Today, Explained - Sugar crash

Episode Date: March 15, 2026

We’re obsessed with sugar. And Big Sugar is obsessed with us. How do we make a break? This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Ariana Aspuru, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Image courtesy of Jenny Lawton. If you have a question, give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or email [e-mail]. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I have run 27 marathons plus a few ultra-marathons, all while fueling my body with plants. Yes, I get plenty of protein. I'm Robin Arson, VPF fitness programming, and head instructor at Peloton. And this week on my podcast, Project Swagger, the fundamentals of a plant-based life with nutritional takeaways for you to apply to your own life

no matter what your preferred diet is. Follow Project Swagger, wherever you get your podcasts. I crave sweet foods when I wake up. I crave dessert after every meal. And I usually like sweet snacks instead of salty. I'm a server and I eat sugar packets throughout the shift. I'll reach for a sweet treat to make me feel better emotionally, even if it physically makes me feel worse.

I don't think I realized how much sugar was in my life until I gave up sweets for lent. I go on a walk and outside the grocery store, I see the Girl Scouts pushing their product. I go to a friend's birthday party, and the cake just stares at me from across the room. I head to the coffee shop, but that macho latte just doesn't hit the same

without a little simple syrup. Sugar is a boogeyman ready to leap out behind every corner. But is it really as bad for us as we've been led to believe? I'm John Glyn Hill, and today on Explain It to Me from Vox, we're going to find out. I'm David Singerman. I'm an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia, and I'm the author of a book unrefined, how capitalism reinvented sugar. Lately, it seems like America has fallen out of love with sugar. I think of RFK Jr. on his crusade against it. Sugar is poison, and Americans need to know that. And you know, when I open up Instagram, I see all these influencers telling me to avoid it.

Two weeks, no sugar, what would happen? The first thing is your mood would get to. get a lot better. Why is excess sugar so bad for your heart? Well, let's break it down. Do you know that if you're overweight or can't lose weight, it's the sugar? If you're addicted to food, it's the sugar. What happened? Have we always been so anti-sugar? Well, I think sugar consumers and even political leaders have been kind of conflicted about sugar for a long time, but it is pretty unusual for people in power to oppose sugar this publicly on these kinds of health grounds. I think it's probably worth acknowledging, or just starting off by acknowledging how much sugar American society consumes. So right now, it's about 120 pounds per person per year. Oh, wow. And this is actually a decline

from the turn of the century. In 1999, it peaked at 153 pounds per person. Wow. And to put that in some kind of perspective, it was about 80 pounds in 19. and it was like six pounds in 1800. That is so wild. So how long has sugar been a big business? How far does this go back? Sugar has been like consumed for a very long time for many thousands of years. But until about 500 years ago, it was largely, at least in European society, an expensive, rare product.

And then the big trend that you can see over the last five or six centuries is that the price of sugar has gone down. It was such a valuable commodity that empires wanted to find places they could grow it and then sell it. And so this really drove European expansion into islands in the Atlantic, in the Caribbean, in Brazil, and to North America. You know, in America, I think, in the United States, at least, when we think about African-American slavery, we think about tobacco and cotton primarily. But if you look at it on a hemispheric scale, sugar was the most important driver of enslavement, right? Something like 75 or 80% of the Africans who were enslaved and brought to the new world were brought to work on sugar plantations. Wow. And it was the worst work.

Yeah, it sounds like sugar is wrapped up in all this economic and political power. Yeah. The sugar industry generated so much wealth for the people who owned plantations and the people who traded it, that it was very politically influential in pretty much any sort of political system that we've been talking about in the West. I would say that the sugar industry's modern level of political influence really begins after the civil war. war due to American industrial expansion and economic growth and the way that America became richer in the decade in the last part of the 19th century. But one thing that happened that was a little bit unexpected was sugar consumption went way up and the federal government happened to

have a sugar tariff at the time. Like sugar was sugar imports are one of the ways that the federal government made its money. And as the sugar imports kept going up and up and up, the government kind of got addicted to sugar tariffs in the same way that Americans got addicted to sugar. And so by the late 1870s, early 1880s, sugar revenues are accounting for a huge part of the federal budget. But also the sugar industry is one of the, the sugar refining industry, I should say, is one of the largest employers in the big cities of the north. So it's very politically concentrated and it has its fingers in a lot of political questions. It reminds me a little bit of like big tobacco. Yes. Like both of these crops just becoming so powerful and having such industry.

