Sugar

• 1. Introduction

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  Sugar is a class of sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, and on average, every person on earth eats about 24 kilograms of it a year. North and South Americans eat up to 50 kilograms, while Africans stay under 20. The simple sugars, or monosaccharides, are glucose, fructose and galactose; compound sugars, or disaccharides, are pairs of those bonded together, such as sucrose, lactose and maltose. White sugar is almost pure sucrose, and the body breaks compound sugars into simple ones during digestion.

  How did a substance found naturally in honey and fruit become a global commodity stirred into cookies, cakes, coffee and soda by the spoonful? In 2015, the World Health Organization urged adults and children to cut their intake of free sugars to under 10% of their daily energy, and ideally below 5%.

• 2. From Sanskrit To English

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  The word sugar traces back to the Sanskrit sharkara, meaning "ground or candied sugar," which passed into Persian as shakar and Arabic as sukkar. Medieval Latin borrowed the Arabic word as succarum, which became the 12th-century Old French sucre and finally the English sugar. Arab traders introduced sugar into Europe through Sicily and Spain.

  A related word, jaggery, describes a coarse brown sugar made from date palm sap or sugarcane juice; it entered English from the Portuguese jagara, itself taken from the Malayalam cakkara, which also descends from the Sanskrit sharkara.

• 3. India To The Americas

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  Sugar was first produced from sugarcane on the Indian subcontinent, and Chinese manuscripts dating to the 8th century BCE already describe sugarcane's use as originating in India. Diverse cane species trace to both India, Saccharum barberi and S. edule, and New Guinea, S. officinarum. Nearchus, an admiral under Alexander the Great, along with the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides and the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, all described sugar in their own eras.

  In the mid-15th century, sugar production spread to Madeira and the Canary Islands, where it was mass-produced for the first time. Christopher Columbus carried sugarcane to the New World, and sugar industries followed in Cuba and Jamaica by the 1520s, while the Portuguese brought the crop to Brazil.

  Beet sugar, the foundation of the modern sugar industry, was a German invention, first produced industrially in 1801 in Cunern, Prussia. Sugar became a household staple by the 19th century, a shift that helped drive colonisation and industrialisation in less developed regions and was closely tied to slavery. World consumption grew more than a hundredfold between 1850 and 2000, led by the United Kingdom, where yearly consumption per person rose from about 2 pounds in 1650 to 90 pounds by the early 20th century.

• 4. The Chemistry Of Sweetness

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  Glucose is the most important of the monosaccharides, or simple sugars, most of which share a formula with between 3 and 7 carbon atoms; fructose, galactose and glucose each carry five hydroxyl groups and a carbonyl group and form rings when dissolved in water. Fructose, or fruit sugar, occurs naturally in fruits, some root vegetables, cane sugar and honey, and is the sweetest of all the sugars; manufacturers also produce a high-fructose syrup from hydrolysed corn starch treated with enzymes that convert part of its glucose into fructose.

  Galactose rarely occurs alone in nature; instead it pairs with glucose to form lactose, or milk sugar, and is less sweet than glucose itself, while also forming part of the antigens on red blood cells that determine blood type. Glucose occurs naturally in fruits and plant juices as the primary product of photosynthesis, and it is the form of sugar carried through the bloodstream in animals; the naturally occurring form is D-glucose, also called dextrose or grape sugar because drying grape juice yields crystals of it.

  Among the disaccharides, lactose forms when a molecule of galactose combines with a molecule of glucose, and the enzyme lactase breaks it down during digestion, though some adults lose the ability to produce that enzyme. Maltose forms when grain germinates, most notably barley converting into malt, and is made of two glucose molecules joined together; it is less sweet than glucose, fructose or sucrose, and the body forms and then breaks it down using the enzymes amylase and maltase. Sucrose, found in sugarcane stems and sugar beet roots, forms from a molecule of glucose bonded to a molecule of fructose, and a family of enzymes called sucrases split it apart during digestion.

  Chains longer than two units are not regarded as sugars at all: oligosaccharides and polysaccharides include starch, a glucose polymer found in plants that ranks as the most abundant source of energy in human food. Cellulose and chitin are similarly built polymers, often crystalline, occurring respectively in plants and insects, though animals cannot digest cellulose directly. A few other substances, such as ethylene glycol, glycerol and sugar alcohols, taste sweet without counting as sugar at all.

• 5. Growing The Crop

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  Sugars occur naturally in the tissues of most plants, and honey and fruit are especially abundant sources of simple sugars, while sucrose concentrates most heavily in sugarcane and sugar beet, the two crops that make commercial extraction efficient. In 2016 the combined world production of sugarcane and sugar beet was about two billion tonnes.

  Global sugar production rose about 14% between 2009 and 2018, with China, Indonesia and the United States the largest importers; world output reached 186 million tonnes in the 2022-23 season and an estimated 194 million tonnes in 2023-24, a surplus of 5 million tonnes according to the industry analyst Ragus. Sugarcane alone accounted for around 21% of global crop production between 2000 and 2021, with the Americas producing 52% of the world's total; global cane output reached 1.9 billion tonnes in 2022, with Brazil growing 38% of that and India 23%.

  Harvested cane is chopped and rushed to a sugar mill, where its juice is extracted, clarified with lime, heated to destroy enzymes and concentrated through a series of evaporators until it becomes a supersaturated syrup seeded with sugar crystals. Molasses is a by-product of this process, and the leftover fibre, called bagasse, is burned to power the mill itself; producing a single kilogram of sugar this way requires about 2500 litres of irrigation water.

