Original subtitles

[narrator] The story of humans is really a story of extraction.

Take copper, which we learned to mine and hammer into plows and tools,

and mix with tin to make bronze.

Or coal and petroleum,

which allowed us to tame fire.

But in order to shape the world,

first we needed to survive it,

and for that, the most precious resource was this.

Sugar,

the closest thing we have to pure energy.

Think of our ancestors. They were hunters and gatherers.

And for them, sugar was one of the fastest sources of energy.

So we evolved to crave sugar and, when we found it, to eat it.

[narrator] But they weren't eating sugar like this.

It was just found in other foods.

Fruits and vegetables, and tough stalks of sugarcane.

It was over a thousand years ago that some enterprising humans

learned to extract the sugar out of the sugarcane,

evaporate it, crystallize it.

[narrator] And turn it into an ingredient that you could add to anything.

And we did.

[Long] Now we could get the white stuff straight up whenever we wanted.

Problem was,

we still had the Neanderthal brain and Neanderthal body

now living in a tech 2.0, sugar 5.0 environment.

And our bodies and brains can't keep up with that.

[narrator] The calories that were once vital to our survival

are now a public health menace.

[reporter] Sugar is responsible for the high rates of obesity,

diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and should be regulated.

Sugary drink consumption

is a key driver of the obesity epidemic in the United States.

Sugar is addictive.

We're literally poisoning ourselves with sugar.

[narrator] So scientists have been on a quest

to create something that can do what sugar does.

Give us that sweetness and pleasure,

but without all the calories we no longer need.

We sometimes forget that sugar is not just sweetness.

Sugar is energy.

Sugar is happiness.

Sugar is mouthfeel.

Sugar is many, many things in food

and replacing it…

I mean, can you replace the heart?

[narrator] So can we satisfy our deep, ancient craving for sugar

without harming ourselves?

Can we actually have our cake and eat it too?

[man 1] It's coated with golden sugar.

[boy 1] Too good for leprechauns.

[boy 2] Silly rabbit. Trix are for kids.

[man 2] Sugar doesn’t have any nutritional value whatsoever.

I'd argue that you couldn’t even call it a nutrient.

[man 3] Some sugar is converted into fat.

[man 4] He shouldn’t let candy and sweets substitute for other foods.

My tummy wants some yummy.

[Russell] These are sugar sculptures.

Elaborate scenes constructed entirely of sugar,

sometimes over 20 feet high,

displayed at medieval royal banquets.

They were known as subtleties,

because they were a subtle statement of wealth and power.

But it wasn't that subtle.

Sugar was really expensive and rare.

That all changed about 150 to 200 years ago,

when we started being able to distill beet sugar and cane sugar

into very highly processed, highly concentrated sugar.

[Russell] It was no longer a symbol of power.

Sugar was an energy food for health and strength.

Physicians excitedly reported on its unexpected stimulating properties.

Fashionable ladies were encouraged to sip sugary cordials,

the only healthy beverage that can be safely taken after cycling.

And soldiers marveled that it acted like a charm,

relieving fatigue and quenching thirst.

Nobody was looking for something to replace sugar.

It happened entirely by accident.

One evening in 1878,

a research chemist sat down for dinner,

bit into a bread roll, and tasted something sweet.

It wasn't the bread.

It was his fingers.

He'd spilled a solution all over his hands earlier that day.

It was a coal tar derivative, which we now know as saccharin,

300 times sweeter than sugar and zero calories,

which would end up filling those pink packets of Sweet'N Low.

At the time, though, its biggest customers

were diabetics and canners looking for a cheap preservative.

But then, Americans' consumption of sugar started shooting up.

It dipped during the world wars when sugar was rationed,

but quickly recovered.

And Americans' waistlines shot up too,

as did the number of heart attacks.

By the 1960s,

heart disease was responsible for a third of all American deaths.

Doctors started suspecting that sugar might play a role,

and lots of Americans were looking to cut back.

Fortunately, lab safety still wasn’t that great,

so scientists continued to stumble upon new substances that could replace it.

In the 1930s, a drug researcher on a smoke break

happened to taste his fingers and discovered cyclamate,

less sweet than saccharin, but still sweeter than sugar,

which gave us the first no-calorie soda.

[announcer] Yes, there's a party in every bottle of No-Cal,

the first, the finest sugar-free soft drink.

