Magnification of grains of sugar, showing their
monoclinic hemihedral
crystalline structure.
Magnified crystals of refined sugar.
In non-scientific use, the term sugar refers to sucrose (also called "table
sugar" or "saccharose") — a white crystalline solid
disaccharide. Humans most commonly use sucrose as their sugar of choice for altering the
flavor and properties (such as mouthfeel, preservation, and
texture) of beverages and food. Commercially produced table sugar comes either from
sugar cane or from sugar beet. Manufacturing and preparing
food may involve other sugars, including palm sugar and fructose, generally obtained from corn (maize) or fruit.
In this informal sense, the word "sugar" principally refers to crystalline sugars; but a great many foods exist which
principally contain sugar: these generally appear as syrups, or have specific names such as
"honey" or "molasses." Many of these comprise mostly sugar; and
sugar may dissolve in water to form a syrup.
Scientifically, sugar refers to any monosaccharide or disaccharide. Monosaccharides (also called "simple sugars"), such as glucose, store chemical energy which biological cells convert to other types of energy.
In a list of ingredients, any word that ends with "ose" will likely denote a sugar. Sometimes such words may also refer to any
types of carbohydrates soluble in water.
In culinary terms, the foodstuff known as sugar delivers a primary taste sensation
of sweetness. Apart from the many forms of sugar and of sugar-containing foodstuffs,
alternative non-sugar-based sweeteners exist, and particularly interest people who have
problems with their blood sugar level (such as diabetics) and people who wish to limit their calorie-intake, but
while enjoying sweet foods to a greater degree. Both natural and synthetic examples exist with no significant carbohydrate (calorie) content, for instance stevia (a herb) and saccharin (produced from
naturally occurring but not necessarily naturally edible substances by inducing appropriate
chemical reactions).
Sugar and society
For many years Suger has been distributed through society, and has helped shape the community. One example of this is sugar
and its effects with language, such as "Give some some sugar," and "you're sweet as sugar." Many more alterations of society have
been swayed by Sugar especially in the southern regions of the earth.
History
Early use of sugar-cane in Asia
Sugar-cane, a tropical grass, probably originated in New Guinea. During prehistoric times its culture spread throughout the Pacific Islands
and into India. By 200 BC producers in China had begun to grow
it too. Westerners learned of sugar cane in the course of military expeditions to India. Nearchos, one of Alexander the Great's commanders, described it as
"a reed that gives honey without bees".
Originally, people chewed the cane raw to extract its sweetness. The process of making sugar by evaporating juice from sugar
cane developed in India around 500 BC. In South Asia, the Middle
East and China, sugar became a staple of cooking and desserts.
Early refining methods involved grinding or pounding the cane in order to extract the juice, and then boiling down the juice
or drying it in the sun to yield sugary solids that resembled gravel. The Sanskrit word for "sugar" (sharkara), also means
"gravel". Similarly, the Chinese use the term "gravel sugar" (Traditional Chinese: 砂糖) for table sugar.
Cane sugar outside Asia
A sugar-cane cutter in
Cuba.
During the Muslim Agricultural Revolution, sugar production was adopted from
India and then refined and transformed into a large-scale industry by the Arabs, who built the first sugar
mills, refineries, factories and plantations. The Arabs and Berbers diffused sugar throughout the Arab Empire and beyond across
much of the Old World, including Western Europe after
they conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century AD.[1] Crusaders also
brought sugar home with them after their campaigns in the Holy Land, where they encountered
caravans carrying "sweet salt". Crusade chronicler William of Tyre, writing in the late
12th century, described sugar as "very necessary for the use and health of mankind".
The 1390s saw the development of a better press, which doubled the juice obtained from the cane. This permitted economic
expansion of sugar plantations to Andalucia and to the Algarve. The 1420s saw sugar-production extended to the Canary Islands,
Madeira and the Azores.
In August 1492 Christopher Columbus stopped at Gomera in the Canary Islands, for wine and water, intending to stay
only four days. He became romantically involved with the Governor of the island, Beatrice de Bobadilla, and stayed a month. When
he finally sailed she gave him cuttings of sugar-cane, which became the first to reach the New World.
The Portuguese took sugar to Brazil. Hans
Staden, published in 1555, writes that by 1540 Santa Catalina Island had 800
sugar-mills and that the north coast of Brazil, Demarara and Surinam had another 2000. Approximately 3000 small mills built before 1550 in the New World created an
unprecedented demand for cast iron gears, levers, axles and
other implements. Specialist trades in mold-making and iron-casting developed in Europe due to the expansion of sugar-production.
