Sugarcane’s History in Slavery and Its Dooming Health Outcomes
Feb 6, 2022
Sugarcane’s History in Slavery and Its Dooming Health Outcomes
Sugarcane has an abhorrent history as being a major driver of the transatlantic slave trade in both North America and Europe. It is arguably one of the worst crops to happen to the human species diet… maybe ever.
Let’s start by reviewing a bit of history, as all astute discussions do.
Sugarcane has been a popular crop around the world since the 5th century AD, but became a big harvest and money maker in the US beginning in the early 1600s. Sugarcane production is the world’s third most valuable crop just behind rice and cereal production, taking up more than 27,000,000 hectares of land across the globe. Today, sugarcane receives nearly $4 billion in annual subsidies in the US in the forms of guaranteed crop loans, tariffs, and regulated imports of foreign sugar.
Sugarcane is not a native plant of the Americas, but rather was originated in Southeast Asia and brought over to the New World with Christopher Columbus. Being considered “white gold,” it wasn’t long before white colonialists realized they needed the manpower to harvest and maintain these plants. And so, sugar was the key driving force behind the Trade Triangle between Europe, the New World and Africa. By the middle of the 19th century, more than 10 million Africans (not including those who died terrible deaths on the Middle Passage) had been forcibly removed to the New World and distributed among the plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean where sugarcane was predominately grown due to the ideal tropical climates there.
Flash forward to the mid to late 1800s, and Louisiana in the U.S. was producing a quarter of the world’s sugarcane. The value of enslaved people alone represented tens of millions of dollars in capital that financed investments, loans and businesses. The demand for slave labor quadrupled over a 20-year period of time, and the treatment of enslaved Africans became the most brutal and torturous conditions of any other type of slave labor. In fact, the life expectancy of the most tortured Africans working on a sugarcane plantation was seven years.
Sugarcane labor continued well after Reconstruction, and the ability of African American and black farmers to actually acquire or keep their own land for their own farming and income came under direct legislative fire in the early 1900s as a result of loan discrimination and forced partition sales. The amount of land held by African American farmers with active farms dropped from nearly 19 million acres of farmland in the early 1900s to just over 2.5 million acres today. Not all of remaining Black-owned farmland is specifically for the production of sugarcane, but whichever way you look at it, these numbers are abysmal.
So, that’s the terrible interwoven history of sugarcane and slavery. But now let’s look quickly at the health consequences of sugar and why it’s a problem.
You might be thinking to yourself: if sugar has been a major global crop for so long, then why are we only just now seeing the extreme health repercussions of high sugar diets now? Great question.
The sugar spiral as it relates specifically to the American diet and the surge in obesity, Type 2 Diabetes, metabolic syndrome and fatty liver (among other chronic health conditions) began in the late 1970s. During the 1960s and early 1970s, animal meat consumption, specifically red meat, had risen drastically. And as a result, the rates of heart attack and heart disease began to rise too. But it wasn’t until several members of Congress began suddenly dying of heart disease did the American diet begin taking center stage. Several studies at the time had linked high fat diets with increased levels of LDL cholesterol. These facts are still true, but not knowing all that we know today, the only thing we knew to do was to curse fat as “bad” for health.
And so, fat became the villain of the next few decades. America’s obsession over the low-fat diet boomed, and so did the demand for low-fat foods. During this time, fat intake dropped dramatically, and carbohydrate intake spiked. There is nothing wrong with carbohydrates (and we know now that there is nothing wrong with monounsaturated, healthy fats either); however, removing fat from foods compromised the taste. Fat is a major flavor enhancer.
So what did big food brands do instead? Added loads of sugar. From a dietetic perspective, this is a major problem on two very important levels. The first is that fat is satiating. It takes much longer for your body to break down fat, and so it keeps you feeling full longer. Not to mention, our bodies need healthy fats for brain health, for cell growth, for producing hormones, to protecting our organs… the list goes on. Removing fat from our diets has huge repercussions to our health.
