"This is the River Clyde in Glasgow." "250 years ago, this was one of Britain's great trading centres." "It was the hub of a huge empire that stretched from the Caribbean to China." "An empire founded on trade in which simple plants were transformed by human labour to become hugely profitable global commodities." "The trade in sugar... tobacco... opium... and whisky... transformed our society, our bodies and our minds." "Over the centuries, we've learned to love these products." "Their smell, their taste, the effect they've had on us." "They've become increasingly guilty pleasures... ..which are still with us, still part of us." "Today, millions of us can't do without at least some of them." "So... how did we become so hooked?" "'The answer will take me on a journey across the world...'" "Oh, my God!" "That's powerful." "'..and inside our minds and bodies too...' Bye!" "HE SNIFFS" "HE LAUGHS" "Gosh, that's good, isn't it?" "..in the pursuit of pleasure. # Sugar that's what I'll name you You just want to dive into t I have been looking at it." "I could shave." "It's hard to imagine that sugar was virtually unknown just a few hundred years ago." "Its emergence led Britain into a consumer revolution, delivering us not just sugar for our tea and coffee, but fizzy drinks, puddings, ice-cream, cakes and chocolate." "This Scottish biscuit factory, epitomises the last 100 years of that revolution." "The business began a century ago as a small family baker, producing just enough for the local community." "Now it makes ten million biscuits a week." "We're eating them like there's no tomorrow." "This is my beginnings, this is how" "I started, broken biscuits." "We used to go to the stop on the way to school, and you would get a penny bag of broken biscuits, if it was" "Tunnocks it would be more expensive." "I fear we may be paying the price for our indulge begins, I know I am. -- indelgynsence, I know I am." "indulgence." "I know I am." "I have always had a sweet tooth, little gems, I love liquorice." "I'm a diabetic, that is my confession." "I have been a diabetic since 1988, late on set." "I discovered it first by going to the toilet, regularly." "I thought it was another problem, and I went to the doctor, he said your blood sugar is through the roof." "The type II diabetes I developed is caused by the overconsumption of calories from fatty and sugary food." "I have to be careful now not to eat too much sweet stuff, as my body finds it much hard Tory store or process sugar." "Even if I eat a square of chocolate it can make me feel ill, a whole bar might send me into a bettic coma." "One -- a diabetic coma." "One of the things I want to find out is how much, culturally, as we have become as a culture addicted to sugark and how much we take it for grant -- sugar, and how much we take it for granted in our life." "Sugar is impossible, it is in everything." "I'm kind of against it, but at the same time I'm for it, I'm caught in a dilemma, I do like the taste of it." "Occasionally I will say, yeah I'll just have a sweet, it ain't good for me." "I grew up in Dundee, and since becoming diabetic, I have given a lot of thought to what might have led me to develop the disease." "This must be Chester." "I'm the youngest of five children, four of whom developed diabetes in later life." "I was practically brought up by my older sisters Betty and May, we have all rather different views about how healthy or otherwise we might have been, and how much sugar we actually ate." "I certainly as a kid ate a lot of sweets." "A lot of sweets." "I also used to eat." "Sweets?" "Brian, remember." "Did you not eat sweets as kids?" "We could have helped ourselves." "Why are you diabetics?" "You're not?" "I am." "I'm not diabetic." "There were sweets galore for us, we had the sweets in the shop." "We were fortunate my father had a shop, even at that we did not eat sweets." "We did eat a lot of sweet stuff, there was a lot of sweet stuff in the house." "I remember bowls of biscuit as opposed to bowls of fruit." "Yeah, we used today eat it." "Look an ice-cream van, why do we have a photograph of an ice-cream van, that is proof, proof positive!" "They do have ice-cream vans in" "Dundee." "We're not denying it. you never eat ice-cream?" "Yeah." "There you go." "Why are you making us feel guilty because we like ice- cream." "I'm not trying to make you feel guilty, I'm trying to establish your eating habits." "I think my sisters and I are typical of the problem." "We all love sugar, it clearly became embedded in our diet very early on." "As well as my sisters and I, there are three million other diabetes sufferers in Britain." "This figure is set to double in the next 20 years, as a result of the sugar- rich diet we are eating, and the rise of obesity." "The Scottish diet in particular is notoriously unhealthy." "Sugar sandwiches, a wee biscuit, sugary tea, simply steeped in sugar." "Back in the Middle Ages, sugar was only available to our ancestors part of the year, as fruit or honey." "Sweetness was in short supply, so where did sugar, as we know it, come from?" "Well, it originated centuries before as a giant wild grass in the South Pacific." "Where its value was so recognised." "Legends from there twelve a story of how sugar