Sugar-mill construction developed technological skills needed for a nascent industrial
revolution in the early 17th-century.[citation needed]
After 1625 the Dutch carried sugar-cane from South America to the Caribbean islands —
where it became grown from Barbados to the Virgin
Islands. The years 1625 to 1750 saw sugar become worth its weight in gold.[citation needed] Contemporaries often compared[citation needed] the worth of sugar with valuable
commodities including musk, pearls, and spices. Prices declined slowly as production became multi-sourced, especially through
British colonial policy. Formerly an indulgence of the rich, sugar became increasingly common among the poor. Sugar-production
increased in mainland North American colonies, in Cuba, and in Brazil. African slaves became the dominant source of plantation-workers, as they
proved resistant to the diseases of malaria and yellow
fever. (European indentured servants remained in shorter supply, susceptible
to disease and overall forming a less economic investment. European diseases such as smallpox
had reduced the numbers of local Native Americans.) But replacement
of Native American with African slaves also occurred because of the high death-rates on sugar-plantations. The British West
Indies imported almost 4 million slaves, but had only 400,000 Blacks left after slavery ended in the British Empire in 1838.
With the European colonization of the Americas, the
Caribbean became the world's largest source of sugar. These islands could
supply sugar-cane using slave-labor and produce sugar at prices vastly lower than those of cane-sugar imported from the East.
Thus the economies of entire islands such as Guadaloupe and Barbados became based on sugar-production. By 1750 the French colony known as Saint-Domingue (subsequently the independent country of Haiti)
became the largest sugar-producer in the world. Jamaica too became a major producer
in the 18th century. Sugar-plantations fueled a demand for manpower; between 1701 and 1810
ships brought nearly one million slaves to work in Jamaica and in Barbados.
During the eighteenth century, sugar became enormously popular and the sugar-market went through a series of booms. The heightened demand and production of sugar came about to a large extent due to a great change in
the eating habits of many Europeans. For example, they began consuming jams,
candy, tea, coffee, cocoa, processed foods, and other sweet victuals in much greater
numbers. Reacting to this increasing craze, the islands took advantage of the situation and began producing more sugar. In fact,
they produced up to ninety percent of the sugar that the western Europeans consumed. Some islands proved more successful than
others when it came to producing the product. And in Barbados and the British Leeward
Islands sugar provided 93% and 97% respectively of exports.
Planters later began developing ways to boost production even more. For example, they began using more manure when growing their crops. They also developed more advanced mills and began using better types of
sugar-cane. Despite these and other improvements, the price of sugar reached soaring heights, especially during events such as
the revolt against the Dutch[citation needed] and the Napoleonic Wars. Sugar
remained in high demand, and the islands' planters knew exactly how to take advantage of the situation.
As Europeans established sugar-plantations on the larger Caribbean islands, prices fell, especially in Britain. By the eighteenth century all levels of society had become
common consumers of the former luxury product. At first most sugar in Britain went into tea, but later confectionery and chocolates became extremely
popular. Many Britons (especially children) also ate jams.[citation needed] Suppliers commonly sold sugar in solid cones and consumers required a
sugar nip, a pliers-like tool, to break off pieces.
Sugar-cane quickly exhausts the soil in which it grows, and planters pressed larger islands with
fresher soil into production in the nineteenth century. In this century, for example, Cuba rose to become the richest land in the
Caribbean (with sugar as its dominant crop) because it formed the only major island land-mass free of mountainous terrain.
Instead, nearly three-quarters of its land formed a rolling plain — ideal for planting crops. Cuba also prospered above other
islands because Cubans used better methods when harvesting the sugar crops: they adopted modern milling-methods such as
water-mills, enclosed furnaces, steam-engines, and vacuum-pans. All these technologies increased productivity.
After the Haïtian Revolution established the independent state of Haiti, sugar production in that country declined and Cuba replaced
Saint-Domingue as the world's largest producer.
Long established in Brazil, sugar-production spread to other parts of South America, as well as to newer European colonies in Africa and in the
Pacific, where it became especially important in Fiji.
In Colombia, the planting of sugar started very early on, and entrepreneurs imported many
African slaves to cultivate the fields. The industrialization of the Colombian industry started in 1901 with the establishment of
the first steam-powered sugar mill by Santiago Eder.
The rise of beet sugar
In 1747 the German chemist Andreas Marggraf identified sucrose in
beet-root. This discovery remained a mere curiosity for some time, but eventually Marggraf's
student Franz Achard built a sugarbeet-processing factory at Cunern in Silesia, under the patronage of King Frederick William III of Prussia (reigned 1797 - 1840). While never profitable, this
plant operated from 1801 until it suffered destruction during the Napoleonic Wars (ca
1802 - 1815).
Napoleon, cut off from Caribbean imports by a British blockade and at any rate not wanting to fund British merchants, banned imports of sugar in 1813. The beet-sugar
industry that emerged in consequence grew, and today sugar-beet provides approximately 30% of world
sugar production.
While no longer grown by slaves, sugar from developing countries has an on-going association with workers earning minimal
wages and living in extreme poverty.
In the developed countries, the sugar industry relies on machinery, with a low requirement for manpower. A large beet-refinery
producing around 1,500 tonnes of sugar a day needs a permanent workforce of about 150 for 24-hour production.
Mechanization
Beginning in the late 18th century, the production of sugar became increasingly mechanized. The steam engine first powered a sugar-mill in Jamaica in 1768, and soon
after, steam replaced direct firing as the source of process heat.
