This is Back Story. I'm Brian Bellow.

Only 18.

Calories, petite spoon, a domino pure cane sugar.

Lift up your energy, feel great.

While you're holding down your weight.

In the 1950s, domino sold a sugar

by playing up how good it was for you.

A cane sugar!

And if that strikes you as strange,

just consider the way healthy eating was understood

100 years earlier.

If people are eating the wrong foods,

they will become more and more sexually licentious

and they will ultimately become kind of babbling idiots.

Today on the show, 200 years of nutritional advice

will ask why early Americans connected diet and sex

and why vegetarians, a generation later, connected diet was slavery.

What was the cause of a violent and corrupt society?

Well, for vegetarians, it was meat.

A history of health food today on Back Story.

Major funding for Back Story is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation,

the National Endowment for the Humanities,

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