The Sweet Treat That Had The Tudors Hooked | Hidden Killers | Absolute History

overseas trade for new Goods potatoes tomatoes and the abundance of things that were previously rare like this did you know until the 1540s the English didn't have a word for this color and of course it led to the mass production of a substance so valuable and delicious they would have become known as white gold and not tobacco sugar sugar had been a fantastically expensive commodity throughout the Middle Ages but in Tudor times the price dropped sharply through using slave labor production costs were Kepler so on the back of the slave trade sugar became an attainable luxury for people of the middling sort the rather bland medieval diet of bread pottage beans lentils oats dairy and eggs occasional meat and if absolutely necessary vegetables began to be enhanced with sugar what's the process by which we could produce sugar it comes in to your house looking like this as a sugar loaf but it has to be broken up someone's got to sit there with a hammer and then a pestle and mortar and if you want sort of an icing sugar to sprinkle over things as a lovely dish which is just a salad of lemons sprinkled with dusted sugar well in some poor lads got to sit there and push it for a silk sieve so this is work hours in sugar as well as expense sugar becomes something that's a sort of desirable way of displaying status so you might use sweet treats at the end of a meal the banquet course it's known as with no sense that sugar could be bad for you they would even show off and play with sugar disguising it to look like some other delicacy so we've got here a little dish of nuts there's little sugar shells with a little bit of sugar and almond in the middle like a marzipan dusted with cinnamon to give it the nutty colour and you get to eat a pure sweet and what's this well wine earth did I lay up some bacon on the table we're supposed to be being spoilt and bacon is is a working man's food but not in this case it's been made to look like bacon by dying some of the sugar with cochineal and leaving the rest white to look like fat but it's in fact all sugar what are these those are little cuter roses in sugar and the middle one I've covered that in silver leaf so the one that looks silver is actually pure silver on top and that's that's showing your your diners real luxury because you've taken a luxury ingredient like sugar put man hours into it and then put a precious metal on top as well from nowhere sugar became the must-have item at any well-to-do meal what would it be like to have all of the sugar must be really intense yes I don't think we can really imagine it we've grown up with sugar all of our lives it's in most of our foods somewhere even bread so to go somewhere where your diet has been virtually sugar free and be given a table full of sugar I think it's gonna be a huge release of energy cause we could have Winer a battery course so if you just had sugar and alcohol for the first time you're gonna be buzzing so why don't you try one of the sugar nuts she was really naughty as sugar became more popular and its consumption more widespread the wealthy ostentatious sugar lover would have little idea of the trouble the lay ahead in the Museum of London storage vaults dr. Jelena McFarlane studies the remains of almost 20,000 bodies spanning the city's history it's a unique resource that reveals changes in disease patterns over time I've come to see what evidence 16th century teeth can provide for the impact of sugar on our health you know no tell me about these different scores what are they telling us well what they're showing us and telling us is the changes that we might see in the dentition and dental health and we see a marked change from medieval period the early media people coming through up until sort of the more recent times if I just turn this back over here you can see you've got a lovely set of teeth here and this is medieval yeah so this is early medieval and I mean they're at their a fairly young individual there they are an adult but you can see here that you haven't got any changes of decay you've got lovely enamel formation but if we come to this individual you can see here that you've lost the molars if you look at the mandible you can just see there you've just got roots of the teeth where they just really sort of been rotted away and the decay has completely destroyed all of the enamel so this one's a medieval skull and this one dates from pretty about sort of that mid 16th century so this is later on and this is then sort of the time than you've had sugar being introduced it's more freely available and you can see the consequences in their teeth so in both the Opera and the lower jaw you've got these huge gaps imagine how painful it would have been to go through that it must've been actually horrendous yes because I've had toothache and an abscess and it was absolutely horrible it was really really nasty so to have had that amount of teeth affected it must have been absolutely ghastly unfortunately the methods people in the Tudor period used to clean their teeth didn't really help in fact they unwittingly made things worse the cheaters would use toothpicks a lot and they would wipe their teeth with tooth clatters a variety of powders and pastes and solutions often with rose water actually often with sugar or honey in it as well which it's not very helpful with the decay they would sometimes use alabaster sticks and with particularly tough stains they might use a powder which was ground coral and pumice stone which would also take away the enamel of course they also had kissing comforts which were perfumed sweets which would take away bad breath but did nothing for the decay tragically the Tudors had no idea that they were in the grip of what would become a centuries-long addiction it's the sweet taste of sugar that attracts us all but part of the reason for that is that it has an