There's a pamphlet that the Philadelphia Sugar Company put out in the 1920s, and this is completely representative of the kind of marketing around sugar for most of the 20th century. So if I can just read you a little quote from this, it says, the food value of sugar is surprisingly high. Per pound, it contains almost twice as many calories as beef steak. The high dietary value of sugar is universally recognized by scientists and physicians. That is wild. Like what? It is. By the 1950s and 60s, what you see in sugar industry propaganda is really pushing back on concerns about, like, dental health, diabetes.

There's an outfit called the Sugar Research Foundation, which is sort of like the pro-industry PR shop. Sugar turns into energy faster than any other food. Sugar helps keep your appetite down, your energy up, and helps you slip past the, quote, fat time of day. sugar, only 18 calories per teaspoon, and it's all energy. Time magazine, 1969. In the 1960s and 70s, the sugar industry paid scientists at places like Harvard to publish studies blaming fat and cholesterol for coronary heart disease while leaving sugar out of the picture. And we know this thanks to some work from researchers at UCSF who've dug into this in the same way that they dug into the tobacco industry.

So you can see that the tobacco industry and the sugar industry are really like playing from the same book. Yeah. So, you know, we saw the downfall of big tobacco. What's caused this backlash to big sugar? The concern about sugar now on health grounds, I think comes out of the same opposition to sort of capitalist food systems that we see manifested in a lot of places. It's manifested in these Whole Foods bags that list everything that's not in your food. Like artificial sweeteners all the way to whale oil. It comes from a concern about like trying to emphasize local food systems and eating healthier and eating more simple things and less refined stuff in general, not just refined sugar. There's this sort of like trad culture influencers, right? And the idea that there used to be a more pure, like, wholesome diet and we need to get back to that.

In the 1970s, you had people like moving to Vermont and Maine to like to have maple syrup, right, as a kind of. of like a countercultural sweetener. And then you also have this right-wing, you know, skepticism of like elite medical science that fed it to sort of vaccine world. And it's weird that those have like come together in this modern Maha movement. It was really striking during the, during the Super Bowl, right, to see the juxtaposition of Bad Buddy's halftime show, which everybody in my life was texting me because it began with, you know, the sugar cane field.

Yeah, yeah. And then that was followed up by this realfood.gov ad. My sister name was Denise. She died of obesity at 25. She had a heart attack. Mike Tyson talking about obesity and how Americans need to take their health more seriously. We're the most powerful country in the world, and we have the most obese, fudgy people. So that juxtaposition of, like, American Empire and sugar cane, and then this, like, right-wing critique of capitalist food was a little jarring. Yeah, I'm curious, you know,

You've got these like, this sort of like, I don't know, this odd group of people who probably would not be aligned in any other way. You know, you have RFK Jr., you got your granola moms, you got everyone all in alignment on sugar. But can they defeat big sugar? I mean, no one's taking it down yet. No, I would say the sugar industry is doing all right. The sugar industry remains politically powerful and it's concentrated, you know, in a couple of key states. The cane sugar growing industry in Florida has been powerful for a very long time. So I don't think sugar has that much to worry about.

What they might have to worry about is just the decline in sugar consumption, right? So as I said, Americans are eating 120 pounds per person per year. And that is going down. It's going to take a long time to get it back to something that seems like a humane or comprehensible number. But that is the trend that if you were the sugar industry, you might be concerned about. So we may be eating a little less sugar than we used to, but that doesn't change the fact that we love it. Coming up, the chemistry behind our cravings.

