Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's Josh and Chuck and we now present
Speaker 1: you with ten of our favorite episodes of all times,
Speaker 1: ones that we haven't released as select yet and um,
Speaker 1: just because we thought you might be sitting around board
Speaker 1: wanting to hear some more stuff. That's right, everyone, so
Speaker 1: be safe, be kind to one another, and learn a
Speaker 1: thing or two. Here we go, Welcome to Stuff you
Speaker 1: should know, a production of My Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles, Chuck, Bryant, Audie.
Speaker 1: Uh high sugar dun dun. That's a I was thinking
Speaker 1: about the earlier at the Archie. So that was an
Speaker 1: Archie song. Oh sugar, honey, honey. D see you called
Speaker 1: Pete your girlfriend like a sugar or hunting or your
Speaker 1: wife or whatever, and it's those are all sweet things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that all makes sense. Did you get your head? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean you wouldn't call you call your wife something
Speaker 1: bitter right like um, like Korean melon. I was trying
Speaker 1: to think of something bitter. I couldn't think of anything.
Speaker 1: Come here, my little Korean melon. I bet someone said that.
Speaker 1: Who I don't know someone Korean? No, and Korea they
Speaker 1: just call him Melons. That's true, man, this is the
Speaker 1: worst start ever. This is the worst ever. I knew
Speaker 1: we would achieve it. We've been building towards well. We
Speaker 1: top ourselves every episode. Really, that's right, um chuck. Yes,
Speaker 1: have you ever tasted sugar? I have. I'm trying to
Speaker 1: bring it back from the break. Yes, I have, I
Speaker 1: have to. Sugar is a big popular sweetener these days.
Speaker 1: It is uh and it's been around for a while.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know this or not, but
Speaker 1: apparently they think sugar is indigenous to the island known
Speaker 1: as New Guinea in the South Pacific around Polynesia, and
Speaker 1: um that as long as five thousand to eight thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, the Polynesians were cultivating it and going like
Speaker 1: this is the jam, sweet and yummy and sweet energy,
Speaker 1: and it makes us fat. Remember that Simpsons where we're
Speaker 1: I guess Bart grows up to be like a paid
Speaker 1: taste tester, and like he drinks that soda and like
Speaker 1: turns into like this horrible, huge, disfigured thing, and he
Speaker 1: goes sweet and the guy with the clipboard goes pleasing
Speaker 1: taste some monsterism, you remember, I don't remember that. It
Speaker 1: was great was that the one where they was there
Speaker 1: all of their future selves. No, it was like just
Speaker 1: a momentary day dream and it goes back to like
Speaker 1: his normal self and he's like cool, like he can't
Speaker 1: wait to grow up to be a professional taste. You know,
Speaker 1: the table readingly set out on that should be coming out.
Speaker 1: I can't wait this year. Right, it was a good one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it should be coming out. It's exciting. I'm excited. We
Speaker 1: can't say what it's about. No, I don't know if
Speaker 1: we can. We're just covering. We're gonna air on the
Speaker 1: side of caution because the last one we want us
Speaker 1: for the symptoms to be mad at us after all
Speaker 1: these years for real? Yeah, alright, So where are we? Sugar?
Speaker 1: So I guess Apparently island hopped from New Guinea across Polynesia,
Speaker 1: made its way up to Indonesia and then finally landed
Speaker 1: in India. And when it was in India, it really
Speaker 1: started to spread. Everything spread from India back then trade
Speaker 1: routes and thanks to the Crusades, it was brought to
Speaker 1: Western Europe. Well even before that, the Persians started conquering
Speaker 1: the land and they encountered sugar and brought that with them.
Speaker 1: That's right. And then you got Columbus, that jerk brought
Speaker 1: sugarcane itself to the Caribbean and said, you know, like
Speaker 1: some some roots samplings, and said, let's try and plant
Speaker 1: this stuff here. And it turned out it was a
Speaker 1: great place to plant sugarcane. It really was, because sugarcane
Speaker 1: is a tropical plant. Yeah, the cane, you can't grow
Speaker 1: it any just anywhere, but you can grow it in
Speaker 1: places like South America, the Caribbean, South Africa, southern United States,
Speaker 1: hot places, India, as we already mentioned. And it just
Speaker 1: kind of spread like wildfire across the world, especially once
Speaker 1: it came to what's known as the New World, like
Speaker 1: you said, via Columbus. Unfortunately, it also was and it
Speaker 1: became an agent of slavery. Yes, uh, it certainly did.
Speaker 1: It fueled the slave trade for quite a while. Um.
Speaker 1: And then by seventeen fifty there were a hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty sugar refineries in Britain. They called it white gold,
Speaker 1: and uh, it was up until that point it had
Speaker 1: been kind of a luxury. Well a little before that
Speaker 1: it beat it became a little more widespread. It was
Speaker 1: a complete luxury. Like literally it was for royalty pretty much.
Speaker 1: It was so rare and hard to come by. UM.
