British sugar consumption rose from 2 pounds a head to 90 in three centuries
In 1650 the average Briton ate about 2 pounds of sugar a year. By the early twentieth century it was 90. That appetite helped drive colonisation and was bound up with slavery, and the word itself carries the story, travelling from Sanskrit through Persian, Arabic and Latin into English.
Chemically, sugars are sweet, soluble carbohydrates. Glucose, fructose and galactose are simple sugars; pair two and you get disaccharides such as sucrose, lactose and maltose. White table sugar is nearly pure sucrose. Lactose is the odd one out, found only in milk rather than in plants. Sugarcane and sugar beet concentrate sucrose so well that together they reached about two billion tonnes of production in 2016.
Cane sugar was first made on the Indian subcontinent, and Chinese manuscripts from the eighth century BCE already credit India with the crop. Sanskrit sarkara, ground or candied sugar, became Persian shakar and Arabic sukkar, then Medieval Latin succarum and Old French sucre. Jaggery, a coarse brown sugar, reached English from the same Sanskrit root via Malayalam and Portuguese. Nearchus, Alexander's admiral, described sugar, as did Pliny the Elder, and Arabs introduced it to Europe through Sicily and Spain.
Mass production began in Madeira and the Canary Islands in the mid-1400s. Columbus carried cane to the Americas, and by the 1520s Cuba and Jamaica had sugar industries, while the Portuguese planted it in Brazil. The modern industry's other pillar was German: beet sugar was first made industrially in 1801 at Cunern in Prussia. Once sugar became an everyday item in the nineteenth century, demand reshaped economies, and world consumption rose more than a hundredfold between 1850 and 2000.
Today the average person eats roughly 24 kilograms a year, with people in the Americas reaching up to 50 and Africans under 20. Because added sugar raises calorie intake, it is linked to higher risks of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. In 2015 the World Health Organization advised keeping free sugars below 10 percent of energy intake and ideally under 5 percent.
Source: Sugar