cane sprouted a man and a woman, who founded the human race." "Wild cane was first tamed and farmed in new Guinea, and over time, spread by travellers, across the globe." "By the 13th century, it had migrated to the Middle East, where traders discovered it, and carried it to Europe." "A commodity so rare, sugar's value equaled that of What about its first appearance in Britain?" "My journey begins in" "Cumbria, where I'm going to meet a sugar historian, whom I'm told has a rather hands-on approach to his subject." "All the sugar we imported into this country came from the Arab world, via the Venetian, they were the sugar controllers, they bought it from the Middle East, and shipped it out to every other European nation." "They put a huge premium on it." "If we go back into the 13th century, small quantities of it are coming to this country, but they are only being purchased by royal palaces." "It was quite expensive?" "It was very expensive, and it was rare." "Sugar in the early modern period is very much a symbol of status." "But it was used as a plastic medium, as an art form." "We have some marvellously detailed images of these sugar sculptures." "My gosh." "There is one piece of sculpture that was six-feet high, entirely made out of sugar." "Six- feet high." "So it is standing like that on the table." "This would be consumed, it wouldn't be ornamental?" "It was totally ornamental." "You are talking about a kind of decadence." "Ordinary people eat food just to sustain themselves, but the very wealthy use it to show off." "Having a sugar sculpture, six- foot high, on your table, is the equivalent of having a Maserati nowadays." "All we have is this evidence of it." "The only evidence we have is the images we have of them." "The other bit of evidence, that is not really obvious, we also have some of the tools we used to create it." "So, for instance, this lovely wooden mould has got these four -- little godesses on it." "I will get you to have a go at making it." "If you drop it on to the surface, you have your perfect grinning gibbons." "One of the first recorded royal requests for sugar was Henry III in the 13th century, if ordered three pounds of if -- it if it was to be had." "So three bags of sugar from a supermarket might be all there was across the kingdom." "You have created your own little thing. you impressed?" "I am, I'm normally kak-handed." "Over the 14th and 15th century, sugar was still too rare and expensive to eat." "Its primary use was pharmaceutical, a spoonful of sugar really did help the medicine go down, especially when ailments were commonly cured using minced worm, burnt snakeskin, or animal faeces." "We need a couple of birds to come." "Maybe we could make the gold finchs." "I have a bird mould somewhere." "By the 16th century sugar was still exceptionally rare." "But, it was now eaten as well as carved." "Elizabeth I was so notoriously sweet-toothed, that her own became blackened and decayed." "Black teeth were, therefore, trendy, several fashionable ladies at court had their's blackened too." "So if sugar was still so rare by the time of Elizabeth i, when exactly did it reach the tables " "Elizabeth I, when exactly did it reach the tables of us ordinary The answer lies here, on a coral spit, only 20 miles long, in the heart of the Caribbean." "I have come to discover exactly how it is that this tiny island came to be so inextricably linked to our love affair with sugar." "At the start of the 1600s, Barbados was an insignificant and far-flung British colony, in the early days of an expanding empire." "A handful of British settlers were working out how to make a living here as farmers." "Cotton and tobacco had already failed, they needed a crop that suited the stoney soil and tropical climate." "Turns out it was this." "Oh my God." "Takes you back to my days as a teenager." "When we would be driving and stop by a country field and break some cane, illegally, and suck away merrily." "Very nice." "Very nice." "People must have just sat in the fields and chewed on this all day!" "Of course." "It is amazingly juicy." "Very, very juicy." "This is one of the original plantations on the island, and dates back to 1658." "The estate produced sugar for more than three centuries, in its very early years, must have witnessed the whirlwind of change, as cane was introduced for the very first time." "This is a fascinating book, it is Ligon's History of Bar days could, published in 1647, an original first edition." "He produces a map of" "Barbados." "If you hold that there, I will open it up." "This is very old this book!" "We have to handle it delicately." "If you want a visual explanation of what we call the sugar ref will you, this was drawn in 1635." "It shows the island being settled along the coastline." "These names, these are names of settlers?" "Fledgling planters who had come in." "This is seven years after settlement." "Most of the island is vacant." "This is the island 1635, before sugar." "And if we compare this following map, which was drawn in 1727." "This shows how the island was completely transformed." "Every single square inch of soil is taken up." "This, all these names indicate the mass of sugar plantations." "There are over 7,000 functioning sugar