Speaker 1: Apparently the first enter, the first Seaborn International Sugar Exchange
Speaker 1: was between Venice and England in thirteen nineteen. I saw
Speaker 1: that Venice was the first place where they were like
Speaker 1: refining it really well, right, and the Venetians where that
Speaker 1: was a merchant city if there ever was one. So
Speaker 1: they were selling it and one of the places they sold,
Speaker 1: the first place they sold it to overseas was England,
Speaker 1: and it was in thirteen nineteen, and they sold fifty
Speaker 1: tons for what's the equivalent of about eleven million dollars today,
Speaker 1: and that's tons with an N N E. I'm sure
Speaker 1: so yes, and right now you could get that for
Speaker 1: about twenty thousand dollars. It was eleven million dollars back then,
Speaker 1: so it was very very expensive. But then two things
Speaker 1: happened that opened the sugar industry and made it available
Speaker 1: to the general public. Uh. The Reformation, which actually strangely
Speaker 1: led to a decrease in honey because monasteries were the
Speaker 1: major producers of honey. Monks kept bees, and the Reformation
Speaker 1: led to a closure of a lot of monasteries and UM. Secondly,
Speaker 1: sugar just became more available. Like those two things happened
Speaker 1: at the same time, and all of a sudden it
Speaker 1: was something that the average person could get their hands on,
Speaker 1: and it actually led to a huge increase in tea consumption.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because before then people drank tea. But once
Speaker 1: they started putting sugar in their tea, they're like, we
Speaker 1: love tea, And that's when it became like the the
Speaker 1: national drink of Great Britain. Man, I love a good
Speaker 1: English tea with a little cream and little sugar in it.
Speaker 1: Just delicious, you t guy? I like the herb eat
Speaker 1: kind more. No, I like it all. Man. I love
Speaker 1: green tea, I love English breakfast tea. You love black tea.
Speaker 1: I'll even do a little I'll chiye it up every
Speaker 1: now and then. I'm I'm into all of it. That's
Speaker 1: a wild sidewalk, uh. And from about eighteen fifteen there
Speaker 1: was a lot of warring going on in Europe and
Speaker 1: there were naval blockades by Britain that basically Europe needed
Speaker 1: that sugar fix and they were like, but you can't
Speaker 1: cut us off. We love sugar now. And so in
Speaker 1: seventeen forty seven they realized that the sugar beat, which
Speaker 1: is the other way you can get sugar, was a
Speaker 1: great way to do it, and that's how they get
Speaker 1: their sugar today. Still. And the beat is um looks
Speaker 1: like a beat that's not purple. It's a root and
Speaker 1: it grows up out of the ground. Looks like a
Speaker 1: little uh, just sort of whitish, light brown. Yeah, sort
Speaker 1: of like a turnip. But it's sweet. It is about
Speaker 1: seventeen percent of the sugar beet is uh can eventually
Speaker 1: become sugar, as opposed to only about ten in the cane,
Speaker 1: which I thought was unusual. Yeah, so you have these
Speaker 1: two plants that can be processed separately independently, and both
Speaker 1: will produce is sugar indistinguishable to the average person, pretty neat.
Speaker 1: And the reason why I chuck, The reason why that
Speaker 1: why it would be indistinguishable is because all plants have sugar.
Speaker 1: That's right. It's a carbohydrate, a simple carbohydrate, and um.
Speaker 1: Sugar is a part of photosynthesis. But you can't go
Speaker 1: out and get, you know, a blade of switch grass
Speaker 1: and get enough sugar out of it to make sugar,
Speaker 1: even though the sugar in it, it's only abundant enough
Speaker 1: in the beet in the cane to really produce sugar.
Speaker 1: Sugar exactly, but sugars is kind of this um. It's
Speaker 1: it's a molecule that powers the earth. Yeah, really like humans, plants,
Speaker 1: everything gets is powered by sugar. It's pretty neat. It
Speaker 1: is pretty neat. Uh. It is also as a you
Speaker 1: can be used it as a preservative. UM. It prevents
Speaker 1: bacteria from growing in jam um. Sometimes you can change
Speaker 1: the texture. They use it as like a food editive
Speaker 1: to make something look and feel different, not only just
Speaker 1: taste different. They're like, this doesn't put fuzzy little jackets
Speaker 1: on people's teeth when they eat it. Enough, So let's
Speaker 1: add some sugar. And our favorite use of sugar is
Speaker 1: to make booze. Accelerates fermentation. And my favorite uses of
Speaker 1: sugar are to make booze and to make Reese's Pieces. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's not leave that out. Yeah, it's a it's an
Speaker 1: important part of the production of alcohol and Reese's Pieces
Speaker 1: and Reese's Pieces, and it does make the world go round. Um.
Speaker 1: And the world actually produces quite a bit of sugar.
Speaker 1: So in this article from a few years ago, it
Speaker 1: says that um the world made about seventy eight million tons.
Speaker 1: That's seventy one metric tons of sugarcane annually. Is that accurate? Stild?
Speaker 1: You know, well, it's just sugarcane. But I know that
Speaker 1: sugarcane accounts for eighty percent of sugar production about and
Speaker 1: then sugar beats account for about um But in I
Speaker 1: think two thousand thirteen, the world produced a hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty five million metric tons of sugar. Okay, yeah, so
Speaker 1: I guess you'd have to be a mathematician to figure
Speaker 1: out that formula. But plus you probably have to have
Speaker 1: more info than weeds. This cave. The cane, sugar cane
Speaker 1: looks sort of like bamboo, the stock does. It's a
Speaker 1: tropical grass. To the top of it looks grassy, and
Speaker 1: it takes about a year or to grow. It takes
Speaker 1: about eighteen months from planting. But once it's planted, you know,
Speaker 1: you cut it back to the route and it will
Speaker 1: take another twelve months for that to grow back up
Speaker 1: to be harvested again. So what's the eighteen months thing?
