Stuff You Should Know - Sugar: It Powers the Earth

Episode Date: June 12, 2014

Since sugar spread from Polynesia a few thousand years ago, the world has been crazy for it. Insanely high prices, wars and even slavery couldn't undo world's need for a sugar fix. Today that fix is responsible for the obesity epidemic facing the West. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lacher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Howdy. Hi, Sugar. That's what I was thinking about earlier. One of the Archies?

That was an Archie song. Oh, Sugar. Oh, Honey, Honey. See, you call Pete your girlfriend like a Sugar, or a Honey, or your wife, or whatever, and that's all sweet things. Yeah. That all makes sense. Did you hit your head?

Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't call your wife something bitter. Right. Like, um, like Korean melon? I was trying to think of something bitter I couldn't think of anything. Uh, Rugalah? Come here, my little Korean melon. I bet someone said that.

Who? I don't know. Someone Korean. No, in Korea, they just call them melons. Yeah, that's true. Man, this is the worst start ever. This is the worst ever. I knew we would achieve it.

We've been building toward it. Well, we top ourselves every episode, really. That's right. Chuck, have you ever tasted sugar? I have. I'm trying to bring it back from the break. Yes, I have. I have, too.

Sugar's a big popular sweetener these days. It is. And it's been around for a while. I don't know if you know this or not, but apparently they think sugar is indigenous to the island known as New Guinea in the South Pacific around Polynesia and that as long as 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, the Polynesians were cultivating it and going, like, this is the jam. Yeah, sweet and yummy and gives us energy and makes us fat. Remember that Simpsons where I guess Bart grows up to be like a paid taste tester and

he drinks that soda and turns into this horrible, huge, disfigured thing and he goes, sweet. And the guy with the clipboard goes, pleasing taste? Some monsterism? You remember? I don't remember that. Oh, it's great. Was that the one where it was there all of their future selves? No, it was just a momentary daydream.

Gotcha. And it goes back to his normal self and he's like, cool. Like he can't wait to grow up to be a professional taste tester. We know the table reading we set out on that should be coming out. I can't wait this year, right? It was a good one. Yeah, it should be coming out. It's exciting.

I'm excited. We can't say what it's about. No. We don't know if we can. We're just covering. We're going to err on the side of caution because the last thing we want is for the Simpsons to be mad at us after all these years. For real.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So where are we? Sugar? Yeah, Polynesia. Ireland hopped from New Guinea across Polynesia, made its way up to Indonesia, and then finally landed in India.

And when it was in India, it really started to spread. Everything spread from India back then. Trade routes. And thanks to the Crusades, it was brought to Western Europe. Well, even before that, the Persians started conquering the land. And they encountered sugar and brought that with them. That's right. And then you got Columbus.

That jerk brought sugarcane itself to the Caribbean and said, you know, like some root samplings and said, let's try and plant this stuff here. Yeah. And it turned out it was a great place to plant sugarcane. It really was because sugarcane is a tropical plant. Yeah, the cane. You can't grow it just anywhere. No.

But you can grow it in places like South America, the Caribbean, South Africa, Southern United States, hot places, India, as we already mentioned. And it just kind of spread like wildfire across the world, especially once it came to what's known as the New World, like you said, via Columbus. Unfortunately, it also was and it became an agent of slavery. Yes, it certainly did. It fueled the slave trade for quite a while. And then by 1750, there were 120 sugar refineries in Britain, they called it White Gold.

And it was up until that point, it had been kind of a luxury. Well, a little before that, it became a little more widespread. It was a complete luxury, like literally it was for royalty pretty much. It was so rare and hard to come by. Originally the first seaborne international sugar exchange was between Venice and England in 1319. I saw that Venice was the first place where they were refining it really well. Right.

And the Venetians, that was a merchant city if there ever was one. So they were selling it and one of the places they sold it, the first place they sold it to overseas, was England and it was in 1319 and they sold 50 tons for what's the equivalent of about $11 million today. And that's tons with an NNE, I'm sure. So yes, and right now you could get that for about $20,000. It was $11 million back then. So it was very, very expensive.

