How long have folks been eating processed sugar?
How bad is it for you?
Would it be healthy to give it up entirely?
Mmmmmmmmmmm sugar!
Very healthy but very difficult to give up, unless you make pretty much all your food.
Refining sugar (creating sugar crystals out of sugarcane) goes back quite a ways. I’ve seen India cited as the first place to refine sugar as far back as 500 BCE.
Ever notice how some words begin to look strange the more you type them? Well, sugar is starting to look that way to me.
Sugar made from sugar cane may go back as far as 2500 years, to 510 BC. Arabs learned to make it in 642 AD. Crusaders brought it to Europe in the 11th century.
Sugar beets were first used for producting sugar in 1747.
http://www.sucrose.com/lhist.html
Sugar has had many forms over the years. In India around 300 AD syrup was extracted by boiling and pressing sugar cane.
http://www.monitorsugar.com/htmtext/HISTORY.htm
The form of sugar has changed over the years. For much of history sugar was sold in a “sugar loaf.” Sugar syrup was poured into cones of fabric so all the liquid would drain out. People used special hammers and nippers to break the loaf into usable pieces.
In 1841 Jakub Krystof Rad invented the sugar cube. (I always wondered why people would go to the insane amount of trouble to make granulated sugar into cubes, then I found out I had the process backwards!)
http://www.bvv.cz/Www/InfoBVV/b-magaz.nsf/gb-e-view-b/39c93aa9f3394ae3c12564eb004e0561?Open
In 1846 Norbert Rillieux patented a better method of refining sugar. The son of a French planter/inventor and a slave mother, he wanted to find a sugar making process that was safer and easier for the slaves who did the work.
http://www.princeton.edu/~mcbrown/display/rillieux.html
I’m not sure if this process created lump or granulated sugar.
Ah, here we go, in 1794 Etienne de Bore began successfully granulating sugar on his plantation.
Too much sugar is bad for you, as is too much of anything 
It is very difficult to give it up entirely as sugar is contained in natural products such as milk, fruits, some vegetables, breads, cereals, and grains.
But you do need some sugar in your diet but this can be got from natural foods. You could just cut out all foods that have obvious sugar content, such as chocolate, fizzy drinks.
And the body cannot tell the difference between naturally occurring and added sugars because they are identical chemically.
As for it being bad for you, the only things I can come up with are black teeth and obesity