effect on the chemicals of our body sugar helps us absorb an amino acid called tryptophan which is used to make the neurotransmitter serotonin and this is a chemical that affects the brain to make us feel happy and content it's one of the sort of like a pleasure chemical and so sugar is linked to that and so it's thought that that's why people like sugar and that's why it is sometimes described as being addictive in 1592 the tudors began recording deaths and mortality bills they include all manner of apparent causes and all the biggest killers make an appearance plague fever consumption and surprisingly teeth are there to bad teeth can you really die from bad teeth yes yes absolutely tooth disease can be a killer teeth are deadly if you've got that amount of decay happening and that can then also affect the bone so you can then form an abscess and if that's then draining internally you've got all of that poison actually going inside you that can cause you a lot of problems with your health teeth are pretty deadly actually the acids bacteria produce eat into the teeth allowing infection to take root bacteria can then get into the bloodstream and attack other parts of the body but without antibiotics there was very little the Tudor dentist could do beyond pulling teeth they would have had no understanding at all of the fact that sugar was damaging the rest of the body so high sugar levels could be predisposing them to be dead develop diseases like diabetes and then the bacteria from the decaying teeth would be damaging perhaps the heart valves and the kidneys so it could be causing damage to all of the internal organs and they would have no idea until it was too late so sugar really can be a killer yes because if you if you're affected that badly then it can have that really awful effect on you on your health and then cause you're you know your demise caused you to die [Music] between 1800 and 1900 the urban population in Britain increased tenfold London became the biggest industrial city in the Western world city dwellers and houses like this were creating an unprecedented demand for mod cons as well as life's necessities they were becoming mass consumers at the end of a production line [Music] supplying the household with basic foods in the newly expanded cities of up to three million people was a strategic challenge but thankfully by the late 19th century the staples of bread and milk had become cheaply available to cater for the new demands the Victorians pioneered new food processing techniques this left the consumer at the mercy of the unscrupulous merchants responsible for each part of the food chain one thing the Victorians loved above all was profit and the way to make profit of course is to use the cheapest ingredients and charge a high price for them so adulteration became very popular throughout the Victorian period some merchants would substitute real ingredients with cheap alternatives that would add weight and increase profit margins food adulteration had always gone on but the new manufacturing process meant it was now big business the food shops themselves change as well so you used to have a system whereby for example with bread the Miller was the same as the Baker was the same as the retailer now the Miller Mills the flour passes it to the baker the baker bakes and the retailer sells so you've got divorcing all the way along the chain that de personalizes the food chain people don't have the personal relationship with their customers therefore they think they can get away with it anything that is made manufactured or passes through the hands of somebody who can adulterate it by the mid Victorian period the chances are it will be adulterated these additions were astounding chalk iron sulfate and even plaster of Paris but for many buying processed foods release them from the drudgery of baking was time-saving and above all was affordable bread was particularly susceptible to tampering as many things could be disguised in it the biggest adulterants at the time was Alan and that's been used since the 18th century it's a whitener what it does is it enables you to take seconds or middlings all the lower grades of flour make them look whiter alum is an aluminium based compound often found today in detergent but when hidden in bread it not only makes it whiter but retains water so the bread feels more substantial in theory the amounts used were quite small and in theory they were not particularly dangerous to health but when you've got both the Miller adding alum and then you've got the baker adding alum as well then you start to build up the dose to levels where it really will affect your bowel system food historian Annie gray has prepared three loaves for me to illustrate the choice I would have had as a Victorian housewife whilst one loaf is pure two of them have plaster-of-paris alum and other undesirables added to them which is which well you're the Victorian housewife so I would say you're in the Baker's and you're presented with these leaves which one would you pick well they all look very attractive which is slightly worrying it's really quite dense though isn't it's quite heavy listen to that this one's still quite dense but again looks nice and smells really like rubber or something very odd it smells fine this is lighter it smells more like bread that I'm familiar with so my guess is that that this one is fine yes it is although it's interesting the way perception plays a role part of the reason that you're preferring that one I suspect is because we are predisposed now to like randomly breads and things that look healthy whether with your Victorian hats on you should be looking for the bread that is whitest and therefore will impress your dinner guests so I would probably be looking not to go for something wholemeal that looks healthy no day but something like this yes in the Victorian period people really want white bread it's the current