But then two things happened that opened the sugar industry and made it available to the general public. The reformation, which actually strangely led to a decrease in honey because monasteries were the major producers of honey, monks kept bees and the reformation led to a closure of a lot of monasteries. And secondly, sugar just became more available, like those two things happened at the same time and all of a sudden it was something that the average person could get their hands on.

That's right. It was a huge increase in tea consumption because before then people drank tea, but once they started putting sugar in their tea, they were like, we love tea. And that's when it became like the national drink of Great Britain. Man, I love a good English tea with a little cream and a little sugar in it. Just delicious. You a tea guy? I like the herb kind more.

No, I like it all, man. I love green tea, I love English breakfast tea, I love black tea, I'll try it up every now and then. Oh, wow. I'm into all of it. That's a wild sidewalk right there. And from about 1792 to 1815, there was a lot of warring going on in Europe and there were naval blockades by Britain that basically Europe needed that sugar fix and they were

like, but you can't cut us off. Right. We love sugar now. Come on, man. And so in 1747, they realized that the sugar beat, which is the other way you can get sugar was a great way to do it and that's how they get their sugar today still. And the beat is, it looks like a beat that's not purple, it's a root and it grows up out of the ground, looks like a little, just sort of whitish, light brown.

It looks like a turnip. Yeah, sort of like a turnip. But it's sweet. It is. About 17% of the sugar beat can eventually become sugar as opposed to only about 10% in the cane, which I thought was unusual. Yeah, so you have these two plants that can be processed separately, independently, and both will produce sugar indistinguishable to the average person.

Yeah. Can be pretty neat. Pretty neat. And the reason why Chuck, the reason why that would be indistinguishable is because all plants have sugar. That's right. It's a carbohydrate, a simple carbohydrate and sugar is a part of photosynthesis, but you can't go out and get a blade of switch grass and get enough sugar out of it to make

sugar. Right. Even though there's sugar in it, it's only abundant enough in the beat in the cane to really produce sugar, sugar. Exactly. But sugar is kind of this, it's a molecule that powers the earth. Yeah. Really.

Humans, plants. Everything is powered by sugar. It's pretty neat. It is pretty neat. It is also, you can use it as a preservative. It prevents bacteria from growing in jam. Sometimes you can change the texture. They use it as like a food additive to make something look and feel different, not only

just taste different. They're like, this doesn't put fuzzy little jackets on people's teeth when they eat it enough. So let's add some sugar. And our favorite use of sugar is to make booze. It accelerates fermentation. My favorite uses of sugar are to make booze and to make Reese's Pieces. Okay.

Let's not leave that out. Yeah. It's an important part of the production of alcohol. And Reese's Pieces. And Reese's Pieces. And it does make the world go round. And the world actually produces quite a bit of sugar. So in this article from a few years ago, it says that the world made about 78 million

tons of 71 metric tons of sugarcane annually. Is that accurate still? Do you know? Well, that's just sugarcane, but I know that sugarcane accounts for 80% of sugar production. 80%? About. And then sugarbeats account for about 20%, the other 20%. But in, I think, 2013, the world produced 165 million metric tons of sugar.

Okay. Yeah. So I guess you'd have to be a mathematician to figure out that formula. Plus you'd probably have to have more info than we just gave. Yeah. The cane, sugarcane, looks sort of like bamboo. The stalk does. It's a tropical grass at the top of it.

It looks grassy. And it takes about a year to grow. It takes about 18 months from planting. But once it's planted, you cut it back to the root, and it'll take another 12 months for that to grow back up to be harvested again. Okay. So it's the 18 months thing, then. The 18 months is if you plan it brand new.

Oh, gotcha. Okay. Like from seed, I guess. I see. And it grows in breaks. They call them cane breaks, which I always think is one of the neater earth science terms. Cane breaks? Cane break.

Yeah. It is grown, and not always refined near where it's grown, but it is harvested and processed initially close to where it's grown so it doesn't rot, sort of like when we did coffee. Yeah. You want to do most of that stuff near where it's grown. Right. And there are some steps you have to take to harvest sugar, at least even get it to the raw state.

But yeah, not every processing place refines it all the way to what we would call table sugar. Yeah, sometimes it's sent to a refinery. So I guess we can cover that in broad strokes here, but it's pretty complicated. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're looking for the end all be all of how sugar is produced, then go watch an hour long video on YouTube.

