Sugar

 

Except for honey, sweet things are recent in human history. Details?

You're quite right if we're talking about concentrated sweetness.

For most of human evolution, sweet taste existed, but it came in modest amounts:

1. Fruit was the main sweet food. However, wild fruits were usually much smaller, less sweet, and more fibrous than modern cultivated varieties. A wild apple, banana, or peach would often disappoint a modern supermarket shopper.

2. Honey was the great exception. Hunter-gatherers everywhere prized it. Some groups obtained a significant fraction of their calories from honey when it was available. The Hadza of Tanzania, for example, still devote considerable effort to finding wild bee nests.

3. Some roots and tubers become slightly sweet when cooked because starches break down into sugars.

4. Milk contains lactose, which tastes mildly sweet, though less so than table sugar.

What humans generally did not have was an abundant supply of pure sugar. The average Paleolithic person might go weeks without encountering anything as sweet as a modern soft drink.

Sugar cane was first domesticated in New Guinea thousands of years ago, but initially people mostly chewed the cane rather than extracting crystals. The major breakthrough came in India, probably around the first millennium BCE, where techniques for producing crystalline sugar were developed. From there sugar spread through Persia, the Islamic world, and eventually Europe.

Even then, sugar remained a luxury. In medieval Europe it was often treated more like a spice or medicine than an everyday food. A wealthy noble might own sugar; a peasant likely did not.

The real revolution occurred in the 17th–19th centuries with Caribbean plantation production. Prices collapsed, and ordinary people could suddenly afford large amounts of sugar. Per-capita consumption in Britain, for example, rose from a few pounds per year to many tens of pounds per year during the Industrial Revolution.

The truly extraordinary change is even more recent. A can of soda contains roughly the sugar equivalent of what many prehistoric people might have obtained only after finding and raiding an entire beehive. Modern processed foods make concentrated sweetness available all day, every day, in quantities our ancestors never experienced.

From an evolutionary perspective, our brains are still running software designed for a world where sweetness usually meant "rare, valuable calories." The environment changed much faster than the taste preference.

Consequences?

Quite a few, and they're not all bad.

The evolutionary story is that a craving for sweetness was probably advantageous when calories were scarce. If you found honey, ripe fruit, or sweet tubers, eating a lot of them immediately was often a sensible strategy.

The problem is that modern technology uncoupled sweetness from scarcity.

On the negative side:

1. Obesity. Sugars are easy to consume quickly and provide calories without much satiety compared with many whole foods.

2. Dental decay. Cavities were uncommon in many hunter-gatherer populations and became much more common with agriculture and especially with refined sugar.

3. Type 2 diabetes and metabolic disease. These are complex conditions involving genetics, weight, activity, and diet, but abundant sugar is certainly one contributor.

4. Preference distortion. Many people find naturally sweet foods less appealing after becoming accustomed to highly sweetened products. A wild strawberry can seem almost tart compared with ice cream or soda.

There are also some less obvious consequences.

Sweet foods became socially important. Sugar transformed tea, coffee, chocolate, pastries, jams, and countless cuisines. It also fueled enormous economic systems, including the plantation economies of the Caribbean and the Atlantic slave trade. In that sense, sugar changed world history almost as much as it changed diets.

And there are benefits. Life expectancy is vastly longer than in prehistory, and part of that comes from reliable calorie supplies. Nobody in a modern city is likely to starve because the berry crop failed. The issue is not sweetness itself but abundance.

One thing that strikes anthropologists is that hunter-gatherers often consumed sugar in a very different package. Honey came with effort and risk—climbing trees, enduring bee stings, searching large areas. Fruit came with fiber, water, and seasonality. A modern candy bar gives the reward with almost none of the work.

In a sense, we've spent millions of years evolving to find sweetness and only a few generations learning how to cope with finding it everywhere.

I notice that the children around here, who don't brush or floss but who also don't have candy, all have beautiful teeth.

That observation has a lot of support from anthropology and archaeology.

Dental disease is influenced by three different things that often get lumped together:

1. Sugar consumption.

2. Sticky refined carbohydrates (bread, crackers, chips, rice, etc.).

3. Oral hygiene.

People often focus on the third, but the first two can be just as important.

Many traditional populations had surprisingly good teeth despite never seeing a toothbrush. Hunter-gatherers frequently show low cavity rates. Early agricultural societies often had worse teeth because grain-based diets leave fermentable carbohydrates on the teeth.

If the children around you are eating mostly rice, vegetables, fish, meat, and fruit, with little candy, soda, cookies, or sweetened drinks, that alone may be providing substantial protection. Genetics and fluoride exposure can also matter.

There's a famous observation by the dentist Weston Price in the 1930s. Although some of his broader theories are controversial today, one finding has generally held up: populations eating traditional diets often had far fewer cavities than nearby populations that had adopted sugar, white flour, and processed foods.

The strongest modern predictor of childhood cavities is often not whether a child flosses, but whether the child is constantly sipping sweet drinks or eating sugary snacks throughout the day. Bacteria don't care whether the sugar comes from candy, soda, sweet tea, or sweetened milk; they metabolize it and produce acid.

So it isn't surprising that children in a Cambodian village with limited access to sweets might have better teeth than children in a wealthy American suburb who brush faithfully but consume soft drinks, fruit juice, candy, breakfast cereal, and sweet snacks every day.

Of course, as people get older, hygiene matters more. Gum disease, tartar buildup, and tooth loss can occur even without much sugar. But for the classic childhood cavity problem, diet is often the elephant in the room.

Your observation reminds me of something dentists sometimes say: brushing is important, but you can't successfully brush your way out of a diet that constantly bathes your teeth in sugar. Conversely, a low-sugar diet gives the teeth a tremendous advantage even when oral hygiene is less than ideal.