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If your company's all-in-one system has you jumping between a dozen different apps for a handful of tasks, then you ought to reconsider your definition of all-in-one. Rippling says their platform actually is all-in-one. They've already reconsidered. It's a unified platform from global HR, payroll, IT, and finance. With Rippling, they say workflows that normally bounce across multiple tools and departments can just all happen in one place, automatically. Say an employee gets promoted or moves. Ripling can update payroll, taxes, manage

new app, permissions, ship a new laptop. Can I get a new laptop? And assign any required training and more all in one place. So if you or your company want to run the backbone of your business on one unified platform with people at the center, you can go to rippling.com slash explained and sign up today. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G.com slash explained to sign up. I'm JQ, back with Moore Explain It to me. The sugar industry is huge, in large part because they're able to tap into one of our most basic desires. I'm Dr. Kimber-Stanhope. I'm a research scientist at the University of California, Davis.

And she says the way our bodies react to sugar depends on what kind it is. So let's start with the natural sugars first. The three important ones are glucose, fructose, and sucrose. Glucose is not only in fruits and vegetables as a glucose molecule, but you put it together in chains, you get starch, and then you have glucose in every single grain and beans, every single plant food. So glucose is massively important. It has chemically the exact same chemical composition as fructose. However, the two are shaped different.

And then we have sucrose, and sucrose is simply one glucose bonded to one fructose. Fruits have all three. Okay, so those are the sugars in fruits. How about the ones in like Oreos? So let's move on to the processed sugars. It was probably around the early 1800s that scientists learned they could take the starch from corn and add enzymes to it and break the chains down into a glucose syrup. Eat it with biscuit or spread on bread.

Use it for a tea punch, hot or iced coffee. Cooling drinks are delicious, sweetened with caro. They worked on that process, and they worked on that process, and they, learn to refine and extract that fructose until now they can make a fructose syrup that is 90% fructose. And they use this fructose syrup to make any formulation of high fructose corn syrup they want. You know what they say about it? Like what? That it's made from corn.

It's natural. And like sugar, it's fine in moderation. How do our bodies react to these different kinds of sugar? Like, what are they doing? When sugar, any sugar, leaves our intestine, it goes into the portal vein. And the first stop for the portal vein is, now beg a surprise, based on the name, the liver. Now, the liver can use whatever sugar is in the liver. that blood, pull it in and turn it into energy, or it can let it stay in the blood and get delivered

to the rest of the body. Now, in the case of glucose, if the liver doesn't need that sugar, because let's say at the very same time you're drinking the glucose, you are also consuming a big mac and french fries, the glucose in that beverage or whatever is going to go past the liver and go to the muscle, go to the fat cells, go to the brain, and the rest of the body gets to use it up. With fructose, even in situations where the liver absolutely doesn't need the energy, all the fructose is pulled into the liver. 86% of the fructose you consume in a big gulp drink is going to end up in the liver. Wow.

And that is way too much substrate for the liver to deal with. So it does the best it can, but the leftover gets turned into fat. And it's that extra fat making in the liver that mediates this chain of bad events that follows the consumption of fructose. That increased liver fat, some of it gets sent into the blood where you get more triglyceride and more cholesterol because they get sent out hand in hand. And the results are increased risk for cardiovascular disease, increased risk. risk for diabetes, increased risk for liver disease. Okay, so the side effects of having too much of the wrong kind of sugar are clear, but we do need sugar for energy, right? I mean, what's the healthy way to get it? Certainly, we need fruit and vegetable for their incredible nutrient profile.

And the amount in fruit and vegetable would cover any need we absolutely have for sugar. With regard to being an energy source, if you're eating a whole wheat grain, you're going to get lots and lots of glucose, and that will provide your energy. Your whole grains are your safe source of carbs. and in my mind your fruit and vegetable are your required source of carbs. Okay, I need to know for once and for all, is it true that sugar is addictive? It's certainly not addictive in the way cocaine is addictive. However, they are similar in both you eat it that first time, your reward center is going to be activated. But in the case of drugs, the award center is saying, oh, this is really bad for me.

