Episode 3 Bang Goes the Theory

Hello, and welcome to Bang.

We're here to bring you the science behind the headlines.

We've been busy researching the issues that affect us all

and have a real impact on our lives.

It seems like food is always in the news.

What's good for you, what's bad for you, the latest diet fad,

and, of course, the latest health scare.

In the past, things like fat and salt have come under fire,

but nowadays it seems to be sugar that's in the dietary dock.

Sugar is a billion-pound industry.

In the UK we consume over two million tons of the stuff

every single year, often without realising it.

It causes tooth decay, but what else?

Obesity, diabetes, heart disease.

-So do you monitor the amount of sugar in your diet?

-No, I love sugar.

It gives you a boost for a wee while

and then you have a big comedown from it.

When it comes to children, sugary drinks,

too much sugar makes them hyper.

Too much is bad for you, really.

I take a lot of sugar in stuff, like in my tea I have, like, four sugars and stuff.

My wife has an extremely sweet tooth.

She can eat a box of chocolates at one sitting,

and I'm talking a big box of chocolates.

Coming up - the pros and cons of all things sweet.

Liz finds out why we have such a sweet tooth.

Without sugar, our cells couldn't do their jobs,

our muscles wouldn't work,

and most importantly, our brains simply wouldn't function.

We meet the doctor horrified to find his diet

has given him fatty liver disease.

It's maybe a wake-up call

that actually I need to change my lifestyle,

because this will only get worse, if I don't do something dramatic.

And Maggie discovers that sugar is also a secret weapon

in our fight against infection.

What I really love about this is that it's so elegant.

It's a neat, simple idea that addresses a massive problem.

Tonight on Bang Goes The Theory - sugar.

-Right, do you use sugar at all?

-Yes, I do. White sugar in my tea.

-White sugar.

-OK.

So, if you're looking at these sugars,

do you feel that any of them

are healthier or better for you than others?

I should imagine brown sugar's probably more healthy for you.

I'd probably say generally the darker the food is

I'd generally associate that with health,

so I'd probably say probably the darker sugar.

I would probably say the honey and the brown sugars.

They're less processed.

Would you use any particular sugar rather than another

because you might think it was either better for you or healthier?

No, cos all sugar's the same,

there's obviously just different bleachings.

-I do tend to buy brown sugar rather than white sugar.

-And why is that?

I don't know why. I think it just looks more healthy.

So, first in the dock, white sugar - sucrose.

Is it really as processed, bleached and unnatural as people think?

Over the past few months,

thousands of tons of sucrose

has been created just under the ground here,

and it's been created inside...

these fellas.

Sugar beets.

Over 7,000 farmers produce 9 million tons of beet in the UK every year.

It's one of the most profitable crops in the country.

Incredibly, this root vegetable could be almost 20% sugar by weight,

but the trick is getting that sugar out.

I want to make some granulated white sugar myself.

Essentially, I just need to get rid of all the bits of beet

that aren't sucrose.

It's stored inside the cells of the beet,

so we need to chop it up to expose as many cells as possible,

then drop it in hot water.

I'm actually going to turn that off,

because I don't want the water boiling,

because then it starts destroying the cells of the plant.

I just want it hot enough that the sugar that's within those cells

just happily diffuses out into the warm water.

70-80 degrees is about right.

While I leave that to simmer, this exact process is happening

just across the field on an industrial scale.

This is the Wissington Refinery in Norfolk.

It's the largest beet sugar factory in the world.

The beets are delivered by the truckload

to that massive pile over there,

where high pressure water

forces them to flow up those two huge metal pipes.

I guess from there it's a bit of a log flume.

They float down and round the corner,

being washed of stone and soil.

And actually the stones and soil

are then sold off as topsoil and aggregates.

Nothing's wasted.

Maybe the fun stops for the beet at that point,

because in there is a vast chipping machine

and it cuts the beet into these fine little slices,

which have plenty of surface area for extracting sugar and...

taste OK.

In these rotating drums,

the sugar diffuses out into hot water.

Just like it has in my saucepan.

What's left is a dirty, sugary juice.

That's beginning to taste very sweet.

So now I've got rid of almost everything about those sugar beet that isn't sugar.

I say almost everything,

because in this dirty water here,

it might be about half a kilo of sugar,

but also there's a few proteins and a few minerals

and little bits of soil that I don't really want.