plantations." "Every single square inch." "In fact, bar bay doss was the only " " Barbados was the only English-speaking island in the Caribbean that had no vacant land." "There is so many names?" "We were the most densely-populated place on earth." "Did people come thinking it was a goldrush, the sugar equivalent of a goldrush?" "That is A brilliant way of putting it." "It was a goldrush, people came with a desire to become as wealthy as they possibly could." "And sugar cane would make them rich." "It gave the farmers three harvests ay, and its juice was packed with more energy   a year, and the juice was packed with more energy than anything on earth." "The cane came off though, so creating sugar was a race against time." "This is fresh, raw sugar cane juice, straight from the mill, where the cane has been crushed." "Keith Laurie is a retired sugar technologyist, he will show me how to transform cane juice into a product with an almost indefinite shelf life." "Once it goes into the pan it cools rapidly, and theoretically, it will crystalise." "The cooling helps the syrup to solidify quickly." "It is crystalising." "What does it actually mean when it is crystalising, apart from it going hard, what is the process, or is that the process?" "Very fine crystals are growing rapidly." "Creating sugar is not as easy as it looks, and despite being an expert, Keith is not happy with the way things are going." "Come on, thing." "I would have preferred it to have gone absolutely solid." "It's on its way, you can see there is some bits here which are really quite ...what do you think?" "Ha ha." "This is supposed to go to a powder." "It is still sticky, but I see what you mean, we could call this a semi- triumph." "Absolutely." "Let us call this a semi-triumph, look, sugar." "Crystal sugar." "Wow-wee!" "Keith showed me some of the industrial- scale kitchens that were built to meet the growing demand for crystalised sugar." "Here, the cane juice was boiled and reduced to a syrup, and shaken into crystals." "This was the eureka moment, their gem-like precious product was now brown sugar." "Of course, none of this could have been achieved without a plentiful supply of labour." "Although some of the first indentureed servants had been white" "Scots and Irishmen, they were soon replaced by a cheaper option." "The cane came to be planted and cut and the cauldrons boiling syrup sweated over, by an army of black slaves from Africa's west coast." "By the time of emancipation 200 years later, Manufactures and Tradersers had traffiked some 40,40,20 million souls worldwide, and the sugar industry had been one of the major customers." "I have come to the " " Manufacturers and traders had traffiked some 40 million souls worldwide, and the sugar industry had been one of the majority customers." "With enslavement the child took its status from its mother, from the maternal, not the paternal line." "A child born of any enslaved woman was enslaved, for life." "And that is the system on which, not only sugar plantations, you talk about" "Barbados, but plantations around the region, wherever they were growing coffee, rice, or even those engaged in mining for salt." "It is, in fact, the traumatic side, the side that people don't want to talk about, the quiet, silent side." "But a side without which sugar would not have become the major mass consumption product that it did become, by the 18th century." "In Europe." "And there it was, the birth of an industry that made the mass production of sugar possible." "Windmills like this one were built using technology from half way around the world." "Enabling the farmers to crush the cane faster and in greater volumes." "Greater volumes meant cheaper price, sugar had become a commodity, available, for the first time, on the tables of at least some, if not all" "British households." "It was our first taste of things to come." "Slaves from Africa, technology from Holland, cranks and shafts from" "Derby, further cranks from Glasgow, and who says that globalisation is a new thing?" "It seems to be as old as this island." "All this effort, it is unbelievable." "All this effort for a cup of tea, some sugar in As the very landscape and population were transformed in" "Barbados, Scotland was also undergoing radical, visible change." "Walking around Glasgow you can see the way the city flourished and expanded in the 18th century." "Individual buildings are a testament to the eye-watering profits from sugar." "The modern art gallery was built as the family home of a single sugar merchant." "Driving down through Ayrshire, every 18th century big house tells the same story." "In Ayrshire there were dozens of houses, built by some of the best architects of the age." "Rosell, Bellisle, a role call of showy new estates, reinventing the landscape with this inflation of sugar millions." "As you pass, you might glimpse a Robert Adams summer house, here, a games Gibb wing there, -- a James Gibb wing there, boasting of the owner's fast-track to gentcation." "Osgoods may have been the most aspirational of them all." "They would eventually own 100,000 acres in Ayrshire." "They got ï¿½10,000 a year from the Jamaican plantation, a million a year just for that." "When he died, Richard" "Osgood's estate was valued