Speaker 1: Then eight months is if you plan a brand new
Speaker 1: oh god jokes like from from seed, I guess grows
Speaker 1: and breaks. They call him cane brakes, which I always
Speaker 1: think is like one of the neater like Earth science
Speaker 1: terms cane brakes, cane brake. Uh, it is grown and
Speaker 1: not always um refined near where it's grown, but it
Speaker 1: is harvested and h and processed initially close to where
Speaker 1: it's grown, so it doesn't rot. Sort of like like
Speaker 1: when we did coffee. You know, you want to do
Speaker 1: most of that stuff near where it's grown, right, And
Speaker 1: there are some stuffs you have to take to harvest
Speaker 1: sugar at least even get into the to the raw state.
Speaker 1: But yeah, not every processing place refines it all the
Speaker 1: way to what we would call table. Yeah, sometimes it's
Speaker 1: sent to a refinery, so I guess we can cover
Speaker 1: that in broad strokes here. But it, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: pretty complicated. And yeah, I mean, if you're looking for
Speaker 1: the end all be all of how sugar is produced,
Speaker 1: then go watching our long video on YouTube. What was it?
Speaker 1: Remember how how um incredibly complex chocolate making is. Remember
Speaker 1: I love all these These are some of my favorite ones. Salt, sugar, coffee, commodities. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the commodity sweet. We gotta do tea we haven't done tea, okay,
Speaker 1: and wine we still haven't done wine yet. Yeah. That
Speaker 1: one that just bugs me. We've got a great offer
Speaker 1: from a nice guy. I don't have his name in
Speaker 1: my memory, but I have his email in a safeholder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he was like, you need some help with this stuff.
Speaker 1: I've got experts. We're ready to talk to you about wine.
Speaker 1: That could that should be a sweet That's a dense,
Speaker 1: dense topic. All right, So sugar beets, let's talk about
Speaker 1: that in the process. Um, usually they're gonna extract over
Speaker 1: the winter months between September and February. And as we
Speaker 1: said earlier, sugar beat is about seventeen percent sugar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so not too bad bang for your buck wise, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, considering the cane is only ten percent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you could pick it up and eat it
Speaker 1: and be like, this is pretty sweet. Oh yeah seven.
Speaker 1: I guess if you're in Russia you could. That's true.
Speaker 1: That's their esist pieces sugar beets UH in a stolen
Speaker 1: international incident. No things are tense right now, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: between US and UH and Russia. Yeah, it's like nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies seven again, we'll the kicking us out of the
Speaker 1: space station. Star Wars just came out. Uh. So, if
Speaker 1: you're gonna process sugar beet. You're gonna slice it and
Speaker 1: you're gonna put it in hot water and you're gonna
Speaker 1: boil it. And it's similar to sugarcane. They're gonna make
Speaker 1: a sugary juice. Then they're gonna filter it, purify it,
Speaker 1: concentrate it, isolate those sugars, and eventually you're gonna get
Speaker 1: sugar crystals developing because you send that syrupy juice through
Speaker 1: what's called a centrifuge, and that's going to separate the
Speaker 1: crystal from what is known as the mother liquor. Whatever
Speaker 1: is left which is one of my favorite terms. Now,
Speaker 1: when whatever is left over that's not crystal is mother
Speaker 1: liquor like byproducts in the original juice, And apparently that
Speaker 1: can be h extracted a few times, I would guess,
Speaker 1: so to get all the crystals out of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think sometimes they need to add a little
Speaker 1: sugar dust to spur that crystallization. Wow, it sounds like
Speaker 1: a magical process. There's mother liquor, there's sugar dust. And
Speaker 1: actually know that you bring up sugar dusts you know,
Speaker 1: do you remember down in Savannah and like two thousand
Speaker 1: seven eight, that sugar refinery that exploded. It was sugar
Speaker 1: that exploded. Dust in the air. Yeah, sugar. Dust is
Speaker 1: particular matter, and when it gets into the air, it
Speaker 1: can catch fire and explode. And it did. It blew
Speaker 1: that place sky high? Yeah. When was that? I wrote
Speaker 1: about it when I got here, So I would guess
Speaker 1: like two thousand seven or two thousand and eight. What
Speaker 1: was the article like, how can sugar explode? I think
Speaker 1: I remember seeing that. We should have touched on that.
Speaker 1: I guess I just did. But I mean, like you
Speaker 1: should go back and check out that now that you
Speaker 1: realize that it was just sugar. Yeah, that blew that
Speaker 1: place up. It it formed a crater. Basically, it just
Speaker 1: blew the whole refiner. Any flour could do that too, right,
Speaker 1: same principle. Yeah, any particulate matter I can do that.
Speaker 1: I think can that's nutty? Yeah? Um, alright, So sugarcane,
Speaker 1: it is a very similar process. They're gonna pulverize the
Speaker 1: stalk um, add water and lime and that's going to
Speaker 1: be your syrupy sweet juice and not lime like limestone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not like squeeze limes into it. I had to double check. No,
Speaker 1: you're right, because it's tropical you know exactly. Uh, and
Speaker 1: they're also going to run that through this interfuge, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna get your mother liquor in your crystals, and
Speaker 1: that is also going to be washed and filtered and
Speaker 1: refined further until you get your sugary white goodness, you know.
Speaker 1: Evaporations going on. It's it's it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that sounds complicated, but it's actually pretty simple. It's the
Speaker 1: same as when you're like making a simple syrup at home.
