Sugar

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Recommended: Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history

Sugar Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Although a lot of people do not realize that every single gram of sugar decreases the healthiness of the product by a large percent. From the moment infants first taste lactose in the milk, humans seem to find sweetness alluring. The refined sucrose we usually call “sugar” is very popular product on the market. Even though this product considered very unhealthy and sometimes harmful, I think it still plays its role and still make the world spin. It gives people a lot of energy; it gives us joy and happiness. But in this world, everything has its consequence. After the joy and after the happiness comes diabetes, tooth decay, excess body fat. It’s really hard to believe that something so sweet can produce that kind of damage. So how did sugar became such an important commodity in our community and the rest of the world? Sugar is one of the oldest and best documented of all of the medieval commodities. Exactly what form, quality and price this commodity achieved could be variable enough to create material for disagreement whenever the product is discussed. What we do know is that it was much more widespread than is commonly believed. The discovery of sugarcane, from which sugar, as it is known today, is derived, dates back unknown thousands of years. It is thought to have originated in New Guinea, and was spread along routes to Southeast Asia and India. The process known for creating sugar, by pressing out the juice and then boiling it into crystals, was developed in India around 500 BC. In 510 BC, hungry soldiers of the Emperor Darius were near the river Indus, when they discovered some "reeds which produce honey without bees". Evidently this early contact with the Asian sources of sugar cane made no great impression, so it was left to be re-discovered in 327 BC by Alexander the Great, who spread it's culture through Persia and introduced it in the Mediterranean. This was the beginning of one of the best documented products of the Middle Ages. The sugar wasn’t cultivated in Europe until the Middle Ages. Arabs traders were first to bring sugar to Spain. Christopher Columbus’s voyage to America was the way sugarcane made it to North America. It was a gift from him to “West Indians”. There this plant found a great environment to spread in.

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