was considered a medicinal product for all ailments.
Beyond these virtues, sugar was an influential product in the economic boom of European powers. When America was discovered and the ease of cultivating cane in these lands became apparent, the trafficking of African slaves to Caribbean plantations began, along with the development of trade routes. Sugar commerce represented up to a third of the European economy. Powers like France and England dedicated significant efforts—not only scientific, but even theological—to decipher the nature of sugar.
For a long time, medicine was based on the so-called humoral theory, which essentially held that the human body needed to maintain the balance of four humors, constituted by four liquids, to be healthy. This theory governed medicine for centuries, and under this perspective, sugar was believed to help balance the organism. It was not until the early seventeenth century, when humoral medicine was replaced by Paracelsus's chemical medicine, that less positive characteristics began to be attributed to sugar. At that time, sugar was not as omnipresent as it is today; excessive consumption was seen more as an accident than as true copious ingestion for pleasure. And it is precisely in pleasure that the controversy around its safety originates. The food once seen as a panacea now becomes the subject of questions about health damage and the willpower and moral quality of the person who consumes it. It is even the subject of treatises and debates about the appropriateness of its consumption during Lent, when pleasure must be renounced. Often, scientific discourse and the morality of the era become intertwined, more due to attribution than to actual discoveries about sugar.
It was not until the nineteenth century that its energetic properties became known, and in the 1960s, discourse about massive health damage from excessive sugar consumption proliferated. Gradually, interest in the safety of sugar has been replaced by interest in the safety of sugar substitutes. The product is already demonized. Centuries of history show us that the scientific paradigm governing an era—and which we now vilify as absurd beliefs—is impregnated with the morality and social norms of the time.
For all those centuries, we had been able to incorporate this small pleasure without falling into excess. Obviously, the environment and socioeconomic conditions have changed. Sugar has become the great scapegoat for an imbalance that is not only about a dietary component, but about an entire lifestyle characteristic of our times.
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.