HEALTH HINTS.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 147, 22 June 1901, Page 2 (Supplement)

HEALTH HINTS.

SUGAR AND ITS SUBSTITUTES

(By Dr. Andrew Wilson.)

Substitutes for sugar are made from poal tar products, and are represented by saccharin and saxin. Each of these substances is many thousand times sweeter than sugar, and doctors prescribe them to patients —to gouty people, for instance—to whom ordinary sugar is apt to prove unsuitable. I have never heard of either substance proving injurious to consumers thereof. The whole topic of sugar in Telation to the body's nutrition is an interesting one. In the first place, sugars and starches are chemically very similar, and all the starch and fat has to be converted into sugar before it can be utilised in the body's processes. There are, of course, various kinds of sugar, ranging from ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar (the one is very different as a food from the other, the latter being inferior to cane sugar), to glucose, milk sugar, malt sugar,, honey sugar, and the like. ! Now in the course of digestion and assimilation the sugars when used up are converted into carbonic gas and water, which we give off aspart of our bodily waste, and the profit we get out of this transaction is the production of heat and energy, or the "power of doing work. Sugar is not, therefore, a body building food. It is rather a work of power-producing material like fat, though it is inferior to fat in Jhis respect. Sugars may be converted into fat, a work in which the liver plays the important part, so that, incidentally, it may contribute to the body substance, and it does so, in a very marked degree when taken in excess. The balance of evidence seems all in favour of sugar being a muscle food of great value. We might infer this also from the evidence afforded by certain nations in the matter of their food. Arabs and negroes, for example, are great consumers of sugar, and in the diet of many other people it bulks very largely. In Paris they are even feeding their horses on sugar, or rather, adding sugar to the dietary of the animals, with excellent effects.

SUGAR AS A FOOD.

The advocates of sugar as food will point to the physique of the nation ffis an evidence that the use of, sugar is advantageous, and no doubt the craving of the child for sweets is part and parcel of Nature's teaching, as Mr Spencer long ago pointed out. The child will not eat fat, and sugar is the only other food that will supply energy to the body in & ready foshion.s

Rheumatic people are" recommended to leave sugar alone for fear of its developing acids which are apt to be injurious to them. Some physicians, however, do not deny sugar to rheumatic people. Gouty persons, however, are forbidden sugar; but I observe one physician at least maintains that while gouty subjects who are fat should not take sugar, those who are thin may do so. The end of the story is that sugar is a very valuable food on the whole, and that its alleged injurious properties are to be limited to those cases in which there is gouty disease, diabetes, or other conditions in which it is inadmissible.

As for tooth decay, the opinion, I think, is correct that it is not pure sugar itself that causes tooth decay, but the impurities with which sweets are often loaded. Those negroes who live largely on sugar have the finest teeth in the world, and for that matter of it, tooth decay is^an ailment that has often to be referred back to our forefathers for its causation, rather than to be laid to the credit of the food we ourselves consume.