Yes, please to sugar, no way to bone char........

Love white sugar?

You may not after you read this.

We switched to raw sugar and coconut sugar years ago, I am just sharing some info so you can make an informed decision regarding the use of white sugar.


Plus too much sugar actually makes you feel like you are hungry when you are not.

Here is the deal with white sugar:

~First of all sugar is naturally brown when it is harvested from the cane (thanks to the presence of molasses) but to make it more appealing to people, it is bleached out white.

Sugarcane

~How does it get white you ask?  Excellent question.  By processing the natural brown sugar from the cane through animal bones which is called bone char.  YUCK!

~Companies burn the bones of cows from Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Argentina.

~They burn the bones into char and then add it to the brown sugar to make it white.

~Basically the charred bones turns in to a filter or decolorizer which removes the beautiful brown color from sugar and leaves it white (bleached).

What?

~But you will not find this information on the ingredients list of what you eat.

~To make table sugar from sugarcane, the stalks are crushed to extract the juice from the pulp.  The juice is heated so it can crystalize.  After that, it is filtered and bleached with bone char. Voila!  White sugar!  A.k.a. refined sugar.

~To make bone char, animal bones are heated at extreme temperatures which reduces them to carbon before being used in a refinery.  Even though the sugar may not contain actual pieces of bone, it definitely comes in to contact with them.

~Some companies, however, use alternatives to bone char such as granular carbon during the filtering process of whitening sugar but you will not be able to tell which sugar was whitened with bone char or granular carbon.  What a Stink!

Burned bone-i.e. bone char

~If you find a sugar that is labeled certified cane sugar, you are probably okay.

~Alternatives to refined, white, cow bone sugars are beet sugars, organic evaporated cane juice, tubinado sugar, coconut sugar, organic cane sugar, and organic dehydrated cane juice.  These are all bone char-free.

~Be sweet without sugar!

A side note since I love to go off on tangents when I research topics.  Have you heard of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon?    Well apparently in his story back in WWII, the remains of US soldiers who died in battle were buried in a lake in Italy; and later dug up and their bones were charred to use as filters for cigarettes.  Mr. Pynchon called it bone charcoal.  That's nice!