F is For Fat Redux

Here's some perspective for a couple commentators in the other piece. I am quoting below from a May 22, 2006 article, "The Search for Sweet - Building a Better Sugar Substitute" published in The New Yorker. For what it's worth.

When Columbus introduced [sugar] cane to the New World, the antropologist Sidney Mintz has noted, sugar was an exotic luxury. Most Europeans had never eaten sugar, but they quickly developed a taste for it. By 1700, the Americas had become a vast sugar mill and the English were eating four pounds per person per year. By 1800, they were eating eighteen pounds; by 1900, ninety pounds. But nowhere was the rise of sugar as dramatic as in the New World. Last year, the average American consumed about a hundred and forty pounds of cane sugar, corn syrup, and other natural sugars - fifty per cent more than the Germans or the French and nine times as much as the Chinese.