Book Review: The Sweetener Trap & How to Avoid It

Why has the human race become so enslaved by sweeteners, both natural and artificial? People seem to have an innate attraction to sweets. This natural preference is thought to exist to encourage us to eat fruits and vegetables. The author of The Sweetener Trap sums up why she thinks that this natural taste has become subverted: “In recent times, however, our taste for sweetness has become maladaptive. As we learned to extract and concentrate the sweet components from plants, we succeeded in separating sweetness from nutrition. Our greatly increased consumption of concentrated sugars is incriminated as an important factor in a wide range of health problems.”