at ï¿½50 million in modern terms." "Funded not only from sugar, but another lucrative business, selling on slaves to other planters, from a small fortified island he bought off the coast of Africa." "It was there he can be credited as the inventor of corporate hospitality." "The only private slaving fortress in the British Empire belongs to them." "They even have a little golf course, two holes, where the slaves wear tartan loin cloths as your caddies." "Yet not a word when you get back to Ayrshire." "Was there any record of how many slaves they traffiked in?" "Yeah, we know that from their records." "What was it?" "They got up to 13,000 slaves." "don't know, I just find it disgusting, I really do." "I just find it, all this, I think people should be ashamed of themselves." "Are people not ashamed of their ancestry?" "It is not mentioned, in the Scottish curriculum, not word, but every house around here has the saifpl example." "If you have a big house in the 18th century, what paid for it." "The more I know about history, the more I feel that human beings are ultimately very disappointing?" "I would agree with that." "As Glasgow and Ayrshire flourished with the Midas touch of sugar, so would the ports, and what was known as the white gold would be landed there." "Grenoch, just north of Glasgow was the most important sugar refiner outside of London." "There were 12 refineries here, it was known as Sugar Opolus." "The refining process wasn't strictlinessry, removing the last vestiges of molasses and brown sugar, created the tryer product with a longer shelf life -- dryer product, and a longer shelf life, and made receipt finers rich." "It squeezed out any vitamins and mineral, leaving Snow White grains ready to deliver a rush of energy and pleasure." "I'm here in a lab in enough field Hospital -- the Nuffield Hospital, to measure why sugar was the hit in the 17th century." "This doctor is researching sugar's effects on the brain, he has been experimenting with all kinds of food." "He has found that sugar creates a lot of activity in certain parts of the brain, known as pleasure zones, or hidonic hot spots." "These areas of the brain are responsible for making us feel good in response to our actions." "I know I shouldn't be drinking a chocolate milkshake, but it is only a small amount, and I'm in the best possible place if anything goes wrong." "Now, if you look at that, with the MRI scanner, you find this part of the brain, just over the eyeball, just about two centimeters in over your eyeball, is the part of the brain that seems to encode how pleasant something is." "That seems in humans to be the most important part that allows us to feel whether something is nice or nasty." "Throughout human history, you would find anything you could eat could potentially kill you." "We have to have ways of controlling what it is that we put in our mouth." "Only five or six receptors on the tongue." "Only one of them is really nice." "That is the sweet receptor." "It is about making sure that what we do is something that not only will provide us pleasure, but is also safe." "This was all very well when we were cavemen pick up berries, thanks to our own ingenuity, we had sugar in a calorie-ridden form, not as safe as our minds were leading us to believe." "By the mid-1600s, sugar began to take hold in many new dishes." "Cook books teaching the arts of syllabubs and plum duff, were published for the first time." "Some so popular they sold more than the Bible." "A new use was soon discovered, even more popular than pudding, the sweetening of tea, coffee and chocolate, led to the invention of the coffee house." "The first in Scotland opened in 1673, in the centre of Glasgow." "By 1675, there were 3,000 coffee houses across England alone, and every one was a Trojan horse pushing pleasure into the centre of our lives, almost unnoticed." "Releasing a huge rush of sugar into our diet, that had simply not existed before." "It became places frequented by the merchants and traders, they could discuss business, and remain sober, with their brains supercharged with caffeine, so they were sharp." "Rather than being bruank on ale." "So -- drunk on ale." "The coffee house becomes an alternative to the ale house, underlying all this is sugar, because without the sugar, they are unpalatable, and it means you sell more sugar." "As the drinking habits sort of become more widespread, and eventually, at least tea drinking goes out to the order wry people of the country, the sugar con-- ordinary people of the country, the sugar consumption is going up and up." "We move from being a nation whose main drink at breakfast is beer, to a nation whose main drink at breakfast is tea." "Or coffee." "Or in some cases chocolate." "It means, at that one meal your sugar consumption has rocketed." "I remember as a child, people would have six spoonfuls of sugar, five, four." "I used to have four spoonfuls when I was a kid." "Of course, the idea of that now is an and the ma to me now. -- an anathema to me." "Sugar was great, but was it good for us As early as 1864 there were signs that it might not be A doctor found a sweetish taste in urine and blamed excessive sugar consumption." "Diabetes had been known about for centuries, but this link