Monday, May 24, 2010

how it began...,

According to a new research study, refined sugar is far more addictive than cocaine -- one of the most addictive and harmful substances currently known. Sugar of any kind, (mono or disaccharide) drives up blood sugar levels dramatically and uncontrollably. In a matter of minutes, you enter a hyperglycemic state from which you crash 1-2 hours later into hypoglycemia. This roughly, 2 hour swing from ingestion to craving is the addictive cycle.

If you get hunger pains, you are addicted. People with stable blood sugar levels do not get hunger pains or experience hypoglycemic crash. Refined sugar was almost nonexistent in the diet of most people until very recently. Today, however, over-consumption of sugar is driving an obesity epidemic in America.

The sugar consumption in the US in 1896 was 4.3 pounds per person and that included sorghum, sucrose, honey, maple syrup and molasses. The consumption today is roughly 153 pounds for every man woman and child in the country, and that is for sucrose (white sugar) and high fructose corn syrup ONLY.

In the subreal era, when we were still trying to figure out what food was safe to eat and what was not, did we discover that foods that were sweet were less likely to be poisonous? Did we develop a taste for the sweet as a survival instinct? Why do babies just starting to eat food prefer fruits to vegetables? Why are there more sweet receptors on the tongue than others?

Everytime I see my chirren get highn'a'muhfukka on sugar, it makes me think about what an extraordinary and unprecedented impact the introduction of mass quantities of sugar must've had on the climate of consciousness on continental europe when it began to be imported in significant quantities from the New World a few centuries ago....,

I think it would make one helluv'n interesting historical narrative to attempt to reconstruct/survey the collective effects and motivations arising in the old world from the introduction of mass quantities of sugar, caffeine, nicotine, etc...,

We know at least one of the major effects this addiction had on our own history;

However, a much larger scale production of sugarcane shifts across the Atlantic to America with the introduction of sugarcane to Santo Domingo on Columbus' second voyage in 1493. Eventually, America will surpass Mediterranean sugarcane industry as huge plantations will spread to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Sugarcane also made inroads with indigo in the Portuguese colony of Brazil. In conjunction with industrialization in Europe the habit of sugar consumption with coffee, tea, and rum will become a drug-like addiction involving sugar, alcohol, and tobacco. Europeans and eventually the world, as it industrializes, will, without much alarm or perceptions of dangers of abuse, feed one of the largest cash crops and food businesses in the world. Cacao like tea and coffee contains a stimulant and is combined with vanilla , milk products, and sugar to produce a sweet with supposed aphrodisiac properties called chocolate this is only one aspect of sugars impact and importance.

The initial labor for sugarcane plantations in America will fall on Native Americans, but by 1600 95 % of Native Americans in the Caribbean and Atlantic Coast populations will be dead, mainly due to disease and labor. African slavery will replace the Native American slave labor and by 1888 9.5 million African people will be enslaved in the Americas. The Caribbean plantations will dominate in sugarcane and slaves, but Portuguese Brazil will always be a strong competitor to the Spanish and other Europeans in the Caribbean. The Southeastern United States in colonial times and as part of the United States will also operate plantations dominated with sugarcane and sorghum production of sugar. The cruelty and exploitation of these slave plantation systems will, driven by unprecedented greed, bring the entire African slave trade aspect to a halt by the late 1880s. In the case of French Haiti (called Saint Dominique) 450,000 African slaves will be persecuted so that a bloody fifteen year revolt will result in the only full take over of a colony in America by African slaves.