ABSTRACT
During the seventies, as a watershed of the ecology movement, when health food all but merged with mainstream eating habits, a number of anti-sugar books hit the health-food circuit, then came to the attention of the wider public. One of these is William Dufty’s Sugar Blues, a century-by-century expose that attributes all the world’s health problems to poisonous refined sugar. These include beriberi, scurvy, schizophrenia, pellagra, lung cancer, and of course diabetes. According to Dufty, the introduction of sugar into people’s diets has always coincided with the impoverishment of traditionally wholesome food regimes. Sugar is the alimentary chemistry of colonialism. For instance, the British brought beriberi to Java when their polished white rice and sugar supplanted the nutrient-rich native brown rice, just as the Americans destroyed their allies, the South Vietnamese, with instant Minute Rice and Coca Cola while the Viet Cong prevailed on unrefined rice and a bit of salt.
