SUGAR THE SILENT KILLER

India has a ravenous appetite for the sweet stuff, way above any other country, if both traditional and modern sugars arecounted. We also take excessive amounts of poor-quality carbohydrates, especially, refined cereals like white rice and whitewheat, sugar-sweetened drinks and fruit juice, sweet treats and savouries, which ultimately turn into glucose, a simplesugar the body uses for energy. And Indians today manifest an increased predilection for diseases linked to sugar (andthe fat with which sugar is inextricably linked): obesity to diabetes, heart disease to hypertension, cancers to dementia,Covid-19 to black fungus.Despite a long association with sugar, there has been very few attempts to understand sugar’s hold in India. Books havebeen written mainly on the sugar industry, some on diabetes and low-sugar diets. Sugar: The Silent Killer attempts to fillthe lacunae. It attempts to demystify the way we eat now, the pre-eminence of refined sugar in our diet, what it does tous and what we can do to mitigate its malign influence. Weaving together history, culture and science, it seeks to analysewhy we have such an intimate relation with sugar, why it holds on to us so doggedly, why we do can’t do without it,even when we know it can harm us.