What was it? I remember how incredibly complex chocolate making is. Remember conking? Oh yeah. Geez. I love all these. These are some of my favorite ones. Salt, sugar, coffee.

Commodities. Yeah. The commodity suite. We got to do tea. We haven't done tea. Okay. And wine. We still haven't done wine yet.

Yeah. That one just bugs me. This guy, I don't have his name in my memory, but I have his email in the save folder. Yeah. And he was like, you need some help with this stuff. I've got experts who are ready to talk to you about wine. That could, that should be a suite. That's a dense, dense topic.

All right. So sugar beets. Let's talk about that in the process. Okay. Usually they're going to extract over the winter months between September and February. And as we said earlier, sugar beet is about 17% sugar. Yeah. It's not too bad, bang for your buck wise, you know, I mean, considering the cane is

only 10%. Yeah. I mean, you could pick it up and eat it and be like, this is pretty sweet. Oh yeah. I guess 17%. If you're in Russia, you could. Yeah. That's true.

That's their racist pieces. Sugar beets. You're going to start an international incident. No. Things are tense right now, you know. Yeah. Between us and Russia. Yeah.

It's about 1977 again. Well, they're kicking us out of the space station. I know. Star Wars just came out. So if you're going to process sugar beets, you're going to slice it and you're going to put it in hot water and you're going to boil it and it's similar to sugar cane. They're going to make a sugary juice and they're going to filter it, purify it, concentrate it, isolate those sugars.

And eventually you're going to get sugar crystals developing because you send that syrupy juice through what's called a centrifuge. And that's going to separate the crystal from what is known as the mother liquor, whatever is left, which is one of my favorite terms now, when whatever is left over that's not crystal is mother liquor, like byproducts in the original juice. And apparently that can be extracted a few times. I would guess so. To get all the crystals out of it.

Yeah. And I think sometimes they need to add a little sugar dust to spur that crystallization. Wow, it sounds like a magical process. There's mother liquor, there's a sugar dust and actually know that you bring up sugar dust. You know, do you remember down in Savannah in like 2007, 2008 that sugar refinery that exploded? Oh yeah.

It was sugar that exploded. Oh, dust in the air? Yeah, sugar dust is particulate matter. Yeah. And when it gets into the air, it can catch fire and explode. That's crazy. And it did. It blew that place sky high.

Yeah. When was that? I wrote about it when I got here. So I would guess like 2007 or 2008. What was the article? Like how can sugar explode? I think I remember seeing that. We should have touched on that.

I guess we just did. It just did. But I mean, like you should go back and check out that now that you realize that it was just sugar. Yeah. That blew the place up. It formed a crater basically. It just blew the whole refinery.

Any flower could do that too, right? Same principle. Yeah. Any particulate matter can do that, I think. That's nutty. Yeah. All right. So sugar cane, it's a very similar process.

They're going to pulverize the stalk, add water and lime, and that's going to be your syrupy, sweet juice. And not lime like limestone. Yeah. Not like squeeze limes into it. I had to double check. No, you're right. Because it's tropical, you know?

Exactly. And they're also going to run that through this centrifuge and you're going to get your mother liquor and your crystals. And that is also going to be washed and filtered and refined further until you get your sugary white goodness. Yeah. You know, evaporation's going on. It's one of the things that sounds complicated, but it's actually pretty simple.

It's the same as when you're like making a simple syrup at home or you're boiling sugar and water. It evaporates often. You're going to end up with something super sweet. Yeah. But there are byproducts to this whole process. Yeah. Essentially.

Molasses is chief among them. Yeah. I never knew that. Yeah. It's a byproduct that comes from boiling sugar, right? Yeah. I mean, it's basically the, yeah, it's the dark, like that, that's what makes brown sugar dark or sugar in the raw dark is molasses.

Right. The molasses isn't extracted as much as it is with refined white sugar. Yeah. Because sugar has zero molasses in it, like sugar in the raw has more and more. Yeah. So it's less refined. And then the greatest byproduct of molasses is, of course, rum. Yeah.

Yeah. I put a little molasses in my, when I make my own barbecue sauce. Oh yeah. That's good. Yeah, that's nice. Another byproduct is called bagasse, and that is the pulp, essentially, of the cane. Are you making these words up? No.

