Westover 2002

Depression and Sugar in Six Nations

As we'll see in Sugar Blues, William Dufty's 1975 book on sugar's role in health and disease, sugar has traced an interesting trajectory across the western world. The quest for sugar, the rum which could be made from it, and the furs Americans would trade for it, drove the slave trade through much of the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries.

Time after time, from ancient India through Persia and Portugal, Spain, Britain, France ... sugar's adoption by societal elites coincided with a cycle of colonial expansion, cultural flowering, sensual indulgence, an economic overexpansion and subsequent collapse that typically lasted only a few generations. For most of this time only the elites could afford sugar. It would take the invention of food processing machinery in the 19th century before the price of sugar fell low enough that the masses could indulge it.

In this study the rates of depression in six nations: the US, Canada, Germany, France, New Zealand and Korea, are compared with those nations' rates of per capita sugar consumption. A tight correlation is found.

This is a two page paper; you have 24 minutes to study it. Watch the video to quickly review the main points.

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