The quick answer: The Industrial Revolution brought us unlimited sugar. We must learn to limit our sugar intake. Candy is this week's Healthy Change—a timely topic as we approach Easter.
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Revolution and Reformation
In Derbyshire, England, the River Derwent flows quietly by hillside pastures divided by moss-covered stonewalls where sheep graze as they have for centuries. The ancient villages of Hathersage, Belper, and Milford slumber peacefully now. But two centuries or so ago a revolution exploded here with the world’s first cotton mills—powered by the river and manned 24/7 by women and children.
Once-bustling mills now lie in silent decay—the Derwent Valley is a World Heritage Site, cradle of the Industrial Revolution and the factory which changed the world for good and ill. In time the factory system reached our food supply under the guise—better-said disguise—of “modern convenience.” It changed how we eat—highly processed factory foods, stripped of nutrients and laden with additives, replaced natural, home-cooked meals. In time, these packaged foods led to today’s chronic diseases including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and maladies too numerous to mention. Together they form a modern plague.
The task before us now is to restore our food chain to its former natural healthfulness—we call this the food reformation—and all who read this blog are part of that restoration, defined by Word of Wisdom Living’s 52 Healthy Changes.
Derwent Valley Origins
Last week the Beautiful Wife, our eldest son, and I traveled through this same Derwent Valley, visiting the villages of Belper, Milford and Hathersage where ancestors once lived and labored in the early factories.
We share an ancestor—William Frost of lovely Hathersage, the scene of Charlotte Bronte’s revolutionary Romance Era novel, Jane Eyre. Bronte lived in the church vicar’s cottage while writing Jane Eyre in the 1840s. My ancestor Robert Hellewell (of Belper and Milford) married William’s lovely daughter Rachel Frost in the adjoining chapel in 1844. The BW descends from Rachel’s younger sister Maria.
Robert, Rachel, and Maria all worked in the textile factories. It was an era of new ideas driving radical change and they were as the leaves blown before the first gusts of a coming storm. In time Robert and Rachel, accompanied by Maria, heeded the preaching of early Mormon missionaries and immigrated to the Utah Territory to help build a new Zion in the wilderness. That new Zion is a work in progress and one task is to restore the wholesomeness of food. In the Derwent Valley, I though I saw the closing of a circle.
Sugar
Before the Industrial Revolution, there was a pre-revolution—the sugar boom. Fortunes could be made building sugar cane plantations in the New World. Before sugar availability had been limited by Nature—bees could only make so much honey. Now there was an unlimited supply flowing into Europe and the nature of food began to change.
Sugar’s sweetness made hot drinks popular according to the colonies supplying European countries—hot chocolate in Spain, coffee in France, and tea in England. As sugar became cheaper a new treat arose—candy. In the beginning sweets were an occasional treat; today it’s hard to find a processed food that doesn’t include sugar.
Soda drinks are a major—and harmful—source of dietary sugar. So-called diet drinks are equally unhealthy. Therefore, the year started with Healthy Change #1: If you consume sodas or other sweet drinks, limit yourself to one (12 oz.) serving per week. It’s a rule we can live with.
As you know the Healthy Changes follow 13 themes that repeat each quarter of the year—now we start the 2nd quarter and revisit the subject of sugar with this Healthy Change:
Please comment: How will you manage the Easter candy glut? Tell about your experience with a "sugar fast." Or share your sad story of falling off the sugar wagon.