obsession with wholemeal granary beautiful artisanal lows nothing you want white bread so Alan is a whitener that's put in and what which is which in terms of these two which is the one what Scott what this one is the Alan based one and this one is the one with plaster of Paris and being a flower from a Baker's point of view this one's brilliant because the third of the dry solids in this are not pure flour so you're making a reasonable saving on even the sort of low-grade flour that you're using but this housewives choice had dire consequences for the consumer if you were a worker eating 2 pounds of bread a day and not much else when you consider that a third of what you're eating just won't benefit you at all you can see why chronic malnutrition is such an issue and when you're adulterants are things like plaster of Paris and alum you can also see why chronic gastritis is a problem in late Victorian England if you're in a workhouse and you're a three year old you're going to start off with constipation you're then going to have irregular bowel movements and then that will lead to diarrhea and if you are a three year old in a workhouse and you've got chronic diarrhea that will lead to death [Music] another reason for adulteration was a desire to make food more attractive and appealing color was a key component and so there were things like colorants you might have something like lead chromate which is a very vivid yellow color in fact it's the yellow that's using the paint of American school buses it's that really bright yellow and that was putting things like mustard to give it a authentic mustard color without having to actually include too much of the real ingredient which was expensive tea is adulterated with everything from iron filings to dust to use tea leaves then black bled to make it look black green tea has Prussian blue in it I mean they're pretty lethal so after he'll hassle a london-based physician identified adulteration in 2,500 products and published his results in The Lancet this led to the first wave of legislation in 1868 the food adulteration laws were not very strong when they were initially put in and they were not particularly effective either people simply continued because it was very difficult to police it was very difficult to prove and even after it is known about even after a command hassles start to publicize the food adulteration people just simply don't know what adulterated food looks like versus non adulterated food so you might know that your bread is probably adulterated but either you don't have a choice or you just assume blithely that it happens to other people bread adulteration might ultimately kill you because of malnutrition but there was a greater more immediate danger that was part of every child's diet for the Victorians milk was a cheap an important source of calcium a healthy food it was thought however in 1882 20,000 milk samples were tested and revealed 1/5 had been adulterated a clue as to what was going on came from the domestic goddess of her day mrs. Beeton the Victorians sought advice on all manner of things and when it came to food mrs. Beeton was their guru according to the 1888 edition of her book of household management milk she said could be purified by preparations of which the principal constituent is boracic acid and she adds it is said that most of the milk that comes to London is treated in this way she concludes fortunately for the consumer it is a quite harmless addition but was it as harmless as mrs. Beeton believed microbiologist Matthew a verson has devised an experiment that tests mrs. Beaton's advice bur assic acid was a component of a product called borax an alkali which was used during the Victorian period to prolong the life of milk this milk doesn't taste very nice so you would throw it away the Victorian to say that's a waste so let's do something to it that removes the sour taste and what they would have done is added alkalis when fresh milk has a neutral pH measurement of around seven but over time as it's ours or spoils and becomes contaminated with bacteria it becomes more acidic and its pH measurement drops so the Victorians worked out probably by trial and error that if you add alkali to this it would neutralize the acid then I've calculated that that will neutralize the acid in this milk so just give it a little bit of a shake and then we'll show hopefully that it gives a pH closer to neutral so you can see this has gone back to six point six which is approximately neutral its neutralized the acid it's now made this milk palatable again this new Wonder alkali sold in the shops as borax was so popular it became a staple of the Victorian larder but alarmingly borax wasn't only used to treat milk it was also marketed as a wonderfully versatile product as I found when I read the journals of the time [Music] I'm just looking at these ads in the sketch from 1893 and there's this absolutely extraordinary one page and Californian household treasure it says it's absolutely pure and absolutely safe it possesses qualities that are exceptional and unknown to any other substance and it purifies water destroys bhakti it promises everything in fact borax promised too much as well as purifying milk it was brilliant cleaning your bath and your loom so what happened when borax ended up in the body borax or sodium borate if inhaled or ingested can cause severe irritation so if it's swallowed it can cause abdominal pain nausea vomiting diarrhea if you have a large amount of it it will start to affect other organs like the brain and the kidneys and if you have enough it come through fatal but just how much borax is harmful I've added a small amount of borax to neutralize the acid in this milk but of course if you had a pint of milk you need more borax so I calculated that you need this much borax to neutralize a pint of milk that's gone sour this is five grams and according to some people five grams is