Speaker 1: You're boiling sugar and water. It evaporates off, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna end up with something super sweet. So chuck their
Speaker 1: byproducts to this whole process. Essentially, molasses is chief among them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I never knew that. Yeah, it's a byproduct that comes
Speaker 1: from boiling sugar, right, yeah, I mean it's it's basically
Speaker 1: the Yeah, it's it's it's the dark like that. That's
Speaker 1: what makes brown sugar dark, or sugar in the raw
Speaker 1: dark is molasses. Right. The molasses isn't extracted as much
Speaker 1: as it is with refined white sugar. Fine white sugar
Speaker 1: has zero molasses in it, like sugar in the raw
Speaker 1: has more and more. It's less refined um and then
Speaker 1: the greatest byproduct of molasses is of course rum. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I put a little molasses in my when I make
Speaker 1: melin barbecue sauce. Oh yeah, that's good. Yeah, that's nice.
Speaker 1: Another byproduct is called gas, and that is um the
Speaker 1: pulp essentially of the cane. Are you making these words up? No?
Speaker 1: Those are rewards what mother looking in bagas? But gas
Speaker 1: we I think another process we studied. It's not it's
Speaker 1: not central just to sugar. It's just the pulpy fibrous
Speaker 1: matter leftover from this kind of process. I wonder what
Speaker 1: we talked about that and was it? Was it coffee?
Speaker 1: Now maybe maybe maybe? But the ba gas is used
Speaker 1: is a big gas because I think I remembers discussing
Speaker 1: whether it's a big gas or by gas. It's big gas.
Speaker 1: I listened to it today. Um yeah, we definitely cover
Speaker 1: that before. I'm starting to feel like an old man
Speaker 1: because when you when we have seven undertopics or so
Speaker 1: oh yeah, literally vaguely familiar, but yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: sound dumb, so you don't say anything, and they just
Speaker 1: spend the next week and going over this. I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: one day we're going to rerecord a show and not
Speaker 1: realize it, man, and we're going to hear about it. Well,
Speaker 1: what was it? It was crystal skulls. We never release
Speaker 1: that one, right, But remember I was like, I thought
Speaker 1: for sure we recorded this, no dreams, what it was.
Speaker 1: We went to record dreams and we just were it
Speaker 1: just wasn't there. Yeah. Uh so, but gas we definitely
Speaker 1: talked about. And the gas is a great byproduct because
Speaker 1: that can be used to power the sugar refinery. They
Speaker 1: actually burned that as fuel to create the steam used
Speaker 1: to power some of these machines. So that is one
Speaker 1: way that sugar production can be green. Um. However, mass
Speaker 1: production of anything like this isn't super green because they're
Speaker 1: transporting stuff over large distances and there's clear cutting of land.
Speaker 1: Well that's a big one with with sugar. Yeah, deforestation
Speaker 1: like in the Amazon, right, and yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So even though they're using things like the gas as
Speaker 1: a byproduct to help power why is that funny? Because
Speaker 1: I always hear by gas and my head okay anytime
Speaker 1: you say it. But it is not a looked upon
Speaker 1: as one of the more green products that is used
Speaker 1: and produced, you know, like they have to use baby
Speaker 1: lambs to really refine it to its whitest. Not true. Well,
Speaker 1: it uses their souls at least, I guess, if you
Speaker 1: want to get technical, the souls of baby lambs, and
Speaker 1: then they're just left to wander the earth for the
Speaker 1: rest of their natural lives, like not feeling anything. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of types of sugar. There are. Um,
Speaker 1: when you think about sugar, especially here in the West,
Speaker 1: you think, oh, that really white, like really pretty powdery
Speaker 1: granular stuff, and that's called will sugar, and that's what's
Speaker 1: known as sucros. That's right, And sucros is glucose and
Speaker 1: fruit toast. Sucros also apparently occurs naturally. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of different types of sugar that you're gonna find in plants, uh,
Speaker 1: and from some animals too. Yeah. Yeah, So cow's milk
Speaker 1: contains lactose and gullactose, both of which are sugars um sucros. Again,
Speaker 1: that's typically table sugar, but I believe you can find
Speaker 1: that in plants, and that's glucose and fructose what you said, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's even one molecule glucose, one molecule fruit toast.
Speaker 1: Put them together, you've got sucros, fruit toast is commonly
Speaker 1: found in fruits. Yeah. Uh, it's also found in honey
Speaker 1: fruit tastes. And then, um, glucose. This is the one
Speaker 1: you commonly think of when you think the body and sugar,
Speaker 1: because glucose is what the body ones on. And we'll
Speaker 1: talk about that a little more in depth than a
Speaker 1: little bit. Yeah, and that's in honey and fruits and veggies.
Speaker 1: And then something called zylos, which I've never heard of,
Speaker 1: that's in wood and straw. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a sugar alcohol called zilattle. Yeah, that's very sweet. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's sugar alcohols and they supposedly um circumvent your blood sugar,
Speaker 1: your normal metabolic blood sugar process, so they taste sweet,
Speaker 1: but they don't have any impact on your blood sugar.
Speaker 1: And one of them is called zio Litle. Zio litle,
Speaker 1: and that's the name of the product. Yeah. There's this
Speaker 1: uh Danish or Swedish gum that's like the best sugar
Speaker 1: free gum you can possibly get your hands on. It's
Speaker 1: called Ziolidle. It's so good. Terrible name though it is,
Speaker 1: but it's named after the sugar, which apparently is based
Speaker 1: on I guess it's probably would sugar alcohol. Wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty creative. I didn't. I'm just recounting here, so
Speaker 1: I know I know you did. You weren't complimenting me. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sugar comes in different granulations and from icing sugar, which
Speaker 1: is if you've ever heard of confection or sugar that
Speaker 1: you daintily sprinkle on top of your Um what's it called?
Speaker 1: What did you get at the fair? Your funnel cake?
