It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when humans only had access to sugar for a few months a year when fruit was in season. Some 80,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers ate fruit sporadically and infrequently, since they were competing with birds.

Now, our sugar hits come all year round, often with less nutritional value and far more easily – by simply opening a soft drink or cereal box. It doesn’t take an expert to see that our modern sugar intake is less healthy than it was in our foraging days. Today, sugar has become public health enemy number one: governments are taxing it, schools and hospitals are removing it from vending machines and experts are advising that we remove it completely from our diets.

But so far, scientists have had a difficult time proving how it affects our health, independent of a diet too high in calories. There is also a growing argument that demonising a single food is dangerous – and causes confusion that risks us cutting out vital foods.

Sugar, otherwise known as ‘added sugar’, includes table sugar, sweeteners, honey and fruit juices, and is extracted, refined and added to food and drink to improve taste.

Термин "сахар" включает в себя широкий спектр подсластителей

The term ‘sugar’ includes a broad array of sweeteners, including the fructose naturally found in fruit (Credit: Getty)

But sugar is actually a broad term for both complex and simple carbohydrates, which are broken down by digestion into glucose and used by every cell in the body to generate energy and fuel the brain. Complex carbohydrates include wholegrains and vegetables. Simple carbohydrates are more easily digested and quickly release sugar into the bloodstream. They include sugars found naturally in the foods we eat, such as fructose, lactose, sucrose and glucose and others, like high fructose corn syrup, which are manmade.

Before the 16th Century only the rich could afford sugar. But it became more available with colonial trade.

Then, in the 1960s, the development of large-scale conversion of glucose into fructose led to the creation of high fructose corn syrup, a concentrate of glucose and fructose.

This potent combination, above any other single type of sugar, is the one many public health advocates consider the most lethal – and it is the one that many people think of when they think of ‘sugar’.

Sugar rush

Consumption of high fructose corn syrup in the US increased tenfold between 1970 and 1990, more than any other food group. Researchers have pointed out that this mirrors the increase in obesity across the country. This may be because high fructose corn syrup, unlike other foods, doesn’t lead to a rise in leptin – a hormone which helps us feel full.