Those are real words. Okay. Bagasse. Bagasse. We, I think, another process we studied. Yeah. It's not, it's not central, just a sugar. It's just the pulpy, fibrous matter left over from this kind of process.

I wonder what we talked about then. Was it, was it coffee? No. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But the bagasse is used. Is it bagasse?

Because I think I remember us discussing whether it's bagasse or bygasse. It's bagasse. I listened to it today. Okay. So, yeah, we definitely covered that before. I'm starting to feel like an old man, because when we have 700 topics or so. Oh yeah. I'm sort of vaguely familiar, but you don't want to sound dumb so you don't say anything

and then you just spend the next week in your head going over this. I'm telling you, one day we are going to re-record a show and not realize it. Man. And we're going to hear about it. Well, what was it? It was crystal skulls. Well, we never released that one. Right.

But remember, I was like, I thought for sure we recorded this. No dreams. Oh yeah. That's what it was. We went to record dreams and we just, it just wasn't there. Yeah. So, bagasse, we definitely talked it out. And bagasse is a great byproduct because that can be used to power the sugar refinery.

They actually burn that as fuel to create the steam used to power some of these machines. So that is one way that sugar production can be green, however, mass production of anything like this isn't super green because they're transporting stuff over large distances and there's clear cutting of land. Well, that's a big one with sugar. Yeah. Deforestation like in the Amazon, right? Yeah.

That's exactly right. Yeah. So even though they're using things like bagasse as a byproduct to help power, why is that funny to you? Because I always hear bagasse in my head. Okay. Anytime you say it. But it is not a, looked upon as one of the more green products that is used and produced.

No. No. Like they have to use baby lambs to really refine it to its whitest. That is so not true. Well, it uses their soles at least, I guess, if you want to get technical. The soles of baby lambs. Yeah. And then they're just left to wander the earth for the rest of their natural lives,

like not feeling anything. That's so sad. Yeah. Let's do a message break. All right. And then we'll get into types of sugar. Okay. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. In the podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So there's a lot of types of sugar. There are. When you think about sugar, especially here in the West, you think, oh, that really white, like really pretty, powdery granular stuff. Yeah.

And that's called table sugar. And that's what's known as sucrose. That's right. And sucrose is 50, 50 glucose and fructose. Yes. Sucrose also apparently occurs naturally, but there's a lot of different types of sugar that you're going to find in plants and from some animals too. Oh yeah.

Yeah. So cow's milk. Sure. Contains lactose and gull lactose. Yes. Both of which are sugars. Yeah. Sucrose, again, that's typically table sugar, but I believe you can find that in plants.

Yep. And that's glucose and fructose, like you said. Yeah. And it's 50, 50 even. One molecule glucose, one molecule fructose, put them together, you got sucrose. That's right. Fructose is commonly found in fruits. Yeah.

It's also found in honey fructose is. Yeah. And then glucose, this is the one you commonly think of when you think the body and sugar. Because glucose is what the body runs on and we'll talk about that a little more in depth in a little bit. Yeah. And that's in honey and fruits and veggies. Yep.

And then something called xylose, which I'd never heard of. That's in wood and straw. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. There's a sugar alcohol called xylolotl. Oh yeah. That's very sweet. Yeah, there's sugar alcohols and they supposedly circumvent your blood sugar, your normal metabolic

blood sugar process. Uh-huh. So they taste sweet, but they don't have any impact on your blood sugar. Huh. And one of them is called xylolotl. Xylolotl? Yeah. That's the name of the product?

Yeah. There's a Danish or Swedish gum that's like the best sugar-free gum you can possibly get your hands on. It's called xylolotl. It's so good. It's a terrible name, though. It is, but it's named after the sugar, right, which apparently is based on, I guess it's probably wood sugar alcohol.

Wow. Yeah. It's pretty creative. I didn't. I'm just recounting here, so. No, I know. I didn't know you didn't. Oh, you weren't complimenting me?

No. Sugar comes in different granulations and from icing sugar, which is, if you've ever heard of confectioner sugar that you daintily sprinkle on top of your, what's it called, did you get it at the fair? Your funnel cake? Yeah. Right. Those are so good.