[Russell] Then, in the 1960s,

another drug researcher licked his fingers and tasted something sweet.

[interviewer] Does that happen a lot?

Do scientists just forget to wash their hands and lick them?

[laughs] Not anymore.

[Russell] But thanks to that guy,

we got aspartame, roughly the same calories as sugar,

but 200 times sweeter, so you needed much less.

And then, in the 1970s,

a scientist was working on a compound of sugar and chlorine,

and was reportedly asked to test it.

He misheard and tasted it instead.

The researcher survived, and we got sucralose.

Zero calories, unbelievably sweet,

and marketed as the ultimate substitute.

[man] Splenda brand sweetener.

You can say sugar or you can say Splenda.

[Russell] Artificial sweeteners seemed like a magic trick.

Thanks to the wonders of chemistry…

[woman] You can enjoy all these sweet sensations

without all the calories.

[Russell] Guilt-free pleasure.

[man] Sounds just too good to be true.

[Russell] For many, that did indeed sound too good to be true.

In a couple studies in the '60s and '70s,

they gave rats bladder tumors,

leading to a panic that these sweeteners caused cancer.

The US banned cyclamate,

put a pause on approving aspartame,

and made saccharin products add a warning label

saying it may be hazardous to your health.

To many, sugar seemed like a safer option.

And the sugar industry had done a lot of damage control,

claiming sugar was actually a diet food,

the smart way to stay slim and trim.

Anytime you were tempted to overeat,

sugar could instantly curb your appetite

because it was only 18 calories a teaspoon

and all energy.

This Domino ad even claimed that three spoonfuls of sugar

was less fattening than an apple.

But while it might have fewer calories, not all calories are created equal.

When you eat an apple, your blood sugar levels rise gently.

[Long] You get the sugar, but you also get it

with fiber and water, and a whole host of macronutrients.

[Russell] Which takes a while to digest.

But pure sugar is more instant energy, followed by a crash,

so you can actually feel hungrier than you did before.

And if you eat more and more,

all that instant energy can start to strain your body.

That means your insulin responds by staying chronically elevated as well.

[Russell] Insulin is the hormone that tells your body what to do with sugar,

unlocking your cells so they can use it as energy.

And if they have enough, you store the energy for later as fat.

But if insulin is constantly pumping through your body,

your cells start becoming resistant to it and eventually…

The pancreas is pumping out lots and lots of insulin,

but the insulin's not working.

That's when you get the type 2 diabetes.

[Russell] Your cells can't get the fuel they need.

Unfortunately, this high insulin level

is still working at some of the other jobs insulin is supposed to do.

And one of those is fat-making.

[Russell] So it's easier to gain weight and harder to lose it,

and your blood sugar also builds up,

which can damage parts of your body, like your heart.

Back in the '60s and '70s, that wasn't well-known.

We were getting a lot of mixed messages on sugar,

but we got one message very clearly.

The culprit behind our scourge of heart disease was saturated fat.

The food industry responded

with all kinds of products labeled "fat-free"

or "heart healthy."

But when you take out fat, you lose flavor.

So, in many cases,

companies added sugar in its place.

But artificial sweeteners were also recovering their reputation.

Study after study after study

hadn't found any evidence that they cause cancer in humans.

The rats in those earlier studies?

They were given the equivalent of hundreds of cans of diet soda a day.

And also…

Rats and mice aren't humans.

[Russell] When Coca-Cola released an aspartame-based soda in 1983,

it was a landmark event.

[man] The world premiere of Diet Coke.

♪ You’re gonna drink it Just for the taste of it ♪

[Russell] Within a decade, aspartame had replaced over a billion pounds of sugar

in foods and drinks in the US.

But artificial sweeteners weren't replacing sugar in our diet.

They were largely an excuse to eat more of it,

and we'd figured out even cheaper ways to make it,

like out of corn.

Sugar is now added to three-quarters of packaged foods in the US,

going by more than 60 different names.

[Long] Dextrose, fructose, sucrose,

high-fructose corn syrup. Anything that ends with “ose” is a form of sugar.

Or one of my favorite euphemisms for sugar,

evaporated cane juice.

[Russell] There was no chance artificial sweeteners

were going to replace sugar in all these foods.

I think anybody who has tried an artificial sweetener

knows that we're not really fooled by them.

They don't taste exactly like sugar.

No, I don't like the way that fake sugar,

you know, leaves that taste in your mouth.

