WHITE SUGAR OR BROWN?

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22354, 18 March 1938, Page 8

WHITE SUGAR OR BROWN?

TO THE EDITOR OR THE PRESS. Sir, —Not long ago a correspondent desired to know which is the more acid-forming, white sugar or brown. Reference to the texts available having failed to make the point as clear as seemed desirable, it was referred to the Dominidh Analyst at Wellington. He has been kind enough to send a lengthy and well-considered reply, in which he details the several steps of the process through which the syrup of the sugar-cane goes on its way from the plantation to the consumer’s table. He sums up thus: “With regard to vitamins, I would expect any present in the raw cane and extracted with the juice to remain with the crude molasses in the first treatment in the mill near the plantation, and not to crystallise out with the raw sugar. Any refined sugar, treacle, or molasses prepared in a refinery from raw sugar would therefore not contain vitamins.”

This is confirmed by an American authority, Otto Carque. In his “Rational Diet.” he states that refined sugar is injurious because “artificially extracted and separated from those organic combinations which are necessary for the building up of tissues and bones, for the proper functioning of the nervous system, and the purification of the blood. Without a constant renewal of the elements of iron and sodium, the blood cannot take up sufficient oxygen, and the products of combustion cannot be neutralised and eliminated. The blood stream is overloaded with waste products, causing sluggishness and general drowsiness, the symptoms of carbonic acid poisoning.” In like manner, he goes on to explain, is caused “a large number of diseases of the digestive organs, The liver and kidneys are severely affected by the increased formation of toxic substances, and the

accumulation of acids in the blood causes a catarrhal condition of all the mucous membranes.” , „ At the same door Dr. Axel Emil Gibson lays a goodly share of the responsibility for goitre, so prevalent, yet so mysterious to our own pundits. Carque affirms that the best method of retaining all the valuable constituents is to condense the natural juice of the sugar cane in vacuum pans at a low temperature—a process that differs completely from the one used by commerce. In his analysis of raw sugar, he gives the average quantity of mineral matter as less than 1 per cent.—approximately one-third of the amount of the organic mineral matter in the cane, and altogether too little to offset the acid-forming properties of the 95 per cent, carbohydrates. In the cane, the carbohydrates constitute but little more than 20 per cent, of the total. Since, however, white sugar is, practically, a pure carbohydrate, the conclusion would appear justified that the refined article is more strongly acid-forming than the raw brown product, but that the balance in favour of the brown is so slight that it must go hand-in-hand with its anaemic associate as an agreeable palate-tickler but a seriously deficient foodstuff—Yours, etc., MacG. WALMSLEY. Timaru, March 15, 1938.