Today, everything that tastes sweet gets associated with sugar. In it's original meaning sugar is an term for a sort of edible crystalline substances (for example sucrose, fructose and lactose) with a sweet flavor. The sugar everybody knows mainly refers to sucrose.
The main sources of our most popular sweetener are sugarcane and the sugar-beet. Both of them contain the sucrose in it's direct form and can be extracted with cooking and pressing in water. Sugarcane can be found mainly on the southern continents while sugar-beet can also grow in most cases in middle Europe. Brazil and India are by far the strongest producers of sugar, they produced in 2005 24.8 and 22.1 million tons while China came on place 3 with just 11.1 million tons.
One fact that helped sugar to become so important is, that it is a regrowing easy accessible resource. This opened the doors to start producing sugar industrially. In 1800 developed Franz Karl Achard a technique which lead in 1825 to the starting of the beet sugar industry.
Before this, sugar hasn't been used in such masses as today. It was a luxury ware, so honey was used more often for sweetening. In regards to a healthy alimentation, this times were better than today, at least if you base this conclusion on the sugar consume.
This high consume of the sweet crystalline generated or showed new illnesses like diabetes, tooth decay and obesity. Beside chocolate and other sweets, the main problem are over sweetened beverages like cola or way too sweet fruit concentrates. On liter cola can contain about 120 gram sugar, are 40 sugar-cubes. Studies in Austria showed that in 1997 the average citizen consumed 40,4 kilogram pure sugar per year. That's 20 times more than about 150 years ago. In the 13 years from 1997 until now it has increased again.
If you like to decrease your sugar consume you've got different possibilities today. There are artificial sweeteners like aspartame that have much stronger sweetening effects than sugar. Cola light for example contains almost zero sugar but is still as sweet as normal cola. The problem is that there are many concerns about artificial sweeteners. The human body thinks it's getting sugar and starts the sugar balancing system of the body, but as we know there is no real sugar.
Another alternative is honey. It has also a little bit stronger sweetening effect and is healthier than pure sugar, but it's not best solution for every beverage or meal.
A relatively unknown sweetener is Stevia. It's a plant which is in extracted form 300 times as sweet as sugar. It seems to have no such negative effects like the artificial sweeteners but there are still not enough studies to really say if it's totally save (that's at least what some "important" people say). So it's forbidden in the European Union as a food additive and in the USA it's also just allowed in diet foods. But you already can purchase Stevia as beauty products and use it for drinks and cooking. Maybe this will be the main alternative to sugar in the future.
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For more information on Stevia visit: Side Effects of Stevia or Splenda Sweeteners Side Effects
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