They are. I haven't had one in years, though. Yeah. They're good. I never, like, I don't indulge in that stuff. Man, what is going on, Chuck? Well, you know, I'm overweight and like it's, there's just like, you don't want to be the overweight guy walking up to the funnel cake stand.

You know? Well, that's why you sneak around the back. Hey, get someone else to go get it and eat it in the alley. Cry. I've never done that. No, I avoid that stuff. Ice cream is my big downfall. Oh, what's your ice cream?

What's your favorite? Well, Ben and Jerry's. Sure. Like, but which one? Yeah. Chubby, hubby. Oh, that's a good one. Ironically.

Yeah. I got to tell you, have you had Bluebell? Yeah. Okay. Bluebell is like the third best selling ice cream brand. It tastes just like the good old days. But you can only get it in like seven states. Oh, really?

That's how good it is. Oh, wow. And they have a banana pudding flavor that is, if you're in Nevada and you can't, the closest you can get it is in Mississippi, it's worth driving there for. And it's like eight bucks for like a gallon or a half gallon is ridiculously expensive. But it is so good. All of their flavors are good, but their banana pudding one is like, it's just, I'm about to cry.

Yeah. Yeah. They're radio commercials. Have you heard those? The songs? They're horrible. Oh, it's the funniest stuff you've ever heard. The TV version of it is even worse.

Yeah. It seems like a joke. Like, are they serious or is this campy? No, they're serious. Yeah. It's like an 85-year-old like Baptist preacher in charge of like their ads. It is. It's campy.

It's so, it's, and they don't mean it to me. It is. I don't know, the songs, it's literally like, you know, mama's bacon, the apple pie and putting it in the windowsill and like the picket fences outside and we're eating blue bell ice cream because it tastes like the good old days. Right. It's really funny. It rhymes more than that, but that's the gist of it.

I'm sure it's on YouTube. Just type blue bell ice cream in. Yeah. It's good stuff. Man, that was a nice sidetrack. So then you got castor sugar, which is larger than powdered sugar, but smaller than granulated sugar. I don't know about until like a couple of months ago.

I don't remember what recipe it was, but there was a recipe that Yumi was making that like called for castor sugar. She was like, what? Yeah. Both of us were. Yeah. Apparently you can make it with the coffee grinder. You can grind your regular sugar.

Yes. She came across that. Yeah. I think we finally found her. She ordered it online or something like that. But. Was she making a meringue? Because they're used a lot in meringues, evidently.

I don't remember. Maybe. I don't remember. Did she make you banana pudding? No. Why did she need that fork? I'll figure it out on my own time and let everybody know in the next episode. How about that?

Rather than all of us sitting here until I remember what the recipe was, and then I pick up the phone and call her and ask. Right. That's good radio, my friend. Yeah. Then you have your granulated sugar, and this is your table sugar. And then you've got preserving sugar, which looks sort of like sort of rock salty. It's chunkier or like sea salt.

Right. Of course sea salt. Sweeter than sea salt though. And that's used to preserve. That's much sweeter. Yeah, because that's another property of sugar is it's a preservative as well. You can throw it into some jam if you want, make it extra sweet, but it'll also keep the bacteria away at bay.

That's right. Which is why, like you said, simple syrup can last for so long. Yeah. You can just make that and put it on your bar at room temperature, right? Yeah. I keep it in the fridge, but yeah. You keep it on hand? Mm-hmm.

Make it yourself? Awesome. That's very easy. Plus also, if you like toss some lavender in there, you've got lavender simple syrup, which goes with anything with gin in it. Yeah. Oh, it's so good. You can put in some like allspice and some anise seed and stuff like that.

You ever use lemon verbena? No, but I have made lemon, like just from the peel. Oh yeah, lemon verbena is like just the green leaf. We grow a lot of that in the herb garden. If you smash it up, it smells so good. Nice. Like I imagine it would be good muddled in a drink. Yeah.

If I was into that. Oh, you're not? You know that. I'm not into the cocktails. I thought you were. No, whiskey over ice. Yeah, you can jazz it up a little bit here or there. No, not me.