-How bad is it? -Sweetened chemically.

Super sweet that your mouth can’t really handle it.

[man] I'm not a fan of artificial sweeteners.

I’ve had saccharin before in sodas and chewing gum.

It makes my mouth chalky and dry, and needing to drink more water.

[Russell] Pichet Ong has spent his career trying to make desserts with less sugar,

without ever compromising on taste.

When I was consuming the ones with aspartame,

it also had a similar effect to me.

It’s not quite, you know, natural tasting.

[Russell] A big part of how sugar tastes is time.

The time it takes for the sweetness to peak after you take a bite,

how long it lingers, and how fast it declines.

It's called temporal sweetness profile.

This is how it looks for sugar.

It peaks really fast and disappears really fast.

And this is how it looks for sucralose.

The sweet taste comes on slower

and takes its sweet time leaving.

Aspartame hits even later and loiters even longer.

The difference is fractions of a second,

but for our taste buds, that's an eternity.

And sugar is about more than just sweetness.

It makes icing glisten

and cakes moist and fluffy.

[Baniel] If you take all the sugar out of a cake,

the cake would come out like a pita bread.

So the challenges are huge.

The one sweetener that's worked for me in many recipes is stevia.

[Russell] Stevia is a natural calorie-free sweetener.

It comes from a South American plant, and it can make a decent pudding.

But the sweetness comes on even later than artificial sweeteners

and overstays its welcome, revealing itself as fake.

There is one sweetener that tastes uncannily like sugar,

just a little less intense.

Allulose, the rising star of sugar substitutes.

Technically, it's a sugar,

a rare kind found in tiny amounts in foods like figs and raisins,

but it doesn't act like sugar in our bodies.

We can't fully break it down, which makes it nearly calorie-free.

It performs well in the kitchen,

and early studies suggest it's safe.

But only a few producers make it. Most countries haven't approved it yet.

And it's priced like gourmet health food.

And none of these sweeteners, even allulose,

can replace the most magical thing about sugar.

[Long] So sugar acts in the same part of your brain as sex and addictive drugs.

The reward zone of your brain.

So you eat sugar, you've released dopamine, you feel happier.

[Russell] It isn't just hunger that drives us to eat sugar.

It's desire.

That's why, even when we're full,

we still perk up when someone offers us dessert.

[Baniel] Isn't that funny?

We have a special space

for the indulgent taste

at the end of a meal.

[Russell] One study found that the reward zones of our brain

only get activated when sweetness comes with calories.

If you want the pleasure, you have to pay for it.

The bitter truth is we can't mimic sugar,

just leaving out the parts we don't like.

So some people are taking a different approach,

trying to reinvent the sugar crystal itself.

In 2013, at age 95,

Professor Avraham Baniel was reflecting back on his life.

He'd been an industrial chemist and worked on many things over his long career.

Extracting copper from desert sand,

minerals from the Dead Sea,

fertilizers, biofuels,

carpet fiber, citric acid,

and a long stint as a professor.

And he remembered something that happened a long time ago

when he was a young man just starting out.

The world was at war,

and sugar was severely rationed.

There was no sugar, or hardly any sugar, to be had.

[Russell] Professor Baniel is Eran’s father.

At the time, he was working near Haifa, helping the war effort by making bombs.

One day, he got a strange visit from a friend's wife,

who asked if he could get her some starch.

[Baniel] My father said, "Why do you want starch?"

[Russell] It was a trick she knew.

If you made a sticky pudding out of starch

and then added whatever little sugar you have,

it would magically taste sweeter,

as if it had a lot more sugar in it.

[Baniel] So my father thought,

"Funny. I must remember that."

And, of course, he forgot all about it.

[Russell] Until that fateful day in 2013,

when it hit him like a revelation.

So my father said, "The only way to cut sugar

is by using sugar in a different way."

[Russell] You see, sugar has a dirty secret.

You don't actually taste most of it.

When you take a bite of cake,

the sugar crystals dissolve in your mouth,

and the sugar molecules go all over the place.

Only a fraction of them ever touch your taste buds.

The rest? You just swallow it.

It goes where you don't want it.

[Russell] The reason starch made pudding taste sweeter

is that it coats your tongue and makes it stickier,

so more of the sugar hits your taste buds.

Eran's dad thought he had a more efficient solution,

embedding something into the sugar crystal itself,

which would act like…

[Baniel] A sponge for the sugar molecules.