sufficient to potentially kill a small child so the addition of borax was not as harmless as mrs. Beeton suggested another vit could kill but by reducing the acid in the spoiled milk and disguising the sour taste borax was concealing another deadly threat the real problem is it doesn't get rid of the bacteria the underlying cause of the acid and those bacteria could still kill people bacteria like Brucella which causes undulating fevers and nasty fever that can go on for weeks at a time that's not particularly lethal but what would be lethal would be TB the bovine TB bacterium is present in cow's milk and this was what was able to flourish undetected in the milk with devastating effects bovine TB it's not the same TV that would cause the coughing symptoms that we associate with TB but what's called non pulmonary TB it spreads out into the extremities includes damage to internal organs damage to the burns and particularly problematic in children what other effects could drinking milk contaminated with the bovine TB bacterium have bovine TB could also cause damage to the bones and the spine for example it could cause an abscess in the bones of the spinal column which would soften the bone which would then collapse to form a wedge shape and if several of these vertebrae collapsed at once it could cause massive deformity of the spine this woman was actually particularly lucky because her TB damaged only the bones of the spine and not the spinal cord itself if the abscess had tracked and burst backwards into the spinal column it would have compressed the spinal cord and caused paralysis at best or death at worst effectively purifying this according to the standards of mrs. Beeton is like removing the biohazard tape and now it's basically pot look as to whether we have something that's contaminated and could kill us or something that's not contaminated and is safe to drink adding borax to milk allowed bovine TB bacteria to grow undetected exposing a generation to a lethal infectious disease it's estimated that virtually all children were exposed to bovine TB at some time during their upbringing and it's known that many of those children succumbed to that infection so you're saying that hundreds of thousands of people mostly perhaps children died as a result of that there are many studies one of which for example was a series of post mortems done in London in the 1890s and they did post mortems on 1300 children who had died 30 percent of those children died as a result of TB non-pulmonary TV almost certainly that came from milk now if you extrapolate that up it's considered likely that half a million children died of TB from milk during the Victorian era [Music] despite these horrendous deaths the purification of milk with alkali was not banned by legislation in the Victorian period and the problem of adulterated food continued until gradually consumer pressure led manufacturers to advertise their wares as pure and unadulterated I'm going to the kitchen now to find out how one apparently innocuous item of food caused mayhem in the post-war home the kitchen became so important in this age because it moved from being a private space into a public one it became a place to entertain guests and so attention was paid to what this previously hidden room looked like and of course it was the woman's place in the home in October 1955 in women's owned it described the kitchen as the heart and center of the meaning of home the place where day after day you make with your hands the gifts of love 14 years of food rationing finally came to an end on the 4th of July 1954 when restrictions on meat and bacon were lifted not surprisingly life in the kitchen suddenly became a whole lot more fun and gifts of love abounded it means of course that people are able to get more foodstuffs a wider range of things and they're able freely to go out and buy as much as they want so they can really indulge if you like on buying you know as much butter I hope they want to after having really sort of had to live by their ration books for a very long time people were excited about the new possibilities was food and into this gap came cookery writers writers like Elizabeth David and Margaret Patten infused food with passion tastes were changing quite literally and demand for meat in particular went through the roof the idea of the British family is to have a roast Sunday joint a beef or possibly lamb but what happens after 1955 or so is that you know gradually chicken is brought into the British diets to a much greater extent livestock like cattle could simply not be reared quickly enough in the numbers needed to satisfy demand chickens however could chickens had accounted for only one percent of British meat consumption in 1950 but now it's moment had arrived thanks to a revolution in modern British agriculture intensive rearing and factory farming were introduced and the resulting cheap chicken meat transformed the British diet so in 1954 five million table chickens were available for consumption in this country and by 1959 it's 75 million feeding an extra 70 million Birds was a colossal undertaking and one that could only be achieved by importing grain from other countries problem solved there wasn't it in the process of feeding birds and indeed livestock we also bring in imported of artificial feeds like ground meat and these come carrying already bacteria load so what you see is that these birds and indeed livestock are being fed Salmonella contaminated food so the chickens were affected by what they were eating and the intensive conditions in which they were kept processed and packaged aggravated the matter and then they landed in the post-war kitchen bred dead and ready to be roasted an analysis of outbreaks of food poisoning showed that the largest number occurred in the home many outbreaks were due to insufficient knowledge by housewives why was this the post-war period is the time at which domestic