High-Priced Sugar

[David Casseres]

deedle sezzzzz...

>Fascinatin'!  From the fields to the body, it seems sugar's poisonous in
>every respect.  I've been ingesting maple syrup, honey (in moderation), and
>concentrated fruit juice as sweetening for years.  Eating the "whitest,
>purest, most heavily processed and refined sugar you can get" doesn't seem
>like the answer, to me, but, whateverrrrrr.  And if you really don't want
>ground up scorched animals and mounds of chemical residue with your
>comestibles, eat organic, support small farmers, be a happy, healthy planet
>dweller, etc.  Hard to do when you're salivating over a rain forest
>decimating McBurger, killer Cola and minimum wage labor fries, right?
>Sigh.  The hand-basket's full to overflowing...

Remember now, I did say "*if you're going to eat sugar."  You're right 
basically but all health-conscious foax need to remember that the 
health-food industry is just that, and every bit as ripoff-oriented as 
General Foods only a whole lot more pious; so caveat emptor.  Me, I eat 
white cane sugar, brown cane sugar, molasses, and the sweeteners you 
mention, all in as much moderation as I can come up with.

My favorite Medical Authority (and he's a real doctor!) is Andrew Weill.  
One of his books, _The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon_, is basically 
about getting stoned on various stuff from peyote (the chapter is called 
"Throwing up in Mexico") to the more subtle high of eating practically 
nothing but mangoes when you arrive in Costa Rica at the height of the 
season, to observing a total solar eclipse.

In one of the chapters he mentions being at a conference where someone 
stated that white sugar was "more dangerous than heroin."  Weill passes 
over whether that's true, but observes that white sugar and high-grade 
heroin are both white powders, as are cocaine, amphetamines, etc. etc.  
He goes from there to propose as a general rule of thumb that it's better 
not to ingest any white powders, as they are pure crystalline substances 
that are usually not found in nature.  Being pure, they present a much 
greater threat of addiction and abuse than the natural substances they 
are extracted from, such as sugarcane, coca leaves, and even raw opium as 
used for centuries in parts of Southeast Asia.

Ob. Pynchon relevance: of course, They don't like the raw substances 
because They can't do much about them or with them.  The pure white 
powders, on the other hand, are a natural opportunity for industry (legal 
or illegal) to make Big Bucks and/or for government to run large and 
highly profitable corruption-mills.



Cheers,
David