Speaker 1: Those are so good? They are. I haven't had one year,
Speaker 1: so yeah, they're good. I never like I got. I
Speaker 1: don't indulge in that stuff. Man, what why is going on? Chuck? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm I'm overweight and like it's there's just
Speaker 1: like you don't want to be the overweight guy walking
Speaker 1: up to the funnel cake stand, you know, Well that's
Speaker 1: why you sneak around the back, get someone else to
Speaker 1: go get it, and you eat in the alley. Cry.
Speaker 1: I've never done that. No, I avoid that stuff. Ice
Speaker 1: Cream is my big downfall. Oh it's your ice cream?
Speaker 1: What's your favorite? Um? Well, Ben and Jerry's sure like,
Speaker 1: but which one, Chubby Hubby? Oh it's a good one, ironically, Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you have you had Bluebell. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: Blue Bell is like the third best selling ice cream brand,
Speaker 1: like Country, but you can only get it in like
Speaker 1: seven states. That's how good it is. And um, they
Speaker 1: have a banana pudding flavor that is if you're in
Speaker 1: Nevada and you can't, the closest you can get it
Speaker 1: is in Mississippi. It's worth driving there for and it's
Speaker 1: like eight bucks for like a gallon or a half gallons,
Speaker 1: ridiculously expensive, but it is so good. All of their
Speaker 1: flavors are good, but their banana putting one is like
Speaker 1: it's just I'm about to cry. Yeah. There. Um, their
Speaker 1: radio commercials or have you heard those? The songs are horrible. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's the funniest stuff you've ever heard. The TV version
Speaker 1: of it is even worse. Yeah, it seems like a joke,
Speaker 1: Like are they serious or is this campy? Oh? They're serious.
Speaker 1: It's like an eighty five year old like braptist preachers
Speaker 1: in charge of like their it's it is. It's campy.
Speaker 1: It's so it's and they don't mean it. It is.
Speaker 1: For those of you who don't know the songs, it's
Speaker 1: literally like, you know, Mama's baking the apple pie and
Speaker 1: putting in the window sill and like the picket fences outside,
Speaker 1: and we're eating bluebell ice cream because it tastes like
Speaker 1: the good old days. It's really funny. It rhymes more
Speaker 1: than that, but that's just it. I'm sure it's on YouTube.
Speaker 1: Just type bluebell ice cream. Man. Yeah, it's good stuff.
Speaker 1: Um Man. That was a nice sidetrack. So then you
Speaker 1: got castor sugar, which is larger than powdered sugar but
Speaker 1: smaller than granulated sugar. Yeah, which I didn't know about
Speaker 1: until like a couple of months ago. I don't remember
Speaker 1: what recipe it was, but there was a recipe that
Speaker 1: you me was making that like called for castor sugar,
Speaker 1: and she was like what both of us were, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you apparently you can make it if like with the
Speaker 1: coffee grinder, you can grind your regular sugar. Yes, she
Speaker 1: came across that. I think you finally founder she ordered
Speaker 1: it online or something like that, but she making a
Speaker 1: merengue because they used a lot of meringues. Evidently I
Speaker 1: don't remember. Maybe I don't remember what did you need
Speaker 1: that for. I'll figure it out on my own time
Speaker 1: and let everybody know. In the next episode, how about
Speaker 1: that rather than all of us sitting here until I
Speaker 1: remember what the recipes and then I pick up the
Speaker 1: phone and collar and asked, right, that's good radio, my friend. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then you have your granulated sugar, and this is your
Speaker 1: table sugar. And then you've got preserving sugar, which looks
Speaker 1: sort of like sort of rock salty. It's chunkier or
Speaker 1: like sea salt. Course, sea salt sweeter than sea salt though,
Speaker 1: and that's used to preserve yes, much sweeter. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: because that's another property of sugar is it's a preservative
Speaker 1: as well. Um, you can throw it into some jam
Speaker 1: if you want to make an extra sweet, but it
Speaker 1: will also keep the bacteria away at bay. That's right,
Speaker 1: which is why, like you said, simple syrup can last
Speaker 1: for so long. Yeah, you can just make that and
Speaker 1: put it on your bar at riom temperature. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can keep it in the fridge, but yeah, you
Speaker 1: keep it on hand, make it yourself. It's very easy.
Speaker 1: Plus also if you like toss some lavender in there,
Speaker 1: got lavender simple syrup which goes with anything with gin
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah, Oh it's so good. Um, you can
Speaker 1: put in some like all spice and some an a
Speaker 1: seed and stuff like that. Every lemon verbina, No, but
Speaker 1: I have made lemon like just from the the peel.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Lemon verbena is like just the green leaf.
Speaker 1: We grow a lot of that in the herb garden
Speaker 1: and if you smash it up, it smells so good,
Speaker 1: like I imagine it would be good muddled in a
Speaker 1: drink if I was into that. Are you not? You
Speaker 1: know that I'm not into the cocktails. I thought you
Speaker 1: were whiskey over ice. So you can jazz it up
Speaker 1: a little bit here there, No, not me, okay, Uh
Speaker 1: So I guess we should talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: high fruit toast corn syrup. We did a whole show
Speaker 1: on it, yeah, which you can go back and listen to.
