The Sugar Blues (Ruthann Russo)

In 1975, William Dufty, wrote the book Sugar Blues. The book was inspired by Dufty’s withdrawal from a significant sugar addiction in the 1960’s. Interestingly, Dr. Otto Warburg’s finding of a causal link between sugar and cancer in 1931 is not even mentioned by Dufty. This probably has less to do with Dufty’s skills as a researcher and more to do with mainstream media’s ability to bury stories that create the wrong kind of controversy.

In Sugar Blues, Dufty describes the history of refined sugar in our diets dating back to the 16th and 17th centuries. He provides some good evidence that the known dangers of eating refined sugar date back to 1664, when diabetes was first identified by Thomas Willis, a physician in England. Willis documented the relationship between excess sugar in the urine and the likelihood of developing diabetes. But because the King’s largest business at the time was importing refined sugar, Willis did not share this information publicly. A wise move for a 17th century physician who wanted to avoid being banished. Today, we still find many of our dietary choices being driven by government policy, some of which may be to benefit industry and not the citizen.

In the preface to Sugar Blues, Dufty defines sugar, defines the blues and then the term sugar blues as the following: “Sugar is refined sucrose, C12H22011, produced by multiple chemical processing of the juice of the sugar cane or beet and removal of all fiber and protein, which amounts to 90 percent of the natural plant. Blues is a state of depression or melancholy overlaid with fear, physical discomfort, and anxiety. And, Sugar Blues is defined as multiple physical and mental miseries caused by human consumption of refined sugar – commonly called sucrose.”

Around the time that Dufty’s book was published, sugar substitutes became popular. The reason for sugar substitutes was, of course, not to improve nutritional value of the food, but rather to decrease the caloric content since sugar is about 60 calories per teaspoon and Sweet ‘n Low is zero calories. The raw food approach recognizes both the human desire for sweetness in our food as well as the need for sound nutrition. Believe it or not, there are several natural sources of sweetness, used by many or most raw foodists that taste wonderful and are nutritious. The one drawback (for anyone who is worried about calories) is that there is only one raw food sweetener with zero calories. That is the naturally sweet Peruvian herb, stevia.