Sweetness and Disease: How Capitalist Sugary Industries Have Destroyed Human Biology
César Abadía-Barrero (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Human Rights, UConn)
with a response by Yusuf Mansoor (History, UConn)
Wednesday February 26, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
In 400+ years of history (from early XVII to early XXI centuries) sugar went from being used primarily by the European royalty and their criminal imperial associates to being consumed in large amounts by all inhabitants of the planet. In this talk, I draw from Sidney Mintz’s classic Sweetness and Power to briefly present the history of sugar. Then, I update this history by presenting the incredible growth and profits of the sugary drinks and ultra-processed food industries. By asking what has happened to our human biology as we have replaced real food with more free sugars and processed substances, I develop connections with several diseases, primarily diabetes and obesity that have reached pandemic proportions. I present how the efforts to curb down consumption and enforce regulations have been met with strategies to co-opt and influence policy makers, aggressively market their products to vulnerable populations, and fund and promote biased research. By naming some of the capitalists of the largest transnational “food” industries and their enormous wealth and profit rates, and by connecting their business success with the progressive destruction of our biology, this first chapter of a larger book project intends to test if we can present a material history of our deteriorating human biology for broad audiences; a material history that argues that to understand human biology we need to understand the history of capitalism.
César Abadía-Barrero is a Colombian activist/scholar and associate professor of anthropology and human rights at the University of Connecticut. His research approach is grounded in activist, collaborative, and participatory action research frameworks and integrates critical perspectives to study interconnections among capitalism, human rights, and communities of care. He has been a member of or collaborated with collectives and social movements in Brazil, Colombia, Cameroon, Spain and the United States examining how for-profit interests transform access, continuity, and quality of health care, and how communities resist forms of oppression and create and maintain alternative ways of living and caring.
He is the author or editor of several books and articles, including I Have AIDS but I am Happy: Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil (2011 in English and 2022 in Portuguese), Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care (2022, English and Spanish editions), and Countering Modernity: Communal and Cooperative Models from Indigenous Peoples (2024).
His current collaborative research in Colombia follows decolonial proposals in health and wellbeing after Colombia’s 2016 peace accord, focusing on Indigenous peoples’ conceptions of Buen Vivir, collective healings, medicinal plants, and peace building. His other research line centers on the dysregulation of human bodies due to the capitalist transformation of labor, consumption, and the environment. He is the director of the Buen Vivir and Collective Healings Initiative at the University of Connecticut, and co-director of the Global Health & Human Rights Research Program at the Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut.
Yusuf Mansoor is a PhD candidate in the History Department, and the Draper Dissertation Fellow at the UCHI. His research focuses on Native Americans and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth century, with a focus on New England. He has received research fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, the American Philosophical Society, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.
