Sugar Story
The truth about raw sugar, light, dark brown and Kleenraw sugar. The facts of sugar refining, and what you should know about sugar.
September/October 1971
By Fred Rohe
No Organic Merchant sells white sugar or any products containing white sugar because it is a foodless food. It is 99.96% sucrose and when taken into the human body in this form is potentially dangerous. It is touted as an energy food, but such propaganda is misleading for there is ample evidence that white sugar robs the body of B vitamins, disrupts calcium metabolism and has a deleterious effect on the nervous system.
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The above material can be concluded by anyone through reading but in addition to the reading, I have taken the trouble to visit sugar refineries in both Hawaii and California. Aside from general curiousity, my reason for these visits was that I had been selling "raw" or brown sugar without understanding what they are. There was no information available which seemed dependable.
Sugar cane is grown with the use of synthetic fertilizers and weed sprays. The fields are burned just previous to harvest. These are destructive agricultural practices; nothing truly good can come from soil so mistreated. I would, therefore, be uninterested in consuming aything derived from commercially grown sugar cane, either brown sugar or molasses.
Sugar refining is largely a mechanical process done in truly huge machines which boil, spin, filter and separate. Aside from water, the materials which enter the processing are lime, phosphoric acid and diatamaceous earth. I don't consider any of these additives significant where white sugar is concerned because one thing is certainly true about white sugar; it is "pure". No chemical residues could possibly remain at the end of the line, so effective is their purification process.
There are three kinds of sugar which are not white: light brown, dark brown and Kleenraw. They are all made the same way—by adding back molasses to refined sugar. For years I have heard several different versions of how these so-called "raw" sugars are made. All of them led me to believe that the so-called "raw" sugar which has traditionally been used in the health food industry is a "partially refined" product removed from the refining process sometimes before the final stage of white sugar. But my investigation have proved this impression erroneous. All forms of non-white sugats are made from a base of white sugar.
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