I'm Confused About Sugar

A Commenter Asks A Good Question

HealthyByDefault

commented on my post “Evolution For The Mad Diet Sphere”

https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/evolution-for-the-mad-diet-sphere

> I will say though, I thought in Victorian times the people in general had terrible dental health because of all the sugar?

This is an extraordinarily good question and I notice that I am confused here.

Off the top of my head, I actually think the problem goes back to Elizabethan times, when sugar first started being imported to these islands.

Apparently tooth decay was at one point fashionable, and people who couldn't afford enough sugar to destroy their own teeth would paint them black, to look like the people who could.

It's a really vile irony that one of the great crimes of the British, the transatlantic slave trade, was mostly initially driven by the British people's desire for cheap sugar, which sweetened their food while destroying their teeth.

It has some parallel to the modern horror of factory-farming, where endless misery is caused to countless helpless creatures in order to make slightly cheaper, worse quality food.

Bloody Capitalism. It gives us what we want for cheap. We should be more careful about what we want.

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But it's a real puzzle. Tooth decay is obviously a fatal problem, especially pre-antibiotics.

Like the appendix, it needs explaining.

How can:

(a) sugar causes tooth decay and

(b) people really like the taste of sugar

both have been true over evolutionary time scales, given that 'liking the taste of things' is probably under genetic control?

I'm going to bite this bullet and say that they can't have been.

Maybe no ancestral population of the English ever had access to sugar?

Maybe sugar didn't use to cause tooth decay?

To be honest, four hundred years sounds like the sort of timescale where evolution should have occurred here. Why do English people still like the taste of sugar after four hundred years of it destroying their teeth with fatal consequences? I must say I never really have as an adult, but I did as a child I think, and even now, I'm not averse to it. I still like the odd ice-cream now and then.

I am also pretty sure that honey has been widely available in most places for a very long time, and that there are sugars in fruits and milk and even blood sugars in meat, which makes the puzzle even worse.

I wonder if the problem is specific to sucrose, rather than ‘sugar’ in general.

When someone asks a question which on its face destroys one of your most strongly held ideas, that's the most interesting thing in the world.

Drop everything and either explain it or abandon your idea.

I'm going to go off and find out. If my ideas are not true, then I do not want to have them.