Okay. So I guess we should talk a little bit about high fructose corn syrup. We did a whole show on it, which you can go back and listen to. But it bears mentioning here because there's a lot of, it gets a bad rap and the evidence is sort of inconclusive right now. Yeah. Yeah. I think what we determined is it's not necessarily any worse for you than sugar, but it's in

a lot more stuff and you may not know it. I don't remember what we concluded. What my understanding is at this point, and that was from 2009, there's a really great article on the New York Times called is sugar toxic. It's very long, but it's very in depth and it really goes into the evidence that's out there that it really is. What are the highlights? Well, like you said, high fructose corn syrup isn't molecularly different very much from

sucrose, which is 50-50 sugar. Most high fructose corn syrup or the stuff that's most widely used is like 55-45 fructose to glucose. Right. Okay. So that 5% difference in fructose shouldn't make much difference. But apparently it does. The other aspect of high fructose corn syrup is that that extra fructose or all that 55% fructose, that is processed in the liver.

Any cell in your body can process glucose. When you eat something that has glucose in it, your pancreas releases insulin and insulin goes, hey, open up cells and the glucose goes in and it's biochemical energy is converted to ATP and then you have this packet of energy that can be used by any cell. Any cell can do that, which means your entire body can metabolize glucose. Fructose has to be broken down into glucose and that's done in the liver. The liver has some options to it, Chuck. When it's presented with fructose, it can use it for energy.

It can convert it into fats in the bloodstream, which are called triglycerides, or it can convert it into fat stores, fat. Yeah. Right? That's if you have too much of it, right? Yeah. Now, with high fructose corn syrup, apparently evidence shows that when it hits the liver, it's just automatically converted to fat and that the speed with which it's metabolized

also has an effect on how much or how frequently it's converted to fat and with high fructose corn syrup, it's syrup and syrup apparently hits the liver a lot faster than say an equal amount of apples that you're getting fructose from. So it's being converted to fat like automatically. That's why they think that high fructose corn syrup is actually far worse from you than just regular fructose or even sucrose, table sugar. Right. Well, the obesity epidemic has sort of matched year to year with the introduction of high

fructose corn syrup as far as increase. So that makes sense. Yeah. I read an article today that said that added sugars overall is the problem, whether it's high fructose corn syrup or regular added sugar, just added sugars in a product. That's the USDA's line and the USDA doesn't want to upset the sugar industry or the Corn Refiners Association. So that's kind of become the predominant government line like, yeah, everybody's eating too much

sugar. That's the problem. Right. Well, then there's a whole group of people out there who are saying like, no, sure, that's a problem, but this is an even bigger problem with high fructose corn syrup. Yeah. That makes sense. That it's different and it's affecting people differently and it's not the same as

sugar. Well, I think a lot of people think we're ingesting too much corn based products, period. Sure. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Did you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

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We need to do GMOs at some point too. You know, yeah, everyone keeps calling for it. Some guy sent us a book on it. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Did you read it?

No. I haven't read it yet. Um, apparently 16% of Americans calories come from added sugars, which is just like totally empty calories. So again, there's, there's a big, there's an argument over those numbers. Yeah. Sure. No one really knows, but supposedly the numbers are very artificially low.

And that the average American eats about 95 pounds of sugar a year. Oh yeah. Yeah. Wow. And the global average is something like 66 pounds. But Israel eats something like 145 pounds. Really? Per person per year.

Wonder what that's from. Sweets. Yeah. You eat a lot of sugar. Package foods. Yeah. Um, are we done with HFCS then? For now?

Yeah. I'd go back and listen to that episode. It was a good one. One of my favorites. Yeah. It's been a while. I meant to re-listen to that, but I didn't get a chance. Um, so sugar in the body, we've, and this also harkens back to our episode on taste.

It, uh, corresponds molecularly, uh, on your, with your taste buds on the tongue because of the shape of the molecule. We talked about that. The molecules are shaped to fit, you know, when sugar hits it, it matches up perfectly with that molecule and sends a message that said, Hey, there's something sweet as opposed to salty or bitter or, uh, sour or umami. The fifth. Right.

This says four and then names five, which I thought was, I even changed it on my sheet. Um, and they recommend something, uh, that I do not recommend, which is, uh, if something tastes sweet in the wild, it's more likely to be safe to eat than something bitter. Right. That's not true, but you should never, ever go and like in a survival scenario and just try and eat something, even a little bit. Um, there's a test you can do, which I won't get into, but it involves like rubbing on your skin first, waiting a certain amount of time.

