The Birmingham age-herald., 1919-06-22
The Sweet Tooth

Arthur L. Dahl, in Leslies.
 When the United States becomes bone dry in 1920, or before, and liquor will no; be procurable in the ordinary ways of
 commerce. will the drinkers, heavy. mod crate or light, turn to sugar as a sub- stitute? Candy men believe so, and they
 are laying their plans to greatly ex-
 tend their business Chemically, the &C., tfon of sugar in the stomach is very much like that of alcohol, in that it is all
 most instantly converted into heat units
 and stimulates the body by adding fuel to get more energy.
 Unlike alcohol, however, sugar has no injurious effect, unless used in excessive quantities, because it is true food supplying energy and heat to the body
 That is why cake of chocolate or other sweets will give a tired walker new ! strength and endurance, and during the late war all governments made it prac- tice to add liberal amount of sugar in the form of sweets to the ration of the scldier. Germany, at the beginning of the | war. had vast quantities of beet sugar
 on hand, and this sugar went very far toward keeping up the vitality of the peo- pie being used as a substitute for meat and other heat producing foods.
 When a hard drinker stops drinking he turns to sweets. finding in sugar a relief for the cravings for liquor. Now the confectioners intend to capitalize this ten dency on the part of drinkers, and they believe that when liquor is not procurable the men will buy candy, and from all parts of the country come reports of en- largements planned by confectioners and dispensers of sweet drinks
 Sugar has always been so universally
 used and so easily obtainabIe that we did
 rot realize, until war restrictions went into effect, how essential it was to our III L~s-1 L s~- reach the average man gave no thought to his taste for it, and poked his wife, or 1 sister or mother about their propensity for candy. When the war snatched the sugar bowl off the table, and substituted one or two little cubelets for generous self-helpings, the genus man kicked the hardest and roared the loudest. in spite of his patriotism Nature intended man to us as sugar in his diet, because it fur
 nishes food needed by the body, and it in- stilled in all of us a natural desire for sweets
 Sugar can be, and is. grown in practical ly every temperate country on the globe. It is made either from cane. grown prin cipally in the tropical countries where ex- cessive heat and abundant rainfall are
 net with, or from beets which are raised in more temperate climates and in more
 widely scattered districts. The United
 States is a large grower of both sugar cane ana SuSdT DeetS, ana yet US tOtdl
 production of sugar is sufficient to supply
 our needs for only IF weeks in the year.
 and three -fourths of our total consump-
 ton must be imported The cane dis
 trict of the United States Is restricted to
 a small area in the south. principally in
 Louisiana, but sugar beets are grown in
 a number of states. the principal ones
 being California, Colorado. Michigan. H. linois. Utah, Idaho. Indiana and Ohio
 Practically all of the sugar used in the United States is refined here, the cane pro- duction from foreign fields coming in the form of raw sugar, which is refined in some one of the IS big refineries main tained along the seacoast. Twelve of
 tl.ese refineries are located along the At lantic coast four near the Gulf of Mex leo and two on the Pacific coast.
 An investigation abroad has been giving some attention to the best means of protecting persons. such as firemen who are compelled to work about furnaces. The conclusion arrived at was that the most effective device
 is to fix immediately behind the fur
 mace door a narrow. oblong nozzle.
 through which cold air is blown up-
 ward, thus interposing a screen of relatively cool air between the door
 and furnace. This arrangement is to give adequate protection to the work
 CT and has the incidenal advantage that