Berita Hari Ini: When sugar was medicine


	April 14, 2026

Original photo by anilakkus/ iStock

Sugar used to be prescribed as medicine.

The beloved film character Mary Poppins is known for sweetly singing that “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” While it works wonders in the movie, the trick didn’t start with the fictitious nanny; healers, doctors, and pharmacists have relied on sugar to help patients choke down unsavory medications for thousands of years. But at one time, the sweet stuff wasn’t just an add-in — it was used as the remedy itself.

		Numbers Don't Lie

Amount of sugar (in pounds) the average American ate per year in colonial America

Amount of sugar (in pounds) eaten by the average American in 2019

Maximum weight (in pounds) of a mature sugar beet

Maximum height (in feet) of a mature sugarcane stalk

Sugar has been found in space.

Granulated, brown, powdered, pearl, cubed — there’s a lot of sugar on Earth. And surprisingly, there’s sugar in space, too. Researchers first discovered evidence of glycolaldehyde, a type of simple sugar, while looking for molecules in space that could support life. Glycolaldehyde is much less complex than cultivated Earth sugars, with only eight atoms compared to cane sugar’s 45. But when it’s found in space, researchers believe the stuff could play an important role in jump-starting life beyond our planet. That’s because glycolaldehyde can combine with a chemical called propenal to make ribose, a component of ribonucleic acid, which is similar to DNA and found in all living things. So far, glycolaldehyde has been found both in the interstellar gas cloud at the Milky Way’s center and in the gases surrounding a young star 400 light-years from Earth.