to sugar was new, as was the label for it "the pissing evil"." "My own type II pissing evil, means I have to go for regular check-ups, which I dread." "Because diabetes, as well as making me more vulnerable to the more serious life- threatening health problems, can have some really nasty side-effects." "Shall we have a look at your feet and see what it's like." "Let's check the pulses." "You have good pulses, that is good news." "The key thing with feet, is if you can avoid an ulcer, if you develop ulcer, it is more difficult for them to heal, and puts you at risk of amputation." "Your eyes can reveal a lot about how your diabetes is progressing." "A retinal scan measures the blood vessels at the back of the eye for the danger signs." "So, can you tell us what my eye is showing up, if anything?" "Yes, the eye looks very good." "There is really no signs of any diabetes-related change here, that is good news." "That's normal." "Going through what I went through now, always makes you nervous, especially with the retinal scan, if they do discover something there." "The doctor will show me the results any diabetic would dread." "Fortunately, today at least, it is not my eye we are looking at." "Sometimes a whole eye might fill with blood and they totally lose their vision." "That can happen in just a matter of second." "This is all sugar-induced?" "It is." "So, even though I'm conscious, that I could go blind, or risk amputation, I admit that I don't manage my diet as well as I could." "This has been plaguing me all my life, my own sugar addict is the fact I like sugar and sweeties, I still do, I'm not supposed to." "And" "I take my pills." "I feel guilty about doing it." "But, it is the habit of a lifetime, that is very hard to break." "There is some cutting-edge science being done at the Hammersmith" "Hospital in London, that might help me understand my predicament." "Tony" "Goldstone is carrying out a research product into why we find it so hard to control what we eat." "I'm going to be one of his Guinea pigs." "This is his brain, it is all the 44 slices." "While a scanner monitors my brain activity, Tony is making me look at pictures of all sorts of mouth-watering food." "It is torture, particularly as he has forbidden me from eating breakfast beforehand." "From what you observed from me, what were my responses?" "You found the high-calorie food appealing when you were fasting, we bias our brain towards the high-calorie sweet foods, particularly when we are fasted." "The vast majority of us are incline today like sugary foods, most of us do, we have evolved that way." "There is no point einvolveing a brain that went after lettuce the whole time, we wouldn't have survived." "We would have embraced the sugar rush, and thought, there it is t heaven." "We are living with the consequences of that, as a result." "The trouble is now we are in a toxic environment, where the sweet, high-calorie foods are all around us, we are hard-wired to like them, they are more readily available, they are cheap, and we" "are consume them in ever-increasing quantities." "Are our bodies working against us?" "They are, our bodies are trying to defend our body weight." "So we are hard-wired to like the sugary foods, and our bodies will do everything it can to keep our body weight where it is at, and it will do that by making us want and like the high-calorie" "sugary foods more." "So every time we try to cut down on those foods, as we need to to lose weight or treat diabetes, our bodies are conspiring against us, not necessarily consciously, we may not be Ayew ware of it." "Where is the alarm " " Aware of it." "Where is the alarm system?" "We maybe don't." "We maybe don't have it." "We have no control mechanism to lose weight." "It is a one-way trade." "I can't stop, and it's not my fault!" "What a catastrophic bit of evolutionary hard-wiring, from the survival of the fit he isest to the survival of the fattest." "It meant as soon as we had more calories available to us than we needed, we were doomed." "In the 19th century, that balance was about to be tipped." "At the start of the 19th century," "Britain had a monoply on sugar, having jealously guarded her" "Caribbean supply for over a century." "But as a result of the Napoleonic wars, French trade lines to the Caribbean were being blockaded by the British Navy, and France was desperately short of sugar." "But then, scientists presented Napoleon with two loaves of sugar, made, not from sugar cane, but this, sugar beet." "Napoleon was so impressed, he decreed that sugar beet should be mass planted, and provided the cash to get the farms and factories up and running." "Within a few more years, more than 40 sugar beet factories were established." "Mostly in northern France." "In a two- fringeered gesture to the British," "Napoleon embargoed the sale of sugar beet to Britain." "The stand-off didn't last, however, and within a matter of decades, the forces of the free market prevailed." "Sugar beet flooded the British market, and the price dropped." "By 1850, it was a commodity that everyone could afford." "And this was the result, teatime." "This very" "British institution was how working people got through the day." "Jealousy guarded tea breaks at the factory, with