brown white sugar

Lately, people are becoming more nutritionally conscious and care about what goes into their bodies.  This isn’t to say that we never cared before, it’s just that nowadays the overall direction of people is towards healthy living and green diets, therefore our trending hashtag is #healthyliving.

Restaurants (specifically fast food) are requested  and maybe even obliged to supply their customers with the calories and nutritional information each item on their menu contains.  Some also altered their menus to provide health conscious customers with a variety of items to choose from such as lean meat brown pasta with tomato sauce instead of pepperoni pizza.  Ingredients like quinoa, kale, and edamame are suddenly popping up in menus and markets for people to buy.

Also interestingly, some people are religiously defending the idea that human beings are not supposed to consume cow’s milk after the age of three.  It is said that cow’s milk is custom designed for calves and humans could actually lose their calcium by drinking cow’s milk.  Instead, we humans can substitute it with almond or soy milk because almond and soy milk are not custom designed for almond and soy babies.

The other day I asked my husband to get some brown sugar cubes because we were running out.  He got a pack of white sugar and a pack of brown sugar cubes stating that there is no difference in the nutrition facts on the packs and that I should compare them.  I chose to consider his comment later on because if what he said was true it would mean that one of the pillars of my beliefs would be susceptible to questioning and there’s never a good time for that.  So instead, I took his word for it and a few days later I googled “what is the difference between brown and white sugar.”  Surprisingly, google laughed out loud and answered nothing much.

What I reached in my research is the following:

1- White sugar is more processed than brown sugar

2- Brown sugar contains molasses and thus tastes a bit different

3- Brown sugar has bigger crystals

4- Brown sugar looks more organic

5- Nutritional value of brown sugar is slightly more than white but not significant enough for it to be measured

So what now?  Should I start questioning the cow’s milk?  Should I start questioning brown vs white rice, brown vs white bread, and brown vs. white eggs?  Should there even be a difference if we are vouching for equality?

So the lie that is brown sugar has finally been revealed.  The next time you see someone choose brown sugar instead of white to sweeten their drink, chuckle a little inside and let them be.  Their perceptions could make a difference as per the placebo effect (the sugar pill experiment where a group of people were given real medicine and another group were given sugar pills and had similar results in their treatment.)  It is the importance of beliefs and obviously nutritional values are on top of people’s lists these days.  It’s a great way of opening new business opportunities, I tell you.