They may be touching it to your tongue, waiting a certain amount of time, but you should never just go like, I wonder if this is edible. Let me taste it. Right. It's not a good idea. Good going. Even if it is sweet. You're a survivalist.

I've done some things. So, you know, we said, uh, sugar is found in all plants, just to varying degrees. Um, and plants create sugar as a byproduct of photosynthesis and they use it for energy, for growth. They also use it to, uh, they take sugars and turn them into more complex sugars to use for like, um, cellular structure, like cellulose. Um, but they also use sugar in their nectar to attract, uh, bees and other things to help them pollinate.

Yeah. And, and propagate their species. Because it's sweet stuff. Yeah. I love it when I see the little bee getting in there, getting a little something sweet. Yeah. I feel like they're getting a little treat. You know?

That's right. And then they're vomiting it up and we eat it as honey. That is true. Uh, sugar is bad for your teeth. Everyone knows that, um, specifically when you eat sugar, it's going to form something called a glycoprotein, that little sweater on your teeth and bacteria love to eat that stuff. Yeah.

And then they love to poop out lactic acid afterward onto your teeth. Yes. Specifically, stripped of caucus mutans. That's the culprit for cavities. Really? Mm-hmm. We've said stripped of caucus before and that's not a good word. No, but there's different kinds of strip.

Okay. Um, but when they poop out that lactic acid, that's what's on your enamel, that's what's going to wear down your teeth. Right. So eating sugary stuff really is bad for your teeth. That's not like something your mom tells you that's a lie. No. And the bacteria also provides or produces a biofilm around all of this stuff, which

traps it in there and traps in the lactic acid as well. So you're in trouble. Yeah. You're dead. Not dead, but you may get diabetes. Yeah, you can get diabetes from too much sugar. That apparently is, um, it's crazy that there's a real parallel between the six-country study and the seven-country study that we talked about in the paleo diet episode of FATS.

Apparently there was a rival all along that said, it's not fat, it's sugar. Like we're both after the same problem, but this guy went after FATS, this other guy went after sugar, and now they're starting to think like, now that they're thinking it's not FATS, after all, that contributed to heart disease and obesity, that they think is actually sugar. And the way that it's sugar is through something called metabolic syndrome, to where if you eat too much sugar, your body becomes resistant to insulin. And remember, insulin gets glucose out of the bloodstream and into your cells and is converted to energy.

Right. And if your body starts sucking at doing that, then you have a lot more glucose in your bloodstream, which means your pancreas is producing more and more insulin. Insulin, remember, triggers fat storage, so you have more and more insulin, you have more and more fat storage, you have obesity, you have heart disease. And they think that possibly the number one contributor to heart attacks is metabolic syndrome. And not necessarily saturated fat.

Right. Interesting. And as a result of this, a side result is insulin, you develop your diabetes. Yeah. Type 2 diabetes is the result of insulin resistance, where you have to inject insulin into your body because your body is not producing enough any longer because it's overtaxed your pancreas. Yeah, we got a lot of great responses from the Paleo episode. It was a really interesting one.

Yeah. And people saying like, dudes, we know so little still about nutrition, and things are changing so much with the things we eat and put in our body that it's hard to keep up. Which is why it's so insulting when some industry that has a vested interest in... Yeah. So they got all figured out? Yeah. And don't worry about it.

Just keep eating it. Yeah. That's insulting. All right. Can sugar power your car? Yes. How? I'll explain.

There's a couple of ways. So there's sugar-based ethanol, which Brazil was basically running on for many years. Yeah. I didn't realize that. They were big into flex fuels and ethanol. They were basically energy-independent in the first decade of the 21st century because they said we're tired of being dependent on foreign oil. Let's figure something out.

And they did. That makes a lot of sense. They started looking into sugar cane, making ethanol from sugar cane, and there's like corn-based ethanol, which Chris Palette and I talked about in the grass lean episode. Yeah. I remember that. And apparently, ethanol made from sugar cane has 800 times more energy output. And so they were making ethanol and in 2008, 50% of the fuel sold in Brazil was ethanol.