tea loaded with sugar, it was a consolation, a reward for dull and difficult days." "Sugar became the fuel which drove the Industrial Revolution." "Sugar changed, not just what we drank, but what we ate." "If you look at the diet of the working-class, at the beginning of the 19th century, we are pretty much looking at bread, potato, cheese, butter if you are lucky, maybe a bit of bacon fat, by the end you are looking at bread," "butter or margarine, jam or cake." "One of the big things the" "Victorians were good at leftover recipes." "This is a sponge cake, you take a steal sponge cake, cut it in slice, and cover it in jam and mask it with meringue." "High tea became an essential for the working-class." "It was an echo of the aristocratic shadow." "High tea was a meal, its signature ingredient was jam." "An avalanche of it, with pound-for- pound as much sugar as fruit." "It was still there a century later, in my own working-class Dundee childhood, where it rolled off a production line, a mile from my house." "What was this thing you were putting on, this apricot, it looked like apricot jam?" "That was carrot jam." "What?" "It is jam made with carrots to look like apricot jam. shouldn't do this, but carrot jam?" "Get out of here!" "It tastes like almonds, and I would have said apricots?" "If you don't know what it is, nearly everybody says apricots." "It is rather nice." "I think it is lovely, there is bitter almonds in there." "It is gorgeous, but it is deadly as far as sugar is concerned." "There must have been old wives who said, get the carrot jam, that really gives the baiorns lots of energy, and they get a lot of bounce and tough." "There must have probably been that kind of chat?" "think there was." "There is a question of are your children going to eat that dry bread, no, if you spread it with a bit of jam, can you get them to eat it." "So they will eat a lot more and bread, and they will take more food if they have a little bit of jam." "For the poor in the 19th century, a lot of their kal rific intake came from sugar dcalorific intake came from sugar, they could have taken it from other nutrients, but they were eating sugar, there is no vitamins," "good fats, or protein." "It is just sugar." "They are getting the buzz they want or need, but they are not getting the nutrients they need." "And malnutrition among the poorer classes in the 19th century, it was awful." "By the beginning of the 19th century how many pounds of sugar are we consuming?" "12 pound a head." "By the end of the 19th century?" "pound a head." "A huge increase?" "Massive increase." "The arguments we have that the poor are spending money on the wrong things, busy drinking and spending their money on chocolates and take-out food, are exactly the same arguments in the 19th century." "People say the working-classes should be eating boiled sheep heads, and they forget about the cost of fuel and the time to cook meals that are long to process." "They fall back on what is cheap and easy. 1886 was the year the Swiss invented milk chocolate, that was bold, new and very popular." "With a recipe that consisted of huge amounts of sugar, sweetened milk." "Britain's confexers competed to make their own." "But for almost 20 years the secret elueted them." "Rumour has it, that George Cadbury became so obsessed with the pursuit of milk chocolate, that he became a sleepwalker, and one night he rolled his wife around the bedroom under the impression she was a milk chuorn." "I have come to discover the secrets of making chocolate for myself." "What am I doing, surrounding myself with more temptation." "Take that bag and I will fill it up." "It took" "George Cadbury to create Britain's first milk chocolate." "In 1905," "Cadbury's Dairy Milk was released to an eager market." "It was a bar of sugar, in a brown disguise." "Do you I think I might have a job here, with this career of mine is fading by the hour." "Milk chocolate fell into a market gluted with sweetness." "Britain was already the largest consumer of sugar in the world." "Yet there was still no sense that it might be bad for you. isn't that amazing." "Very nerve racking all of this, you know." "In this country we have a taste for milk chocolate, and I remember as a child, only eating milk chocolate." "It makes a delicious recipe, if you are making something very, very sweet, it is appealing to the caveman instinct in us all." "We all crave for sweet things." "subsequently not very healthy?" "indeed." "If you get a bar of milk chocolate, now, and you read the wrapper, I think you would be lucky to get about 22% cocoa solids, and all the rest, which is almost 80%," "would be milk and sugar." "And sometimes some other fats as well." "I would say that milk chocolate is not very healthy, not only because it has a lot of sugar, but it is also interestingly, the milk bonds with all of the vitamins and the minerals in the chocolate, and you" "can't actually digest them." "Really?" "It is really true, if you want to eat healthy chocolate, it has to be dark." "Of course, as the chocolate manufacturers might tell you, milk chocolate isn't unhealthy in itself." "As long as it is eaten as an occasional treat." "But there lies the problem." "Oh my goodness." "That is good." "This is