In 1813 the British chemist Edward Charles
Howard invented a method of refining sugar that involved boiling the cane juice not in an open kettle, but in a closed
vessel heated by steam and held under partial vacuum. At reduced pressure, water boils at a lower temperature, and this
development both saved fuel and reduced the amount of sugar lost through caramelization.
Further gains in fuel-efficiency came from the multiple-effect evaporator,
designed by the African-American engineer Norbert
Rillieux (perhaps as early as the 1820s, although the first working model dates from 1845). This system consisted of a
series of vacuum pans, each held at a lower pressure than the previous one. The vapors from each pan served to heat the next,
with minimal heat wasted. Today, many industries use multiple-effect evaporators for evaporating
water.
The process of separating sugar from molasses also received mechanical attention: David
Weston first applied the centrifuge to this task in Hawaii in
1852.
Etymology
The English word "sugar" originates from the Arabic and Persian word shakar.[1] It came to English by way of French, Spanish and/or Italian, which derived their word for sugar from the Arabic and Persian shakar (whence the
Portuguese word açúcar, the Spanish word azúcar, the Italian word
zucchero, the Old French word zuchre and the contemporary French word sucre). (Compare the OED.) The Greek word for "sugar" is zahari,
which means "sugar" or "pebble". Note that the English word jaggery (meaning "coarse brown Indian sugar") has similar
ultimate etymological origins (presumably in Sanskrit).
Sugar as food
Originally a luxury, sugar eventually became sufficiently cheap and common to influence standard cuisine. Britain and the Caribbean islands have cuisines where the use of sugar
become particularly prominent.
Sugar forms a major element in confectionery and in desserts. Cooks use it as a food
preservative as well as for sweetening.
Concerns of vegetarians and vegans
The sugar-refining industry often uses bone char (calcinated animal bones) for decolorizing. This concerns vegans and vegetarians; about a quarter of the
sugar in the U.S. gets processed using bone char as a filter and the rest gets processed with activated carbon. As bone char does not get into the sugar, the relevant authorities consider sugar
processed this way as parve/kosher.
Vegetarians and vegans may also object to the impact that the burning of the cane fields (a common part of the harvesting
practice) has on insects, rats, snakes, and other life residing in the fields.[2] The killing of such species parallels the killing of bees in the course of the production of honey,
another sweetener that vegans usually avoid.
Sugar and health
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Whereas historically rotting teeth once seemed the most prominent health-hazard from the use of sugar, first the growth in the
usage of rum (a sugar-cane derivative) and then concerns about type 2 diabetes and obesity have gradually come into
prominence.
Tooth-decay
Tooth-decay, arguably the most prominent health hazard associated with the use of
sugar, can damage teeth in many ways.[citation needed] Bacteria in the mouth metabolize sugar into various acids.[citation needed] When the pH at the surface of the tooth drops below 5.5 (known as the "critical pH"), the acids start dissolving
tooth-enamel.[citation needed] This results in decay of the tooth.
Diabetes
Diabetes, a disease that causes the body to metabolize sugar poorly, occurs when
either:
- the body's cells ignore insulin, a chemical that allows the metabolizing of sugar (Type 2
diabetes)
- the body attacks the cells producing the insulin (Type 1 diabetes)
When glucose builds up in the bloodstream, it can cause two problems:
- in the short term, cells become starved for energy because they do not have access to the glucose
- in the long term, frequent glucose build-up can damage many of the body's organs, including the eyes, kidneys, nerves and/or
heart
However, while sugars may adversely affect those with diabetes, science has not proven that sugars cause diabetes.[citation needed]
Obesity
In the United States of America, a scientific/health debate has
started[citation needed] over the causes of a steep
rise in obesity in the general population — and one view posits increased consumption of carbohydrates in recent decades as a major factor.[3]
Obesity can result from a number of factors including:
- an increased intake of energy-dense foods — high in fat and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients;
and
- decreased physical activity.[4]
United Nations nutritional advice
In 2003, four United Nations agencies, (including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)) commissioned a report compiled by a panel of
30 international experts. The panel stated that the total of free sugars (all monosaccharides and disaccharides added to foods by
manufacturers, cooks or consumers, plus sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices) should not account for more
than 10% of the energy intake of a healthy diet, while carbohydrates in total should represent between 55% and 75% of the energy-intake (table 6, page 56 of the
WHO Technical Report Series 916, Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases: see http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/AC911E/ac911e07.htm#bm07.1.3 ).
Sugar producers’ nutritional advice
In contradistinction to the United Nations report, the Sugar Association of the United States of America insists that other evidence[citation needed] indicates that a quarter of human
food and drink intake can safely consist of sugar.[citation needed]
Debate on extrinsic sugar
Argument continues as to the value of extrinsic sugar (sugar added to food) compared to that of intrinsic sugar (sugars -
seldom sucrose - naturally present in food). Adding sugar to food particularly enhances taste, but has drawbacks of boosting