Speaker 1: But it bears mentioning here because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: it gets a bad rap um and the evidence is
Speaker 1: sort of inconclusive right now. Yeah. Yeah, I think what
Speaker 1: we determined is it's not necessarily any worse feed than sugar,
Speaker 1: but it's in a lot more stuff and you may
Speaker 1: not know it. I don't remember what we concluded. What
Speaker 1: my understanding is at this point, and that was from
Speaker 1: two thousand nine. Um, there's a really great article on
Speaker 1: the New York Times called It's sugar toxic. It's very long,
Speaker 1: but it's very in depth, and it really goes into
Speaker 1: the um the evidence that's out there that it really
Speaker 1: is the highlights. Well, like you said, high fruit toast
Speaker 1: corn syrup isn't molecularly different very much from sucrose, which
Speaker 1: is sugar. Most high fruit toast corn syrup, or the
Speaker 1: stuff that's most widely used, is like fifty fruit toasted glucoast.
Speaker 1: So that five difference um in fruit toast shouldn't make
Speaker 1: much difference, but apparently it does. The other aspect of
Speaker 1: high frue toast corn syrup is that that extra fructoast
Speaker 1: are all that fruit toast that is processed in the liver.
Speaker 1: Any cell in your body can process glucose. When you
Speaker 1: eat something that has glucose in it, uh, your pancreas
Speaker 1: releases insulin, and insulin goes hey open up cells and
Speaker 1: the glucose goes in and it's converted. It's biochemical energy
Speaker 1: is converted to a t P and then you have
Speaker 1: this packet of energy that can be used by any cell.
Speaker 1: Any cell can do that, which means your entire body
Speaker 1: can metabolize glucose. Fruit toast has to be broken down
Speaker 1: into glucose, and that's done in the liver. The liver
Speaker 1: has some options to it chuck. When it's presented with fructast.
Speaker 1: It can use it for energy, it can convert it
Speaker 1: into fats in the blood stream, which are called triglycerides,
Speaker 1: or it can convert it into fat stores fat. That's
Speaker 1: if you have too much of it, right, Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: with high fru toast corn syrup, apparently evidence shows that
Speaker 1: when it hits the liver, it's just automatically converted to fat,
Speaker 1: and that the speed with which it's metabolized also has
Speaker 1: an effect on how much or how frequently it's converted
Speaker 1: to fat. And with high fruit toast corn syrup, it's syrup,
Speaker 1: and syrup apparently hits the liver a lot faster than say,
Speaker 1: an equal amount of apples that you're getting fruit toast from,
Speaker 1: so it's being converted to fat like automatically. That's why
Speaker 1: they think that high fruit toast corn syrup is actually
Speaker 1: far worse from you than just regular fruit toast or
Speaker 1: even sucros table sugar. Right, while the obesity epidemic is
Speaker 1: sort of matched year to year with the introduction of
Speaker 1: high fruit toast corn syrup as far as increase um.
Speaker 1: So that makes sense. I read an article to Day
Speaker 1: that said that added sugars overall is the problem, whether
Speaker 1: it's high fructose corn syrup or regular added sugar. Well,
Speaker 1: that's added sugars in a product. That's the U s
Speaker 1: d a's line, and the U s d A doesn't
Speaker 1: want to upset the sugar industry or the Corn Refiners Association,
Speaker 1: So that's kind of become the predominant government line, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody's eating too much sugar, that's the problem. Well, then
Speaker 1: there's a whole group of people out there who are saying, like, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah, sure that's a problem, but this is
Speaker 1: a an even bigger problem with high fructose corn syrup. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense that it's different and it's affecting people differently, right,
Speaker 1: and it's not the same as sugar. Well, I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people think we're ingesting too much corn
Speaker 1: based products. Period. We need to do g MS at
Speaker 1: some point too. You know, yeah, everyone keeps calling for it.
Speaker 1: Some guys sent us a book, Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Did you read it? No, I haven't read it um.
Speaker 1: Apparently six of americans calories come from added sugars, which
Speaker 1: is just like totally empty calories. So again there's a
Speaker 1: there's a big there's an argument over those numbers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no one really knows, but supposedly the numbers are very
Speaker 1: artificially low. UM and that the average American eats about
Speaker 1: nine pounds of sugar a year. Oh yeah, yeah wow,
Speaker 1: and the global average is something like UM sixty six pounds,
Speaker 1: but Israel eats something like a d forty five pounds
Speaker 1: per person per year. What what that's from sweets? Yeah,
Speaker 1: packaged foods Um. Are we done with HFCs then for now? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I go back and listen to the episode. It was
Speaker 1: a good one, one of my favorites. Yeah, it's been
Speaker 1: a while. I'm meant to re listen to that, but
Speaker 1: I didn't get a chance. Um, So sugar in the
Speaker 1: body we've been This also a hearkens back to our
Speaker 1: episode on taste it uh corresponds molecularly on your with
Speaker 1: your taste buds on the tongue because of the shape
Speaker 1: of the molecule. We talked about that the molecules are
Speaker 1: shaped to fit. You know, when sugar hits it, it
Speaker 1: matches up perfectly with that molecule and sends a message said, hey,
Speaker 1: there's something sweet as opposed to salty or bitter or
Speaker 1: sour or umami. Five? Right, this is four, and then
Speaker 1: names five, which I thought was I even changed it
Speaker 1: on my sheet. Um And they recommend something that I
Speaker 1: do not recommend, which is, if something tastes sweet in
Speaker 1: the wild, it's more likely to be safe to eat
Speaker 1: than something bitter. Sort of true. But you should never
Speaker 1: ever go and like in a survival scenario and just
Speaker 1: try and eat something even a little bit. Um. There's
Speaker 1: a test you can do which I won't get into,
Speaker 1: but it involves like rubbing on your skin first, waiting
Speaker 1: a certain amount of time. They may be touching it
Speaker 1: to your tongue, waiting a certain amount of time. But
Speaker 1: you should never just go like, I wonder if this
Speaker 1: is edible, let me taste it? Right, It's not a
Speaker 1: good idea good going even if it is sweet. You're
Speaker 1: a survivalist. I know some things. So you know. We
Speaker 1: said sugar is found in all plants, just to varying degrees.