The other problem is that by replacing fat with carbohydrates, most especially the refined forms of carbohydrate with added sugar and little to no fat, we were and still are basically just feeding our body with sugar. After all, carbohydrates break down into sugar (internally known as glucose) in our body. And when our body’s intake of sugar is more than our energetic needs require, we store the excess sugar as fat on our body. Additionally, with the exponential intake of added carbohydrates and refined sugar (like sugarcane, as one example), we become less sensitive to insulin, the hormone that regulates the uptake of glucose into our cells. And when this happens, we develop chronic health conditions like Type 2 Diabetes, for instance, of which 35 million Americans (about 1 in 10) currently have. African Americans have the second highest rates of contracting Type 2 Diabetes, currently affect 11.7% of the Black population, second only to native American Indians.
So what’s the message here? The first is that we need all of the macronutrients in our diet. We need proteins, we need fats and we need carbohydrates. Any time we completely eliminate any one of the macronutrient categories, we are likely going to see detrimental health issues. (Basically, we need fat, and eating it won’t necessarily make you fat, so long as you’re choosing healthy forms of fats like from avocados, oils, nuts/seeds and fatty fish). And second, refined sugar is the bane of the American diet. It has singlehandedly wreaked havoc on our bodies, our overall health, and subsequently on the state of healthcare spending nationally as well as individual health related debt.
Reports from 2018 indicate healthcare spending on Type 2 Diabetes care totaled $327 billion dollars. In 2018, obesity and obesity-related health issues cost our country $190.2 billion dollars. Childhood obesity came in around $14 billion in direct medical costs. In the 10 cities in the US with the highest obesity rates had healthcare costs $50 million more per 100,000 than their neighboring cities with lower obesity rates.
Sugar is addicting. It is even more addicting than cocaine. It temporarily spikes dopamine production in our brain, but will just as quickly deplete us of that feel-good hormone, leaving us feeling worse than we did before. The more we eat of it, the more we crave it. And guess what, the more we eat of it, the more damage we cause to our taste buds too. Eating too much sugar can train your taste buds to need those same levels of sugar, otherwise low-sugar foods will taste bitter and unsavory (like vegetables, for instance). It’s no wonder that the health of our children is so rapidly declining as a result too! They want more sugar, and don’t like the taste of veggies. This is a dangerous combo, but certainly not their fault.
Do not be fooled, either, folks! Sugarcane is touted as a “healthy sugar” and is therefore included as the sweetener in more “healthy” food products. Please hear me loud and clear: sugar is sugar is sugar is sugar. If it’s not naturally found in the fruits and vegetables you are eating, it’s added sugar. Period.
So here’s my long story long, here are some tips to begin practicing in your every day life:
1. Read Nutrition Facts Labels. Make this a habit. Specifically look at the ingredients list. The ingredients are listed in order of weight. So, in general, if any form of sugar (labelled as sugar, convection sugar, honey, coconut sugar, date palm, agave, among others) is listed within the first 3 to 5 ingredients. Put it away and find a better choice.
2. Opt to make your own sweet treats. Any time you can make your own sweet treats, do it. This way you can better control the amount of added sugar you’re including, and you can choose to use more nutrient-dense forms of sugar like honey or dates instead!
3. Focus on getting your fiber. Fiber is found in plant-based foods and is especially rich in fruits, vegetables and nuts and seeds. Fiber slows down the uptake of sugar in our body, which mitigates sugar’s harmful effects. Not to mention, fiber helps us to feel fuller longer too (just like fat). So look for products that have at least 3-5g of fiber per serving. Or, maybe choose to make your sweets with some added seeds or nut-based flour for the fiber benefits.
4. Eat a balanced diet. And by balanced, I mean, eating a moderate amount of protein, adequate amounts of healthy fats, complex and whole-grain forms of carbohydrates and loads of vegetables. We need all of these macronutrients for a long and healthy life!
Getting a handle on our addiction to sugar is going to pay off in dividends for the state of our health in the future. It is imperative that we take responsibility for the foods we are eating. And it starts by staying informed about the foods your buying and eating instead of choosing them blindly.
Not to mention, staying away from sugar can be a big statement of racial justice. Unless you are purchasing sugarcane from the handful of African American farmers left in this country, you can vote with your fork by not continuing to line the pockets of rich white men who continue to prey off our addiction to sugar. Afterall we can vote with our fork, and I urge you to do this too!
References:
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QC
https://theconversation.com/a-history-of-sugar-the-food-nobody-needs-but-everyone-craves-49823
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html
https://www.livescience.com/4949-sugar-changed-world.html
https://www.diabetes.org/resources/statistics/statistics-about-diabetes