I can easily get rid of all that muck

with the help of some milk of lime

and a bit of carbon dioxide from a fizzy drinks maker.

Between them, they combine to make chalk,

which helps sink everything to the bottom.

That's settled out beautifully.

The chalky deposit at the bottom there

has pretty much taken out everything else that was a bit sugar beet-y

and that water at the top is almost just sugar and water now.

Next job - to reduce down the liquid into a thick syrup.

Boiling's good for that.

But as it thickens up,

I risk it getting too hot and spoiling the sucrose...

so I create a partial vacuum in the pan

to boil it at a lower temperature.

It's not difficult to make a syrupy solution,

but to make actual real sugar crystals is quite hard.

Now, it is a bit of a dark art, but...

I think there's a chance

that I might have got that concentrated enough now

so that as it cools it could grow real sugar crystals.

So I'm going to pour it off into here and leave it to do its stuff.

Under a microscope,

you can see sugar crystals appearing at the edge of the syrup.

The longer you leave it, the bigger the crystals grow.

I've decided it's best to come inside

for the high-pressure finale of the sugar-refining process.

What I've got in here is an incredibly sticky brown syrup

and in it has grown a kind of multitude of tiny sugar crystals.

What I need to do now is the almost impossible task

of separating one from the other,

and for that, I've built a centrifuge.

Well, it's actually the old food processor,

to which I've made something

that's like a miniature washing machine drum.

I'm going to put these on,

because the accelerations necessary

to separate sticky syrup from tiny sugar crystals

are quite frightening.

Right. One, two, three.

Oh, you can see the syrup out there!

The syrup's been flung straight out onto the sides of the bowl,

hopefully leaving the crystals behind inside.

Look!

It's going white in there,

you can see all the syrup coming out.

And the stunning thing is,

for all it started out as a dirty brown mass,

the sugar that's left behind is almost pure white.

Right, I'm going to take that apart. I mean, turn it down.

Look at that!

It's kind of...just white sugar.

'That is my favourite bit of the process,

'and they have a centrifuge just like mine at the refinery.'

And this is it.

'Only a whole lot bigger... and more powerful.'

This uses kind of G-force just to fling out the brown syrup

and leave behind the pure-white sugar crystals.

And that really is.

It's not bleached, it's not dyed, that's how sugar grows.

Once you fling off the brown syrup that it grows in,

it is left with these pure-white crystals.

And if you want brown sugar,

you can either crystallise it earlier on in the process,

or you take the pure crystals

and then they put on a tiny bit of the molasses that they've removed

to get brown sugar.

In other words,

white sugar can actually be less processed than brown sugar.

So is sucrose good or bad for you depending on where it comes from?

No.

Sucrose is sucrose, whether you find it in fruit,

a sweet or a vegetable,

and this factory is not making sucrose,

it's extracting it from a vegetable that grows in a field down the road.

But sucrose is not the only sugar that we find in our food.

Fruit has lots of fructose and there's another,

perhaps the most important sugar, glucose.

The universal energy source for almost all life on Earth.

That reaction right there

shows you how much energy is available from just one jelly baby.

And that holds the key to our next big question -

why do we like sugar so much?

Now, we need energy to function,

for all of our cellular processes to work properly,

and our cells get that energy from sugar.

Without sugar, our cells couldn't do their jobs,

our muscles wouldn't work, and most importantly,

our brains simply wouldn't function.

In fact, our brains are almost entirely dependent

on glucose for energy.

Glucose is so important to our brains

that our taste for sugar is deeply rooted in our evolution.

For our early ancestors, naturally-occurring sugar was rare.

But, just like today's hunter-gatherers,

they would go to great lengths to get hold of it.

But our love of sugar might not just be down to the energy it provides.

Researchers believe it can activate the release of endorphins

and neurotransmitters like dopamine in the brain,

that gives us a sense of exhilaration - a sugar rush.

And that rush seems to go beyond simple pleasure -

the mere taste of sugar might literally switch us on.

So we can see how,

Dr Tiina Eilola has asked me to take a classic test of mental agility.

OK, this is it.

Right.

So, basically, what we're going to do

is we're going to run a classic Stroop experiment.

A Stroop experiment? OK.