Speaker 1: Um And plants create sugar is a byproduct of photosynthesis,
Speaker 1: and they use it for energy for growth. They also
Speaker 1: use it to they take sugars and turn them into
Speaker 1: more complex sugars to use for like um cellular structure
Speaker 1: like cellulose um. But they also use sugar in their
Speaker 1: nectar to tract bees and other things to help them pollinate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and propagate their species because it's sweet stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love it when I see the little bee getting
Speaker 1: in there getting a little something sweet. Yeah. I feel
Speaker 1: like they're getting a little treat, you know, that's right,
Speaker 1: And then they're vomiting it up and we eat it
Speaker 1: as honey. That's true. Uh, sugar is bad for your teeth.
Speaker 1: Everyone knows that. Um. Specifically, when you eat sugar, it's
Speaker 1: gonna form something called a glyco protein, that little sweater
Speaker 1: on your teeth. And bacteria love to eat that stuff
Speaker 1: and then they love to poop out lactic acid afterwards,
Speaker 1: unto your teeth. Yes, specifically, stripped a caucus mutans. That's
Speaker 1: the culprit for cavities. Really, we've said stripped a caucus before,
Speaker 1: and that's not a good word. No, But there's different
Speaker 1: kinds of strap okay, um, But when they poop out
Speaker 1: that lactic acid, that's what's on your enamel, that's what's
Speaker 1: gonna wear it on your teeth. So eating sugary stuff
Speaker 1: really is bad for your teeth. That's not like something
Speaker 1: your mom tells you. That's a lie. And the bacteria
Speaker 1: also provided or produces a biofilm around all of this
Speaker 1: stuff which traps it in there and traps in the
Speaker 1: lactic acid as well. So you're in trouble. Yeah you're dead,
Speaker 1: not dead, but you make it diabetes. Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: get diabetes UM from too much sugar and that that
Speaker 1: apparently is um. It's crazy that there's a real parallel
Speaker 1: between the six country study in the seven country study
Speaker 1: that we talked about. In the Paleo diet episode of fats,
Speaker 1: apparently there was a rival all along that said it's
Speaker 1: not fat, it's sugar. Like we're both after the same problem.
Speaker 1: But this guy went after fats, this other guy went
Speaker 1: after sugar. And now they're starting to think, like now
Speaker 1: that they're thinking it's not fats after all that contributed
Speaker 1: to like heart disease and obesity that they think is
Speaker 1: actually sugar. And the the way that it's sugar is
Speaker 1: through something called metabolic syndrome, to where if you eat
Speaker 1: too much sugar, your body becomes resistant to insulin. And
Speaker 1: remember insulin gets glucose out of the blood stream and
Speaker 1: into your cells and is converted to energy. Well, if
Speaker 1: your body starts sucking at doing that, then you have
Speaker 1: a lot more glucose in your blood stream, which means
Speaker 1: your pancreases producing more and more insulin. Insulin remember, triggers
Speaker 1: fat storage, so you have more and more insulin, you
Speaker 1: have more and more fat storage, You have obesity, you
Speaker 1: have heart disease, and they think that possibly the number
Speaker 1: one contributor to heart attacks is metabolic syndrome and not
Speaker 1: necessarily saturated fats. Right. Interesting, But as a result of
Speaker 1: this aside result is insulin, you develop your diabetes. Type
Speaker 1: two diabetes is the result of insulin resistance where you
Speaker 1: have to inject insulin into your body because your body
Speaker 1: is not producing enough any longer because it's overtaxed your pancreases. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we got a lot of great responses from the Paleo episode.
Speaker 1: It was a really interesting one. Yeah, and people saying, like, dudes,
Speaker 1: we know so little still about nutrition and things are
Speaker 1: changing so much with the things we eat and put
Speaker 1: in our body that it's hard to keep up, which
Speaker 1: is why it's so insulting when some industry that has
Speaker 1: a vested interest in so they got all figured out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and don't worry about it, just keep eating it. You
Speaker 1: know that that's that's insulting. All right? Can sugar power
Speaker 1: your car? Yes? How I'll explain. There's a couple of ways. Um,
Speaker 1: So there's sugar based ethanol, which Brazil was basically running
Speaker 1: on for many years. I didn't realize that they're big
Speaker 1: into flex fuels and ethanol. They were basically energy independent
Speaker 1: in the first decade of the twenty one century because
Speaker 1: they said, we're tired of being dependent on foreign oil. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's figure something out. And they did. They put all
Speaker 1: they Yeah, they started looking into sugarcane, making ethanol from sugarcane,
Speaker 1: and you know there's like corn based ethanol, which um,
Speaker 1: Chris Pallette and I talked about in the Grass Lena episode,
Speaker 1: remember that. And apparently ethanol made from sugarcane as eight
Speaker 1: hundred times more energy output, and so they were making
Speaker 1: ethanol in it. In two thousand eight of the fuel
Speaker 1: sold in Brazil was ethanol. That's awesome, made from sugarcane
Speaker 1: right there in the country. Well then gas prices lowered
Speaker 1: and um people started using gas again because they'll use
Speaker 1: whatever's cheapest. But Brazil, even though it's on its heels,
Speaker 1: the ethanol industry there is they proved it's a completely
Speaker 1: viable alternative fuel. Yeah. The problem though, again with UM
Speaker 1: refining more and more sugar for these purposes is the
Speaker 1: deforestation and worker wages. And I feel like anytime we've
Speaker 1: covered any commodity like this, there's some workers somewhere in
Speaker 1: the world getting screwed over, and sugar is definitely not
Speaker 1: any stranger in that process. Well. Also, it drives up
Speaker 1: food prices too, yeah, um, because if if there's two
Speaker 1: different huge sectors competing for the same commodity like there,
Speaker 1: it's going to drive the price of that commodity up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. So if you have energy and food right
Speaker 1: going after sugar prices, sugar goes up. Right. I wish
Speaker 1: people could have seen that demonstration. It really brings it home. Uh.
