India has a ravenous appetite for the sweet stuff if both traditional and modern sugars are counted. We also take excessive amounts of poor quality carbohydrates, especially, refined cereals, sugar-sweetened drinks, sweet treats and savouries, which ultimately turn into glucose, a simple sugar the body uses for energy. Indians today manifest an increased predilection for diseases linked to sugar (and the fat with which sugar is inextricably linked): obesity to diabetes, heart disease to hypertension, cancers to dementia, Covid-19 to black fungus.

Despite a long association with sugar, there have been very few attempts to understand sugar's hold in India. Books have been written mainly on the sugar industry, a few on diabetes and low-sugar diets. Sugar: The Silent Killer attempts to fill the lacunae. It attempts to demystify the way we eat now, the pre-eminence of refined sugar in our diet, what it does to us and what we can do to mitigate its malign influence. Weaving together history, culture and science, it seeks to analyse why we have such an intimate relationship with sugar, why it holds on to us so doggedly, why we can't do without it, even when we know it can harm us.