dark chocolate." "It really is good." "That is very little sugar in there." "The figures speak for themselves, the invention of Dairy Milk made" "Cadburys the wealthiest chocolate company in Britain." "With a turnover in today's money of ï¿½120 million." "In 1914, at the beginning of the" "First World War, the British Government placed massive orders for bornville cocoa and Dairy Milk." "Cadburys streamlined their production to accommodate demand." "German standard rations were plain fare by example, bread, potatoes, but the standard rations of the" "Britain contained Dairy Milk Chocolate, and good Caribbean rum, mooded food." "Bravery, afterall, doesn't need to last." "Reckoned in the span of a lifetime, it can be the merest blink, more than long enough for the dopamine surge, delivered by sweetened chocolate, or the brief intokation, following a tot of rum, chemical courage." "After the war, the shelves of grocers continued to fill with what can be described as old friends, brands like Rowntree's Kit Kat from" "1905, and Smarties from 1927, brands still unchanged today." "The mass production of food had just begun, and the jockeying for position to sell each new product was fierce." "The philosopher Claude" "Levi straws, had raised the idea that food -- straus, had raised the idea that food needed to appeal to the mind as well as the mouth." "His philosophy of messing with our minds, and making the slide towards sugar more inevitable." "There was an explosion of the brands at the beginning of the century, when these appeared, 1920s, 1930s, a chap was working called Edward Bernase, he used the phrase, the idea mind marketing and branding was to "engineer consent", to" "create brand loyalty and addictions." "In the case of chocolate and sweets, what is interesting to me, and I'm thinking about my own response, I consume nearly everything here." "But it seems to me that it goes back to a very, very early point in my life, almost at the very begin of my conscious life." "This has been with me." "It is a bit like the Jesuits used to say about children, give me the boy until he's seven and I will give you the man." "That is how the brands work." "You give me the child, at pre-school age, and I will give you the adult, I will deliver you the adult." "Because we will then anchor that brand with all those pleasant, happy memories we had as children." "Look at this historic Kit" "Kat add, "Polly put the Kit Kat on and we will all have tea"." "There is the Rowntree's fruit gum boy. wanted to be him." "Cadburys milk chocolate buttons." "The backing the box." "Big -- the Jack in the box, big smiling things." "It is the happiness, I look at this, and go, yeah, I remember when Opal Fruits started, Love Hearts, I would love them and look at them and see the mottos they had." "The names as well." "Bounty, Bounty giving you excess." "Life Savers, a Marathon, making you run forever." "Unbelievable." "The names themselves there." "The amount of time these brands spent getting the name right, and the design right, getting their brand position right, so you will open the doors to your mind, and the brands will run in and sit there and lodge" "there for the rest of your life." "That is how they work." "At the turn of the 20th century, the average Briton ate just shy of a pound of sugar a week." "Our intake was accelerating at a frightening rate." "Because sugar was now finding its way into virtually everything." "One loaf of bread, two-and-a-half tablespoonfuls of sugar." "And it doesn't even taste sweet." "Other sugar, like high fructose corn syrup, are also in a bewildering variety of both sweet and savoury foods." "Corn syrup was an American invention from the 1950s, when the post-war, post-rationing world, was looking for more plentiful supplies of food." "Corn syrup was much cheerer than granulated sugar, -- cheaper than granulated sugar, so one by one the companies started to use it as the flavour enhancer of" "Joyce." "The wide use of corn syrup may explain why sugar consumption has rocketed over the last 50 years." "Going from a two pound supermarket bag each a week in the 1960s, to three-times that today." "That's six pounds a week each." "And one of the biggest users of corn syrup is this, fizzy drinks." "It is the most recent Trojan horse to invisibly steal sugar into our diet." "Over the last 30 years our habits have changed." "There has been a huge upsurge in their popularity." "In America, consumption of these soft drinks has doubled since the 1970s." "Here, they make up 20% of all the drinks we buy." "Today I'm meeting someone who is lucky to be alive he has got to the point where he was drinking six litres of fizzy drinks a day, and couldn't stop." "How did it escalate?" "It just got into a habit of not drinking water." "It was always, IronBru." "My sister won't drink water, she's the same." "How bad did it get?" "I had to have it." "You were completely addicted?" "Yes." "Totally." "What about nightime?" "If I didn't have any through the night I would wake up in the morning, wanting to throw up, sore head, sweating. you didn't have any?" "If I didn't have any through the night." "So you are saying to me, that if you didn't have anything through the night you would be sick, and this kept you from