Speaker 1: And what else is the other I remember I think
Speaker 1: we talked about this too, Uh, sugar devouring microorganisms basically
Speaker 1: feeding on sugar and making energy in the process. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a like viable, viable way in the future, maybe
Speaker 1: to power things. Yeah, so there's a certain certain types
Speaker 1: of microbes are more sugar hungry than others. But yeah,
Speaker 1: when they're eating sugar, they managed to separate electrons and
Speaker 1: loosen loosen electrons, and as the electrons flow, as we
Speaker 1: mentioned in our electricity episode, the flow of electrons is electricity.
Speaker 1: So if you direct that flow across like some something
Speaker 1: that can use it, you create a current. And the
Speaker 1: cool thing about microbial fuel cells is when that electron
Speaker 1: makes it to the other side, it um combines to
Speaker 1: form water. So that's the byproduct like this, so it
Speaker 1: it truly is a very um environmentally friendly alternative fuel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did. We covered that at some point too. I remember,
Speaker 1: it's our world is getting smaller because we're explaining it.
Speaker 1: That's right. You got anything else? No, I don't think so, mother, liquor,
Speaker 1: BA gas, all these words I made up just for
Speaker 1: the show. You did good with the making up the words, man, Thanks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't have anything else, chuck um. But if you
Speaker 1: want to learn more about sugar, I'm sure there's some
Speaker 1: words we left out of this article. You can type
Speaker 1: sugar into the search bar at how stuff works dot com. Um,
Speaker 1: and uh, since I said search parts time for a
Speaker 1: listener mail, I'm gonna call this refuting listener mail. We
Speaker 1: read a listener mail from a creationist not too long ago,
Speaker 1: man that got a certain response from some quarters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so then a lot of people right and responding to
Speaker 1: that listener mail. So we might just continue this for
Speaker 1: the next year just reading rebuttals. H. Hey, guys, you
Speaker 1: received an email from a creation that's explaining that both
Speaker 1: creationists and scientists believe in natural selection, and that both
Speaker 1: groups believe in micro evolution but disagree on macro evolution.
Speaker 1: What the person did not mention is that macro and
Speaker 1: micro evolution describe the same process of natural selection, just
Speaker 1: on different timetables. Uh. Micro a short term, macros long term.
Speaker 1: It simply does not make sense that natural selection works
Speaker 1: on the short term, but it's somehow reversed on the
Speaker 1: long term. Natural selection introduces changes to a population subgroup
Speaker 1: as they adapt to their environment, but the changes are
Speaker 1: small the population subgroup can naturally breed with the original population.
Speaker 1: That is micro revolution. Once it changes are significant enough
Speaker 1: that the subgroup can no longer naturally and successfully breed
Speaker 1: with the parent population. The subgroup is considered a new species,
Speaker 1: that's a special event, that it's macro evolution. To believe
Speaker 1: in micro and not macro is to ignore how nature works.
Speaker 1: Say you put two separate populations of the same species
Speaker 1: put in very different environments. Each population would slowly adapt
Speaker 1: to its new environment and change over time micro evolution,
Speaker 1: each group will become better adapted to its new environment,
Speaker 1: and the differences between the two groups will only grow
Speaker 1: in time. However, if you don't believe in macro revolution,
Speaker 1: you don't believe in new species. So you have to
Speaker 1: believe that no matter how different each group becomes, nature
Speaker 1: does not work like this. Also, the previous writer claimed
Speaker 1: to be a creationist botanist, and that is like a
Speaker 1: doctor that does not believe in germ theory. I'm sure
Speaker 1: they might exist, but I would definitely take their expertise
Speaker 1: with a large dose of salt. Quite a rebuttal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I didn't have a name. I feel bad, so
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm gonna say thanks you, thanks Richard Dawkins.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. So the evolutionists have rebutted, what say
Speaker 1: you creationists? Let us know, and everybody stopped tweeting and
Speaker 1: sending emails about how dare we put a creationists views
Speaker 1: on and listener mail? Yeah. Yeah, it's no way to
Speaker 1: go through life trying to silence your opponents. Yeah, your
Speaker 1: debate and engage. I was surprised there were a lot
Speaker 1: of people that said you shouldn't give equal time to
Speaker 1: this stuff because it's just not true. Yeah. Somebody said, Um,
Speaker 1: I thought discovery stood for something interesting. Yeah, well, hey,
Speaker 1: I think debate is healthy and they think you're not
Speaker 1: right either, So like you know, yep, debate is healthy.
Speaker 1: Chuck exactly. Um. If not, Bill and I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: done it, boom. If you want to contribute to the debate,
Speaker 1: we want to hear from you. You can tweet to
Speaker 1: us at s y s K podcast. You can join
Speaker 1: us on Facebook dot com, slash Stuff you Should Know,
Speaker 1: send us an email to stuff podcast at how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com, and as always, check us out at
Speaker 1: our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
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