That's awesome. Made from sugar cane right there in the country. Well then, gas prices lowered, and people started using gas again because they'll use whatever's cheapest. But Brazil, even though it's on its heels, the ethanol industry there is, they proved it's a completely viable alternative fuel. Yeah. The problem, though, again, with refining more and more sugar for these purposes is deforestation

and worker wages. And I feel like anytime we've covered any commodity like this, there's some kind of worker somewhere in the world getting screwed over, and sugar is definitely not any stranger to that process. Well, also, it drives up food prices, too, because if there's two different huge sectors competing for the same commodity, it's going to drive the price of that commodity up. Yeah, that's true. So if you have energy and food going up for sugar, the price of sugar goes up.

Right. I wish people could have seen that demonstration. It really brings it home. And what else is the other? I remember, I think we talked about this, too, sugar devouring microorganisms, basically feeding on sugar and making energy in the process. That's a viable way in the future, maybe, to power things. Yeah.

So there's certain types of microbes are more sugar hungry than others. But yeah, when they're eating sugar, they manage to separate electrons and loosen electrons. And as the electrons flow, as we mentioned in our electricity episode, the flow of electrons is electricity. So if you direct that flow across something that can use it, you create a current. And the cool thing about microbial fuel cells is when that electron makes it to the other side, it combines to form water. So that's the byproduct of this.

So it truly is a very environmentally friendly alternative fuel. Yeah, we did. We covered that at some point, too. I remember. Absolutely. Our world is getting smaller. Yeah. Because we're explaining it.

That's right. Yeah. You got anything else? No, I don't think so. Mother liquor, bagasse. All these words I made up just for the show. You did good with the making up the words, man. Thanks.

I don't have anything else, Chuck. But if you want to learn more about sugar, I'm sure there's some words we left out of this article. You can type sugar into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this refuting listener mail. We read a listener mail from a creationist not too long ago, man, that got a certain response from some quarters.

Yeah, so then a lot of people write in responding to that listener mail. So we might just continue this for the next year, just reading rebuttals. Okay. Hey, guys, you received an email from a creationist explaining that both creationists and scientists believe in natural selection and that both groups believe in microevolution but disagree on macroevolution. What the person did not mention is that macro and microevolution describe the same process of natural selection just on different timetables.

Micro is short term, macro is long term. It simply does not make sense that natural selection works on the short term but is somehow reversed on the long term. Natural selection introduces changes to a population subgroup as they adapt to their environment. If the changes are small, the population subgroup can naturally breed with the original population. That is microevolution. Okay.

Once the changes are significant enough that the subgroup can no longer naturally and successfully breed with the parent population, the subgroup is considered a new species. That's a special event. That is macroevolution. To believe in micro and not macro is to ignore how nature works. Say you put two separate populations of the same species put in very different environments. Each population would slowly adapt to its new environment and change over time, microevolution. Each group will become better adapted to its new environment and the differences between

the two groups will only grow in time. However, if you don't believe in macroevolution, you don't believe in new species. So you have to believe that no matter how different each group becomes, nature does not work like this. Also, the previous writer claimed to be a creationist botanist and that is like a doctor that does not believe in germ theory. I'm sure they might exist, but I would definitely take their expertise with a large dose of salt.

Quite a rebuttal. Yeah. And I didn't have a name. I feel bad. So I'm just going to say thanks. You. Thanks, Richard Dawkins. Yeah.

I appreciate that. So the evolutionists have rebutted, what say you creationists, let us know. And everybody stop tweeting and sending emails about how dare we put a creationist's views on and listener mail. Yeah. It's no way to go through life trying to silence your opponents. Yeah. You debate and engage.

I was surprised. There were a lot of people that said you shouldn't give equal time to this stuff because it's just not true. Yeah, somebody said, I thought discovery stood for something. Interesting. Yeah. Well, hey, I think debate is healthy and they think you're not right either. So like, you know,

Yep. Debate is healthy Chuck. Exactly. If not, Bill Nye wouldn't have done it. Boom. If you want to contribute to the debate, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know, send us an email to stuffpodcast

at howstuffworks.com. And as always, check us out at our home on the web stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Munga Shatikular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable

happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.