being sick?" "Yeah." "That defines an addict, when you are that dependant?" "Definite addiction." "Definitely an addiction." "I would have done anything to get Ir nBru!" "I wanted to ask the manufacturers about the impact of iron brew on the health of the people who drink it, but they declined to do an interview, instead they sent a statement that basically says that the drink should be enjoyed as part of a balanced diet, and that they" "would never advocate overconsumption." "But what of that choice being out of your hands." "Andrew said he felt he was addicted to IronBru." "You were completely addicted?" "Yes." "It has been scientifically proven that drinking and smoking can be addictive, but it is much more controversial to suggest that sugar might have the same effect." "So, what did you make of that?" "I think clearly sugar is very addictive." "There has been some research done in rats that has shown that when given free access to either sugar or to cocaine, a lot of rats will actually prefer the sugar." "Suggesting that there is an even stronger association with the sugar than with something else addictive like cocaine." "The research into addiction shows that the warm glow of pleasure that we feel when we drink a sugary drink, for example, is generated by different parts of the brain communicating with each other." "The feelings of wanting that drink then liking it as you drink it live in different parts of the brain." "But in the brains of addicts, they refuse to communicate at all." "The stand-off between these two feelings results in addictive behaviour." "The more you want to drink, the less you actually enjoy it, which leads you to look for more." "I think one of the interesting things about that is you can explain a lot of human behaviour in that way." "You can think of how they would normally go together, and sometimes they don't." "When the balance of that goes wrong, is that when we are, as it were, vulnerable?" "I think the moment that we are no longer able to actually get pleasure out of something, and we just start to expecting or pursuing that particular pleasure more than actually getting any, there is clearly something wrong." "A lot of your brain then becomes out of balance." "That in itself then create behaviour which is out of balance, and one of the things that can happen with that is it can lead to things like obesity, or addiction, or all sorts of other problems." "For Andrew, what began as a pleasurable experience, eventually became an addiction." "He has managed to recover, but only after severe illness." "He was saved by a quadruple heart bypass operation, and the careful monitoring of this doctor, who helped him give ups daily fix." "The cholesterol was around about 9- 10, it plummeted once you changed your behaviour." "It is amazing what a change it has been." "That coincides exactly with when you cut out your fizzy drinks." "The doctor is convinced that people can change and wean themselves off sugar. young child is given excessive amounts of sugar in their diet, they will develop tastebuds and their palate will be programmed to have sweet substance from there on" "afterwards, if their tastebuds are never challenged or over a period of time, they can become addicted to sugar, "addicted" in the broadest sense." "People can take sugar out of their diet, and Andrew is an example, and are eating less sugar in food and drinks, still enjoying their diet, to the same extent, if not more, by reprogramming their palate." "That is the key point." "What many of my colleagues don't recognise, and many of the people in the public don't recognise, sometimes to reprogramme your palate can take a couple of months to do so, but that they can achieve that change, and" "they can get to a point where something that might have been considered to them really bland in the past is actually becoming quite tasty." "When I set out to discover why sugar has become such a big part of your diet, I don't think I realised the extent that we depend on it." "Or how serious the consequences have become." "From Elizabeth I's sweet tooth to the working-man's jam-laden high tea." "Our penchant for sugar has become a particularly British infatuation." "From the moment it was first mass produced in Barbados, and became one of the British" "Empire's most successful trading commodities, there was no turning back." "Our love of sugar knew no bounds." "In recent times it has spread like a virus through all the food and drink we consume, to the extent that we have been left in a world where eating can be dangerous." "The choices we make about our diet are a matter of life or death." "Science is telling us that our brains and bodies can no longer cope with this conbombardment of sweetness." "My own -- this Bonn bombardment of sweetness." "My own body is sat Railtracked with sweetness, but -- saturated with sweetness." "But we can overcome our hard wiring and cravings if we choose." "For the first time in our evolutionary history we have been given a choice, and a pretty major one at that." "We have all evidence, but to act on it, the choice is your's." "But in the meantime, to eat the cheesecake or not to eat the cheesecake, that is the question." "And you are not going to know the answer. # Sugar"