In the West Indies, where the sugar cane is indigenous, the negro
consumes sugar juice and not manufactured sugar and he has fine teeth
and excellent health. The juice of the sugar cane contains saline
mineral matter, with albumen, etc., and is a natural food just as is
beetroot in its uncooked salad state. But sugar as we know it here is a
chemical or inorganic substance.
Majendie and others showed that animals fed on commercial sugar
perished in from two to four weeks with all the symptoms of exhaustion
and atrophy.
A diet consisting largely of white bread and sugar, especially if the
latter is taken melted in various beverages, will produce catarrhs of
every type.
The inordinate use of sugar produces heartburn, neuralgia of the
stomach, acid eructations, loss of appetite, anæmia, and either a
state of constipation or diarrhœa. Muscovado (sold as “pure cane”
Barbados and Puerto Rico) is the old-fashioned sugar boiled in peculiar
open pans. When the juice comes from the crushed canes it resembles
dark thick treacle. This requires to be strained to remove the grit
and other impurities. After that it has to be boiled and subjected to
other processes to get the uncrystallizable portion of the juice or
the treacle separated from the crystallizable or ordinary sugar of
commerce. Then the best kinds are filtered through animal charcoal and,
when sufficiently purified, allowed to crystallize. The soft brown cane
sugars (Barbados, etc.) are the least harmful; while the worst are the
white crystallized and dyed yellow beet sugars which form by far the
largest bulk of what is sold in Great Britain.
Those who wish to maintain a high resistance to disease and decay, and
a clean digestive and circulatory system, should wean themselves away
from the habit of sugaring their tea and coffee, lemonade and other
beverages, and rely more and more upon the natural sugars present
in honey, dried and fresh fruits, malted grains, etc. It has been
picturesquely, but truthfully, said that “sugar burns in the body like
thin paper in the fire: it flares up, giving momentary heat, but leaves
a lot of useless waste in the grate.”
T