'I'll do this test twice,

'each time swilling a different liquid round my mouth.

'Once with glucose.' Excuse me. 'Once with a sweetener.' Here we go.

'All I need to do is name the colour of the text, not read the word.'

-Got that wrong.

-And now you're going to have the second drink.

Oops...

98.33%.

This is the end of the experiment.

'With the test over,

'Tiina reveals that the second drink had the glucose in it.'

Crucially, I didn't drink either of them,

I just tasted both.

OK, so, how did I perform in test one, sweetener,

-versus test two, glucose?

-OK.

So, what I can see from your reactions, you were overall faster

when you had the sugar drink

-than when you got the sweetened drink.

-OK.

So I performed better when I tasted glucose

than when I tasted artificial sweetener.

-That's right.

-That's really interesting, right,

because obviously it's not about energy release,

it's about something else.

Well, in this particular task,

what it's really testing

is your ability to ignore irrelevant information,

in favour of the information that is relevant for a particular task.

This shows that glucose

triggers a direct link from the tongue to the brain

and seems to boost our mood and our brain power,

and that's what keeps us coming back for more.

So essentially this is all about survival.

It's almost like doubly, triply making sure

that we will always eat sugar,

and never forgetting how sugar is so important for us.

That pleasure effect in our brain is so strong

that some researchers believe

that people really can become addicted to sugar,

just like drink and drugs.

In fact, there have been calls for sugar to be controlled,

like we control alcohol and tobacco.

So, still to come, I'll be meeting the doctor

whose health depends on cutting out calories.

Suddenly this wake-up call, actually I need to change, you know,

my lifestyle, because this will only get worse.

And I discover how it's being used as a secret weapon against disease.

It's a neat, simple idea that addresses a massive problem.

And Liz is on the case of artificial sweeteners.

But first, just how bad is sugar's health reputation?

I think there's more negatives towards sugar,

on the news and TV programmes.

No, I think it's definitely more negative than positive.

Decays the teeth, I know that. I've still got my own teeth.

If you're eating more sugar,

obviously you're going to have more calories,

so it means you're going to put on weight.

Is sugar really such a health hazard?

Well, when Scott Nelson fell ill, it was certainly a suspect.

Scott is a doctor at the maternity unit at Glasgow Royal Infirmary,

where chocolate is never far away.

People are always very grateful for having babies.

Quite often they bring chocolates as a gift and so on,

so if you're in the labour ward in the middle of the night,

there's normally coffee and chocolates hand-in-hand,

and that's just part of what we're accustomed to.

'A couple of years ago he started to feel unwell.'

I wasn't feeling that great, I was tired all the time, I thought,

"What's going on." I thought, "Let's do some blood tests."

It was my liver function tests that were abnormal.

Scott had fatty liver disease,

a problem normally associated with obesity and alcohol abuse.

I guess it was quite striking, because I don't drink,

and suddenly - what was going on?

So when you got that diagnosis that you'd got fatty liver disease,

how did you feel?

I think I was pretty shocked. I thought I was essentially healthy

and then suddenly here I was

having completely abnormal liver function tests.

Caused a huge amount of abuse from my colleagues,

who suddenly thought, here's this person who never drinks,

has never drunk, and suddenly he's got abnormal liver function test.

So Scott went to see a specialist, Professor Naveed Sattar.

He told Scott that when you eat more calories than you burn off,

one of the places fat can build up

is your liver.

The consequence of that is that the liver doesn't work as well,

particularly in its ability to handle sugar metabolism.

This can lead to other, more serious, health problems.

The consequence for the individual is their sugar levels tend to rise

and so liver fat is linked to a higher diabetes risk

in many individuals.

Also, in a small proportion, they'll have an increased likelihood

of developing cirrhosis and potentially liver cancer.

Suddenly, maybe, this wake-up call,

actually, I need to change my lifestyle

because this will only get worse if I don't do something dramatic.

So, Scott cut down on the chocolates and canteen dinners,

and took up cycling.

How do you feel? Has it made a real difference to how you feel?

There's no doubt that it makes a big difference.

The whole, kind of,

just doing exercise makes a difference.

You know, I've got more energy, that's fantastic for the family.

Being able to do things more, you're a lot less lethargic.

Scott's not alone.

It's thought one in five adults in the UK

suffer from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

and it's on the increase.