service really disappears from the middle-class home so middle-class women sometimes feel rather hard on by because they're having to fend for themselves and do most of household work in labor for themselves and of course this might create more problems in the kitchen because of course they would have been obliged to take primary responsibility for cooking and feeding the family which they may have found difficult if they'd been brought up in a home where all that work have been done by servants but housewife plays a cardinal role in this story partly because she is a person who handles the chicken in the house the hapless housewife was ever thus tasked with putting food in the mouths of her family not realizing that tonight supper is already a heaving mass of bacteria then inadvertently upped the ante even further [Music] well into the 50s you can still buy chicken sometimes they are what's called New York dressed which means that they've got wear guts left in intact they quite often come still with their heads attached and the housewife would expect to deal with that nothing she might or might not wash chicken when she gets at home and she might well not wash her own hands when she'd finished handling the bird and as such she was accidentally spreading this hidden killer throughout the home [Music] I've come to Matthew Ava sons laboratory to find out what the post-war chicken cooking housewife didn't know about salmonella because salmonella is too deadly to use in this experiment Matthew has contaminated some chicken with a similar though thankfully for me less lethal bacteria I'm going to show four different ways of cleaning my hands after handling the chicken so we can demonstrate just how pernicious this bacteria was so what I want you to do is just touch the chicken and then we're going to make an imprint of your fingers on this indicator plate okay the first time I don't clean my hands at all then I'll just lift the lid and you just put your fingers on to the surface after the second time of handling the chicken I wiped my hands with a paper towel hmm not sure this will do the trick it makes it feel less slimy but actually yes yes so when you're touching the meat you feel slimy but that's not actually the bacteria that's just the meat you don't feel the bacteria after the third time I'm touching the chicken I wash my hands in lovely clean water [Music] and lastly I touched the chicken then washed thoroughly with soap and water [Music] it actually takes a huge number of bacteria to infect somebody particularly if you're healthy between about a million and a billion bacteria but you can't see them and so the food that you're eating may look smell and taste completely normal okay Matthew let's see some results then okay so these are some plates that have been incubated overnight and this is the first one so this is with the unwashed hands so this is just after touching the bacteria the darker colors at the bacteria there are so many bacteria on here you can't see individual colonies individual spots they're literally thousands and thousands of bacteria on each finger after rinsing your hands under the tap though that's just simply the act of washing the bacteria down the sink we're not killing the bacteria at all you're actually making some significant strides to reducing the numbers there's still quite a few bacteria but you can see individual colonies the biggest difference of all though comes from using soap which doesn't kill the bacteria what soup does is it just improves the ability of us to wash away the bacteria from our skin so there are still some bacteria Matthew estimates that simply wiping your hands reduces the level of contamination by maybe 10 times while washing your hands with soap reduces contamination by probably a hundred thousand times so in short if they brought meat into the house that had been contaminated in this way and did anything with it and then didn't wash their hands really thoroughly yeah it could get everywhere yeah absolutely not only into your mouth but also onto the other food that you're preparing onto the surfaces around you onto utensils and to your children to your children absolutely if somebody eats salmonella infected food it between a day and two days after eating it you'll start to develop symptoms and those are likely to be things like diarrhea abdominal pain and cramps and possibly vomiting most people who develop salmonella food poisoning would recover within five to seven days it would be unpleasant but they wouldn't need any particular treatment but if you're particularly young say babies and young children or old or if your immune system is suppressed for any other reason perhaps you've got cancer or some other disease then you're much more susceptible to really severe infection and in that case it's possible that the bacterium could get into the bloodstream and then spread around the body and then it could affect other areas such as the brain and cause meningitis which could could be faithful or sent to see Mia a blood poisoning today 60 years later intensive farming conditions have improved and successive public health campaigns have resorted in a better understanding of food hygiene in the home [Music] there's no reason why you should be at risk from this particular hidden killer nowadays is there [Music] you

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Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, top 10, history documentary, tv shows - topic, suzannah lipscomb, suzannah lipscomb documentary, suzannah lipscomb hidden killers, hidden killers of the victorian home, hidden killers of the tudor home, hidden killers of the post war home, victorian documentaries, tudor documentary, hidden killers food, food documentary, Bridgerton, bridgerton real life, bridgerton real, bridgerton real story

Id: f8j27KPrfBU

Length: 36min 16sec (2176 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019