[Russell] Soaking them up and creating a new kind of crystal

containing giant clumps of sugar molecules.

So when you take a bite, and the crystals dissolve,

more of those molecules have a chance to reach our sweet receptors.

Eran was so convinced by his dad's idea,

he started a company.

DouxMatok.

"Doux" is "sweet" in French,

and "matok" is "sweet" in Hebrew.

And "du" also means "double" in Hebrew.

[Baniel] So "sweet sweet" or "double sweet."

[Russell] They discovered that silica,

a common food additive, was a great sponge.

And the result was Incredo,

nearly 100% sugar,

but because we taste more of it, we don't need to eat as much.

It's got a lot of people excited.

Time named it one of the best inventions of 2020.

But it has its limitations,

namely water.

With Incredo, the sugar and the silica break apart as soon as they get wet.

[Baniel] Boom! The couple is broken.

Sugar on one side, carrier on the other side.

The miracle is gone.

[Russell] Our bodies evolved for this compound

in ways that are hard to trick or hack,

and that we still don't fully understand.

But we keep learning more about sugar,

and some common assumptions are due for another update.

In the 2000s,

high-fructose corn syrup was considered the most evil of sugars.

It's been called "the Devil's candy,"

a "sinister invention," and "the crack of sweeteners."

But a lot of high-fructose corn syrup

is basically the same molecular structure as sugar.

No better, no worse.

Things like agave nectar and honey

are widely seen as healthier alternatives to sugar, but…

The truth is, whether it's fructose, sucrose, glucose, or the other forms,

your body sees it as sugar.

[Russell] Brown sugar has some trace nutrients that white doesn't,

but we're talking really trace.

Raw sugar isn't better for you, either.

It's not even really raw,

just slightly less refined.

And to be clear,

artificial sweeteners won't give you cancer.

By the early 2000s,

saccharin products were no longer required to carry a warning label.

Compared to a sugar-sweetened beverage,

an aspartame-sweetened beverage

is a much safer,

healthier choice.

And I

will probably go to my grave saying that.

[Russell] But recent studies also suggest

that artificial sweeteners aren't a great way to lose weight,

possibly because they change the composition of bacteria in our guts.

The taste of sweet never comes for free,

but there is some good news.

Sugar actually isn't as bad for us as we may have been led to believe.

You may have heard that sugar makes kids hyper,

but that idea was based on pretty weak data.

Later studies couldn't find any evidence

that sugar affects kids' behavior or cognitive function.

Very often these days,

someone will say,

“Sugar is the new tobacco,

and we should banish it.”

[Russell] You may have heard that sugar's wildly addictive.

The science is coming in now where we know

that sugar is more addictive than cocaine.

Eight times more addictive than cocaine.

Addictive like heroin, rock cocaine.

[Russell] But that evidence, once again, comes from mice studies.

If you had to pick between sugar withdrawal

and cocaine withdrawal,

definitely pick sugar.

[Stanhope] Clearly, there's a greater level

of addiction

and physiological effect with cocaine compared to the sugar.

[Long] As I always say, "Sugar isn't poison."

"The dose makes the poison."

A little bit of sugar is not the problem.

It is the large, constant, chronic quantities that create the problem.

[Russell] In the US,

sugar consumption has actually been going down for the past two decades.

But fast food and junk food consumption is not going down.

[Russell] So obesity rates keep trending upwards.

People are still eating

horrifyingly little amounts of fresh fruit and vegetable,

whole grains, beans.

Nobody eats beans.

[Russell] We may never be able to have our cake and eat it too.

That's just not how cakes work.

But we're getting closer to making healthier cakes.

On November 27th, 2020,

Eran's father celebrated his 102nd birthday.

He's eating a brownie.

The sugar was 35% reduced.

I mean, he loved it.

He was really beside himself with happiness.

Mazel tov!

[Russell] We should all be aiming for a more balanced diet

without too much sugar.

But declaring war on a single ingredient

is a recipe for defeat.

You're not going to stick to any diet that makes you miserable.

Dark chocolate, especially dark chocolate bars with nuts in them.

That, without a doubt, is my most favorite.

[Ong] It makes me feel energetic and happy.

When I go to bed at night,

I will be thinking I can't wait to wake up and have some dessert.

We need to cut the overconsumption of sugar.

Absolutely.

But the overconsumption,

not the essential consumption of sugar.