Re: Crockett Sugar Refinery on Shorpy
Author: Dr Zarkoff
Date: 12-12-2013 - 18:02
I first ran across this info in a link which had a half-hour video of a presentation by a pediatrician at UCSF Med Center: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5X0i92OZQ
"Sugar" means two different things: a family of molecules (fructose, glucose, lactose, galactose, levulose, etc.) and table sugar, that white granular stuff we put in coffee, on cereal, etc., commonly called "sugar".
What the pediatrician had to say was that table sugar molecules consist of two sections: a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule joined by an oxygen atom. There's an enzyme (in our stomachs, I think he said) which immediately cleaves these at the O atom so the body can glom onto the glucose, which it needs to make glycogen, the energy source for powering all our body and it's functions (insufficient ability to use glycogen = diabetes).
Fructose, on the other hand, is of no use at all to the body. When ingested via moderate amounts of [table] sugar, the body is pretty much able to excrete it before it becomes absorbed. The problem with fructose sweeteners is that by ingesting products sweetened with them is that the body's digestive and elimination systems becomes overwhelmed, and too much fructose entering the body's system.
Unlike the situation with glucose, the human body has evolved no way to metabolize fructose. It tries, but the end product is: fat -- accumulating in the liver and throughout the body. And this fat isn't readily eliminated.
While you do ingest fructose by eating fruit, the fiber content of the fruit helps the body to eliminated it before becoming absorbed.
There was a British pysiologist named John Yudikin who figured all this by 1972, but he was drowned out by the money grubbers. See: www.amazon.com/Pure-White-Deadly-John-Yudkin/dp/0241965284/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386898882&sr=8-1&keywords=pure%2C+white%2C+and+deadly
Fructose gives me severe acid indigestion, so I essentially stopped drinking soft drinks when the manufacturers dumped sugar for fructose. I've avoided fructose as much as possible ever since. I guess I was lucky.
The C&H plant used to get two or three switches on the daylight shift and two on the after noon shift. The procedure was to spot tank cars and covered hoppers on the track outside the fence for cleaning. C&H would recover and recycle the residual sugar from the hoppers, and the cleaning crew would used special clean covers over their shoes before entering inside the cars. The tank cars would be washed with hot water and filled with syrup (the Molasses Spur was across the main lines). Then we would set up more cars for cleaning and pull and respot the Life Saver. Going into the Inshore and Offshore was less common. After corn syrup made it's debut, things went to one switch a day.