Roman Meal is ‘cheap junk’? I love that stuff… is that really what most people think of it?
All three are basically the same as far as nutrition goes. Use what tastes best for you.
Sugar’s actually remarkably un-processed.
First, they take the cane (or beets) and get the sugary juice out.
They treat the juice with chalk (calcium carbonate) to precipitate out the dirt and crud.
They then evaporate the juice into crystals.
At this point, it’s raw sugar. (demerara sugar)
When they refine it into white sugar, they hit it with chalk again, centrifuge it, and filter it through activated carbon to decolorize it.
At this point, it’s regular white sugar.
The by-product of the refining process is molasses.
White sugar coated with molasses is brown sugar in the US.
The sugars are indeed nutritionally equivalent- you don’t get enough molasses in any of them to make much difference. Of course you can buy molasses if that floats your boat too.
To continue the bread hijack (OP appears to have been answered), I’ve heard that cookbooks published in the 1930’s routinely had less sugar or none compared to those in the 1960’s in recipes for muffins, breads, etc.
So this culture’s tastes have changed, in the direction of getting a little more indulgent over time.
How about manufacturer’s use of focus groups? They make two or three recipes, feed them to a batch of people, and my, the people like the sweeter one better, or the saltier, or the more predictable spices.
WAG: the focus groups consist of ‘typical consumers’, and that’s why the mass marketers go for that kind of recipe. Then that creates a market for those who like dark chocolate better, or aged cheese, or ripe tomatoes, or proper whole wheat bread, and along come producers who target that smaller market–too bad they can charge more for food with character.
I don’t think it’s a question of changing tastes as it is a reflection of the Depression and (later) WWII. Sugar was more or less a luxury item during the Depression, and rationed in WWII. Contemporary cookbooks would reflect that.
Robin
You mean if I went to another country I could find bread that wasn’t ridiculously sweet? The reasons to move out of the U.S. mount . . . I don’t eat much bread in my day-to-day life but when I get a sandwich at a shop, I always end up getting white bread, which is not my preference, because the “whole wheat” (usually also mostly white) is so frickin’ sweet. Actually, I might well purchase and eat bread if I could find whole wheat bread on store shelves that wasn’t so sugary.
Actually, it seems like processed food in general has a lot of unnecessary added sugar in it, though maybe again it’s a US phenomenon. I find it’s hard to find prepared spaghetti sauce that isn’t overly sweet. Why do they add so much sugar to spaghetti sauce, fercrissake?
Not really. Honey isn’t recommended for babies because it often contains botulism spores, according to everything I’ve ever read. The botulism won’t grow in honey, but its spores will survive it. Adult digestive systems can prevent colonization by botulism, but infants’ systems can’t (and I think that’s because there’s not enough acid in the stomach.) Thus infants can get botulism infections from honey. In adults there’s little risk of infection by botulism, but the toxins it releases if it colonizes a food item will do you in just the same.
I always find that I like foreign desserts because they’re generally less sweet and less rich. But bread? I’ve never though of American bread as sweet. Typically we buy the whole wheat, off the shelf stuff for general use, and the good, “Italian,” freshly-baked stuff for when we want good bread, and finally, we make it – either with a kit or from scratch, in a bread machine. Given the price of sugar and the move to corn syrup, I’d always figured that manufacturers would use as little of the stuff as possible. Now I’ll have to try some bread and see if it’s sweet.
As for getting bread to rise, my bread machine recipe specified 2.5 tablespoons of sugar for a 1.5lb loaf. Much too sweet. I cut back to 1tsp and it both rises and tastes just fine on about 13% of the recommended amount.
Obesity? Well, if you’re used to excessive sugar in a basic staple from an early age, food with less sugar in won’t taste right, and you’ll take too much sugar unthinkingly until you train your palate. I used to take two sugars in coffee. I take none now. It doesn’t taste any worse, but I had to train myself down. (It’s a shame I’m still far too fat, but that’s another story.)
Theoretically, though, adding sugar to bread doesn’t make it much less healthy for you. You’re really just replacing one simple carbohydrate (starch) with another (sugar). At least, according to the low carb people, starch hits your blood sugar just as fast a sucrose.
This was illustrated in the reverse when cereal companies started offering lower sugar kiddie breakfast cereals. My idiotic local network complained that the cereal didn’t have lower calories or carbohydrates, so it’s not really healthier. Of course it doesn’t, the sugar they take out (gram for gram) has to be replaced with something, namely a carb laden grain, which is what cereal is made out of in the first place. Maybe if they replaced the sugar with sawdust, my network would have been happy.
More info on cereal from the Most Trusted Source in the World
As far as the cultural thing goes, I remember reading in The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking that wheat bread is generally looked down upon by Europeans (I know this is a broad generalization, humor me). The author talked with one monk (I believe it was in Italy) who said he wouldn’t give wheat bread to the poor or homeless, out of compassion apparently. And that he only fed wheat bread to the birds.
But as far as sugar content goes, I have no idea.
Wow! Am I starting to sound like a sugar hater? 'Cos I’m not, and far from being one. But… low-sugar Frosted Flakes are the absolute best. Wish I could get them down here.
As for coffee – anyone who wants a cup of cream and sugar shouldn’t drink it.