Let's not respond. Therefore, the drug addicted person keeps escalating their dose to get back to getting a reward out of their drug. Sugar isn't like that as much as, yes, the reward goes down. when you consume, let's say, the donut the first time. But what we think is going on is our food has become so palatable. We are completely overriding the homeostatic controls on food intake. What's a homeostatic control? It is basically your appetite being shut off when you have consumed enough calories.

But when you have hyper-palatable food, you are getting reactions that we call hedonic reactions. You're eating for the pleasure of eating. You're eating because the food is causing such a great sensation of reward. Is our food too tasty? Is this our problem? Our food is too delicious? Yes, absolutely. And it's not accidental.

Our food processors do test after test after test to come up with the formulation of fat, sugar, and salt that produces the most people, taste testers, saying, this one's the best. Sugar has a powerful hold on us. Up next, how to break free. Support for To Explain comes from Talkiatry. If you're dealing with anxiety, depression, ADHD, therapy might just be part of the solution. Maybe you're stuck on a months-long wait list to see a psychiatrist. Maybe you're bouncing between online platforms trying to find medication. You may want to check out tachiatry.

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in just a couple minutes. That's tachiatry.com slash explain to get matched in minutes. For a brief period of time, in the beginning of the pandemic, a time that I'm very sorry to make you have to remember, there was this hot new app that promised to reinvent the way that we thought about social media forever. Clubhouse was going to be the thing. And this week on version history, our chat show about the most interesting and important

and best and worst products in tech history, we're talking about why Clubhouse took off and then ultimately why it went away. That's on version history, available on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts. This is David. I firmly believe in dessert. Bacreds are just life, you know? It's what gives life meaning, I feel. I mean, have you ever met a grumpy baker? It's explained it to me. I'm JQ.

And yeah, sugar is just so good, but it's also bad. So, what do you do? My name is Maya Feller. and I'm a registered dietitian nutritionist based out of Brooklyn, New York. You've been a practicing nutritionist for quite some time. Is there a way that we're talking about sugar these days that's different from how it was in the beginning for you? So I would say the difference is the demonization. Currently, we're in like a battle of wits and morality around sugar.

Back in the 80s, like when I, I mean, I was really, really young then. that was like, oh, we're going to go sugar-free. It wasn't like, oh, you're a good person or you're a bad person. Now there's this whole kind of you're having sugar. Well, do you know what it does to you? And then there is this like question about whether or not you're actually making a good choice. And what does that say about who you are as a person? So we've fully entered into the morality that's associated with sugar.

If someone is like, okay, I'm not going to do the sugar thing anymore, it stops. Do you recommend going cold turkey? Is that how you do it? Oh, no, absolutely not. Oh. No, no. I'm totally like, I'm like, no, go curled turkey. So what I would say to folks is because any change that you make in your overall eating pattern, you kind of want to make sure that it's something that's sustainable and that you can replicate it over time. And for most of us, it's not realistic to say that we're not going to eat any added sugar.

So I do say slowly reduce to a place that you feel like you can sustain the majority of the time. And then if there are days where you have no added sugar, then that's fine. But think of it in a way where it's like it's not an all or nothing because it really is everywhere. You know, one of the ways that I try to manage my sugar cravings because I definitely have a sweet tooth is just to like, okay, I'm not going to bring this in the house. But that doesn't stop me from wanting the sweets. We heard from a listener named River who said they have a really bad sweet tooth. And I mostly manage it, I guess, just by trying to avoid keeping sweets in my house. But when I am based with the cookie, I do not know what you do with myself and I will eat at all.

