If cane sugar is the worst “natural” sweetener, why was diabetes so rare before the sudden increase of diabetes in the 20th century?

Question

I know around the middle of the 20th century vegetable oils, synthetic sweetener became a thing. But statistic wise doesn’t make sense, even if before it caused tooth problems, but not diabetes.

In: Biology

Answer 1

There is nothing particularly different between beet sugar and cane sugar, the two most widely used crops for producing table sugar. They’re mostly just pure sucrose. Of course, in modern times both are now widely available and low cost. This has, understandably, led to a bit of overuse and therefore overconsumption. Humans are predisposed to “like” the taste of sugar since it is the basic nutrient that provides energy either in the form of starches or sugar.

Of course, there is a rather more cynical interpretation of the marketing and so called research. When Europeans owned slaves and cane plantations, nothing bad is said about cane sugar. Sugar beets are temperate climate crops and grown in Europe and the US. Not very surprisingly, there is not going to be a lot of research money or government support to highlight the dangers of beet sugar as that would be politically troublesome to the local (voting) farmers.