Excessive sugar Excessive sugar can cause obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease. Kids will tend to eat what they’re given especially in school which tends to be lots of sugar. Sedentary lifestyles are a problem too. We watch too much TV (because we’ve eaten too much sugar) and don’t get enough exercise (because excessive sugar has sapped our energy!) Brutal history of sugar and the Cult of Sugar Sugar cane was first farmed about 10,000 years ago in New Guinea. It was thought to be a kind of elixir, a cure for every ill. Some New Guinea myths depicted the sugar cane as the mother of the human race. Sugar refinement became a highly skilled art practiced by masters and taught to apprentices. When Arab armies invaded Persia they adopted the art and it spread: “Sugar followed the Koran.” Sugar was worshipped. The work involved was brutal and captured enemy slaves were put to work in the fields and mills. It is possible that we Europeans first discovered sugar during the Crusades. In the beginning only rich Europeans ate it; it was considered a delicacy much like caviar today. The explorations and discoveries we learn about in school today were motivated by producing sugar cane and finding colonies to grow it with a readily available slave population. Henry the Navigator and Columbus brought cane to newly discovered lands. The age of Big Sugar had dawned. Slave revolts in Hispaniola were linked to the sugar trade; Portugal used Brazilian slave labour to produce sugar –  and profits. Greater availability decreased prices and the poor started to consume sugar as well as the rich. Ever since, sugar-rich products have been cheap and so attractive. Agricultural exploitation led to environmental degradation in places like Barbados; some...