Did sugar drive the industrial revolution?

I've been wasting yet more time on what is fast becoming my most time-consuming pastime, watching debates on Youtube. Forget porn, videos of kids with lightsabres or cats getting flung into walls by ceiling fans. Watching the world's leading academics trade verbal blows is what gets my juices flowing.

Anyhoo, interesting man of the hour in Mr Niall Ferguson, who graced our screens with his The Ascent of Money programme and who thinks that Britain should have stayed out of the First World War and let Germany win. Hm.

He certainly knows how to take a fresh look at things. This is a quote from him discussing the history of our species and the role nutrition played in the feverish development that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago:

"Human nutrition. For most of human history men and women were malnourished. You can see that by the skeletons that survive. They really were rather short. And their lives were pretty brief. They didn't take long to be taken out by disease. And then there was a great breakthrough. It wasn't a particularly happy story because the great breakthrough involved enslaving millions of Africans and getting them to produce sugar for the consumption of sugar in Western Europe.

Sugar is a great source of energy. For the first time there are people in the world getting the calories they need, and those people are in Britain.

At this point you start to see a shift in the direction of proper nutrition. People start to get better and better fed. By the mid-twentieth century you have human beings getting a really good diet.

But then you tip over into the obese era. Because this thing can't be sustained. What happens is that the habits of the industrial era, lets have some sugar lets have some more sugar lets mmm that's pretty good lets put some corn oil and sugar and have that too...you reach a point of diminishing returns. You only have to take a walk through Atlanta airport...

There comes a point when you just can't actually get any bigger. You reach a point like in Monty Python's Meaning of Life when you're about to explode."