But sugar may not be entirely to blame.

By and large, the average individual

who has an over-consumption of calories, excess refined sugar,

is part of that package of excess caloric intake.

It's just calories, in any form, that are the problem.

So is sugar the health hazard we think it is?

If someone is healthy and does not have excess fat

in the liver, of course they do not need to avoid sugar.

The key thing with diet, of course, is to have a moderate intake

as befits their lifestyle.

Periods where they'll need excess sugar when they're exercising, periods when they will not.

The truth is, sugar has no more calories than protein

and has fewer than fat.

Doctors do worry that the amount of sugar in processed foods

makes it all too easy to eat more than our bodies can handle,

because we don't always know when we're eating it.

I'd like you to tell me how much sugar you think

is in each of these drinks. You got a popular cola drink,

a blackcurrant drink and a fruit juice, OK?

So, you know, using these little sugar cubes as a visual aid,

would you mind placing these bottles where you think they belong?

I thought that, maybe, that could go there.

-I think this has the most sugar in.

-So place it where you think.

I would say fruit juice the least.

-Least in the cola? It's a real cola drink.

-Oh, sorry.

-We'll go here.

-Not far behind.

Well, I can now reveal,

-that they actually all have the exact same amount of sugar.

-Oh!

-About 50 grams of sugar.

-That surprising, yeah.

The same amount of sugar. Around about 50 grams.

-That's amazing.

-Isn't it?

I thought there'd be some sort of difference.

What about the sugar in foods, then?

I want you to tell me which of these three meals

you think has the most sugar to the least sugar?

You've got a popular burger.

We've got a low-fat cheese and pasta bake

and we've got tomato soup.

I think that the bake might have the most.

I think tomato soup.

-I think the soup, actually, tomato.

-Tomato soup?

-Yeah.

-Most sugar?

-Probably the soup.

-And what would be next?

-The burger.

-Yeah.

-Soup, then burger, then pasta dish?

-Yeah, agreed.

OK, I can now reveal...

-Are you excited?

-Yeah.

That the dish with the most sugar

is actually the diet tomato and cheese pasta. OK?

Then the soup, then the burger

because many diet foods have lest fat.

The flavour then is lacking, so what manufacturers do

is they pump it full of sugar so it tastes better.

-Interesting, isn't it?

-It is.

-Wow!

Yeah, it can be quite surprisingly just how much sugar

there is in everyday foods that we eat.

But it all has to be listed on the label

and the World Health Organisation recommends that we take

on board no more than 10% of our calories from added sugar.

You've probably all heard about high fructose corn syrup,

a particular type of sugar syrup that's added to lots of food and drink in the US.

There is some debate about whether such high levels of fructose could be bad for you

because it overloads the liver and ultimately leads

to greater fat deposition in the body, than other sugars.

And, although, we don't use high fructose corn syrup in this country,

we do add fructose to our food.

So, it is an area of research that's well worth keeping an eye on.

Now, some people are concerned that they do eat too much sugar

and they've opted to use artificial sweeteners instead.

But are artificial sweeteners a safe alternative?

To find out, I'm going to make my own with chemicals in the lab.

This is quite good fun, actually.

OK, so cyclamic acid, hydrochloric acid, barium chloride,

all in solution.

They sound quite ominous as chemicals,

but like all good chemical reactions, if you combine them

in the right proportions, you get some interesting products.

The last ingredient, though, is this stuff, sodium nitrite.

Watch what happens when I combine the sodium nitrite

with the rest of the chemicals. Here we go.

There you have it, the precipitated salt

of cyclamic acid, or sodium cyclamate,

which is an artificial sweetener.

Because of the risk of contamination I can't taste my sweetener,

so time for more technical kit to see if it's the real thing.

OK, now for the interesting bit.

The sample's been analysed and, if I've got the chemistry right,

there should be a peak appearing on this graph, around about here,

indicating sodium cyclamate. Let's check it out.

Bingo! There it is. I've made sodium cyclamate.

Most of the sweeteners in our drink, in our food,

are made in the lab, in a similar way.

The most popular sweetener, aspartame,

is made by synthesising two naturally occurring amino acids,

joining them together to produce an entirely man-made substance.

People are suspicious of artificial sweeteners

because they're made in a lab, but are they doing us any harm?