  Sugar beet, a biennial root crop, became a major sugar source in the 19th century once extraction methods matured, and global beet production reached 260 million tonnes in 2022, led by Russia with 18.8% of the total. Harvested beets are washed, sliced and processed with milk of lime and calcium carbonate before the syrup is boiled under vacuum, cooled and seeded with crystals; the resulting white sugar needs no further refining once spun dry in a centrifuge.

  Refining raw cane sugar begins with affination, softening and removing its sticky brown coating in concentrated syrup, followed by carbonatation or phosphatation to precipitate and filter out impurities, and decolourising with activated carbon or ion-exchange resin. Purity is measured using ICUMSA numbers set by the International Commission for Uniform Methods of Sugar Analysis, where refined sugar scores below 300 and raw sugar scores above 1,500.

• 6. From Crystals To Syrups

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  Coarse sanding sugar, with crystals roughly 1 to 3 millimetres across, resists melting under heat and moisture, making it a common topping for baked goods and candies. Ordinary granulated table sugar, with crystals around 0.6 millimetres, sweetens hot drinks and baking, and also preserves foods like candied fruit, jams and marmalades by discouraging micro-organisms. Powdered sugar is milled to a fine dust for dusting and confectionery, while caster sugar is screened to a uniform grain for table use and baking; densities vary by type, from 0.56 grams per millilitre for powdered sugar up to 0.80 for beet sugar.

  Sugar cubes are steamed and pressed into blocks for sweetening drinks, while the sugarloaf, a cone-shaped block, was the standard form of refined sugar sold until the late 19th century. Brown sugars keep some of their molasses, or have it added back in, giving muscovado and turbinado their colour and a richer flavour than white sugar.

  Glucose syrup and corn syrup, made industrially by breaking down starch through enzymatic hydrolysis, sweeten beverages, hard candy, ice cream and jams. Inverted sugar syrup, made by heating granulated sugar in water, blends glucose and fructose and helps breads, cakes and drinks hold moisture without crystallising. Molasses and treacle are byproducts left over once sugar is removed from cane or beet juice, used to enrich toffees, licorice and baked goods; in winemaking, fermentation turns fruit sugars into alcohol, and sugar is sometimes added beforehand, a process called chaptalisation, to raise the finished wine's alcohol content.

  Heating sugar to nearly 200°C for several minutes produces burnt sugar, sometimes modified with alkali or sulfites, releasing volatile compounds such as butanone and various furans during the process. Because sugar dust ignites easily, the 2008 Georgia Imperial sugar refinery explosion, caused by ignited sugar dust, killed 14 people, injured 36 and destroyed most of the plant.

  Low-calorie sweeteners are often built from maltodextrin, an easily digestible synthetic polysaccharide made of short glucose chains produced by partially hydrolysing starch; despite its structural resemblance to maltose, it is not strictly classed as a sugar because it links more than two glucose molecules. Polyols, or sugar alcohols, sweeten chewing gum with a flavour that lingers in the mouth longer than ordinary sugar does.

• 7. Sugar And The Body

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  Worldwide, sugar supplies about 10% of daily calories on a 2000-calorie diet, though the share has shifted sharply over time among Britons: the average Briton took in 72 calories a day from sugar in 1750, rising to 395 by 1913, and still around 14% of total calories in 2015. Brown and white granulated sugar are almost entirely carbohydrate, with less than 2% water and no fibre, protein or fat, though brown sugar's 5 to 10% residual molasses gives it a fuller flavour.

  The World Health Organization recommends keeping free sugar under 10% of total energy, equal to roughly 50 grams or 12 teaspoons a day, while the American Heart Association sets a lower bar of 6%, or 36 grams for men and 25 grams for women. On the 20th of May 2016, the United States Food and Drug Administration announced that Nutrition Facts labels would have to list added sugars by weight and as a share of Daily Value from July 2018 onward, with 100% of that value set at 50 grams; a typical 12-ounce can of soda alone contains 39 grams of sugar. A government survey covering 2013-14 found that American men and women aged 20 and over consumed an average of 125 and 99 grams of total sugar a day.

  A 2003 World Health Organization report tied high intake of sugary drinks, including fruit juice, to a greater risk of obesity through added energy intake, and later meta-analyses linked excess sugar calories to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Cancer Council Australia has stated plainly that there is no evidence sugar makes cancer cells grow faster or causes cancer, though excess sugar can contribute indirectly through obesity-linked cancers.

  Despite the popular idea of a childhood "sugar rush," a 2019 meta-analysis found sugar does not improve mood and can instead lower alertness and raise fatigue within an hour of eating it. Dental researchers, including the WHO and the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, link tooth decay directly to free sugar intake, and reviews show fewer cavities when sugar makes up less than 10% of total energy consumed. Nutritionists also warn of "nutritional displacement": once added sugar exceeds 25% of daily energy, it starts crowding out foods that supply essential nutrients.

• 8. An Industry Under Scrutiny

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  In the 1960s and 1970s, manufacturers of sugary products such as soft drinks and candy, along with the Sugar Research Foundation, were accused of sowing doubt about sucrose's health risks while pushing saturated fat forward as the main dietary culprit behind heart disease. That history resurfaced in 2016, when critics pressed policymakers to demand higher-quality research that weighs multiple biomarkers before drawing conclusions about cardiovascular disease.

  Colour itself carries meaning: the anthropologist Sidney Mintz has written that sugar only came to be seen as ideally white after cultures that prized whiteness as purity extended that value to the substance. In India, sugar figures in religious observance, and for ritual purity it must not be white at all, a reminder that the crystal in a coffee cup carries a history far older than its own sweetness.