How would you help River handle this proverbial cookie? Here's the thing. The challenge is when we're shopping, rarely do we purchase the one. single cookie. Perhaps it's a bag of cookies. And so I would say to River, is there a way to change how the cookie comes into your home? Could you instead, is there a bakery co-sby? Could you bake a cookie? And then maybe it's just having the cookie after lunch or after dinner. I prefer to have it up against a meal just because you've had some protein and fiber, hopefully, in the meal to help slow down the absorption of the sugar into the bloodstream. But I would say have the cookie, be aware of it.

enjoy it, and then move on. Is there a way to retrain our taste buds? You know, we heard from Anthony who said, I love, love, love, love sweet things. Something that's been helping me is eating and drinking more things that are bitter to kind of get used to it. Does that work? Is there a way to, like, make the sweet tooth stop?

So, Anthony, here's the thing. I love that. And you absolutely can. It takes time. So when I'm working with folks, I like to figure out, like, how much sugar are you having on a regular basis and in what form was it coming? Is it a liquid sugar or is it a solid sugar? And the reason I ask about the liquid, because, like, if someone's sitting down and they're having a two liter of a soda, that it's very, like, we have a visual.

And we can say, okay, we're going to, you know, cut it down by half a glass per day over X amount of days and we can see. but if it's like, oh, I'm getting a sleeve of cookies or I'm getting cake, then we're going to have to start about, okay, what are your sugar interactions that you're having over the course of the day? Is it possible that we can reduce it to two sugar interactions from three? Can we cut the portion size? Can we change when you're having it? Can we change some of your behaviors around what you do after you have it? And I really, with patients, we go through at that level of detail. because food, when we eat by mouth, we eat multiple times per day.

And these are questions and interactions that we have to constantly come up against. And so I want to make it applicable to work, relaxation, all of the things. So that when you're doing that step down, it's not like, oh, I'm on my sugar reduction journey now, but it doesn't apply to other parts of my life or other scenarios. We're living in really stressful times, and I think for a lot of people, a sweet treat at the end of the day is a reward for making it through. Here's a listener named Becca. Especially with the myriad horrors of life and politics happening every day, it's hard to deny myself anything that will make me even a little bit happy. But is that a crutch?

Like, are we ultimately doing ourselves more harm than good when we do that? So I don't actually think so, to be honest. I understand foods being comforting, and I'm not going to be the person to say, like, no, you can't have that thing after you've done the whole thing of lifing. You know, I'm not going to, I won't do it. But what I will say is, what's your current health? How can we create a space where you can really enjoy that sweet treat? Let it be a moment and then move on from it so that it doesn't become a four-hour. activity. So I gave up sugar for Lint this year. And, you know, in a few weeks, Lint will be over.

And I'll once again be staring down those cookies at my favorite bakery, trying to decide how this is going to fit into my life. What should I do when that happens? I'm a huge believer of if you want to have a cookie, it can be a once-in-a-while activity. Once it becomes a staple, then it's a different story. But, As a once-in-a-while activity, is there a way that you can go to the bakery, get that cookie that you love, and savor it when you have it. So not eating it, walking down the street, but you find a special place. If it's a park bench, if it's your home, if it's with a friend or whatever,

savor that cookie, and then it becomes special. There was a time when we used to, like, go out for ice cream, and that was a special thing. And I'm not trying to put it down that we can eat. eat it whenever, but we've lost the specialness of special moments. Like a treat is supposed to be special. That's it this week. We want your help with a show we're working on about accents. We all have them, but sometimes they change.

Have you lost your accent? Or maybe you absolutely love yours? Give us a call and tell us about it. 1-800-61845 or email a voice memo to AskVox at Vox.com. If you like this show, you can help us make us make it. by becoming a Vox member. Vox members get all kinds of cool perks, like listening to this show and other Vox podcasts ad-free.

Head to vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan and Ariana Spurru. It was edited by Judy Lawton, with fact-checking by Melissa Hirsch, and engineering by David Tattachore. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, John Glyn Hill. Thank you so much for listening.

I'll talk to you soon. Bye! Support for the show today comes from Mint Mobile, our old friend. You probably like keeping your money. Unfortunately, lots of big wireless companies also like keeping your money so much so that they're really good at squeezing more out of your phone bill each month. Mint Mobile says they do things differently. They offer a premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month. All of their plans come with high speed 5G data and unlimited talk and text.

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