I asked an expert toxicologist if we should worry.

The truth is, they have been extensively tested,

both in animals and in humans

and there's really no evidence

that they cause any harm with the levels we're exposed to at all.

Why would people think it's a good idea for a major food

producing company to poison their consumers? That's not good business.

Well, some people would argue the immediacy of a quick buck

without doing the proper tests, but that's part of the reason, isn't it?

If you're saying, categorically, there's nothing to worry about,

why do people still worry?

If I say "aspartame" to most people, they go,

"Oh, yeah, it causes cancer, really bad for you."

Aspartame has been through more studies than almost any additive in our diet.

We have no evidence that, no matter how much of these sweeteners you consume,

you would ever get cancer.

-That's categorical?

-That's categorical.

There's no well-conducted study on the sweeteners

we're using today causing cancer.

So the evidence suggests artificial sweeteners don't do any harm.

At least, not at the levels people consume them.

There's more about artificial sweeteners on our website, bbc.co.uk/bang.

Now, our final story on sugar has nothing to do with eating the stuff.

it turns out it can be a real lifesaver when used in medicine.

Medical uses for sugar, mainly in the form of honey,

have been around for thousands of years.

Papyrus scrolls, like these from ancient Egypt,

are some of the earliest written medical records

and it's absolutely fascinating when you go through them.

You can see that honey is frequently mentioned as one of the key

ingredients for treating wounds.

Thousands of years later, modern clinical trials have shown

that certain honeys do indeed have antibacterial properties.

Medical grade honeys, like these, are routinely used in hospitals up and down the country.

Treating infected wounds with sugar is one thing,

but using sugar to prevent illness could be even better.

Vaccines like these prevent lethal diseases of all kinds.

They are one of the most effective health protection measures ever.

But they can be difficult and costly to administer

because it's vital that they're kept refrigerated

from the moment when they're produced to the moment when they're injected into the patient.

Shockingly, up to half of all vaccines have to be thrown away

because when they warm up, the vaccine spoils.

But a company in Leicester could be about to change all that with a little help from sugar.

We know, that one of the real issues with vaccines is

they have got to be transported under refrigeration. How can sugar help?

Sugar is a well-known stabiliser.

What we are essentially doing is we are mixing our vaccine

with a sugar mixture and we dry that onto a membrane,

a fibrous membrane.

When the liquid dries, it changes into a sugar glass

and once it's in a sugar glass format,

the vaccine component that's trapped within the sugar,

is completely protected from the external elements.

The dried sugar keeps out any air or water

and stops the vaccine from deteriorating.

The dried pad is then packed into a plastic case.

-So that doesn't need to be stored in the fridge?

-That certainly does not.

Once it's been manufactured, it can stay outside the fridge

in the room temperature for a very long period.

The unit can easily be connected to a standard syringe

and when saline solution is flushed through it,

the sugar instantly dissolves,

releasing the vaccine into the needle.

It's lightweight and you can pack large quantities

into a backpack, for example,

if you want to do a vaccination campaign

in a remote, developing country.

So this could make a huge difference, couldn't it?

It certainly will. It offers you the stabilisation properties.

It's easy to deliver, manufacture

and also administer in large vaccination programmes.

This technology also cuts the cost of administering vaccines

against killer diseases, like tetanus, diphtheria, TB and measles,

which we all need to have.

What I really love about this is, is that it's so elegant,

it's a neat, simple idea that addresses a massive problem.

It's all about thinking differently

and, by thinking differently, potentially saving millions of lives.

Well, it appears as though a spoonful of sugar may well help the medicine go down.

That's it for this week.

We are back, same time, same channel next Monday.

Visit bbc.co.uk/bang to watch my explosive investigation

into sugar's energy and for even more on sugar,

including hyperactive kids and honeycombs,

follow the links to The Open University.

-Thanks for watching.

-Night.

-Good night.

Next week on Bang Goes The Theory...

How safe are young people?

Jem puts car safety seats to the test.

I'm heading for a solid steel bar.

How bad can it be?

Liz discovers why traffic looks very different to children.

Some of the children needed a speed difference of 20 miles an hour

to notice one car is going faster than the other.

And I find out how much we should worry about sudden cardiac arrest.

There is something extraordinary about looking at your own heart

on one of these because this isn't something I've ever done before.

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