Year of No Sugar (12 page)

But I could see that this dextrose question wasn't going away, and I just wasn't confident I was going to get this one right by myself. After all, my one and only ten-minute, convenience-food dinner was riding on this. Lustig wrote me back—no doubt from the Situation Room—and kindly responded that dextrose is made from corn and that, essentially, “dextrose
is
glucose,” and therefore for our fructose-free purposes, fine.

!!

It was
really
nice. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say really, really,
really
nice to have at least one “what about?” question end with a
definitive
“why, yes, you
can
have that!” even if it
was
dextrose and not, you know, hot fudge sundaes.

Later I would come to realize that this dextrose question was far, far more important than whether we could eat farfalle with spinach and cream sauce when the cook was feeling listless. Soon after getting Dr. Lustig's response, I read a book that was to change my life—and our year—again, called
Sweet Poison
, written by an Australian author named David Gillespie.

In it, Gillespie told a story I had now become familiar with: the story of fructose. If you've read the foreword to this book, you already know his story: once upon a time, there was a lawyer who was the father of four children, when one day his wife announced she was having twins. Gillespie, at that time, was overweight, unenergetic, and now, with the knowledge that he was soon to be father to a solid
half-dozen
progeny, completely petrified.
How on earth am I going to keep up with my kids?
he thought. Although he had tried every diet he
could think of, he had never succeeded in finding a plan that worked, long term, for maintaining a healthy weight. Why is it, he wondered, that exercise and diets don't seem to
work
? Why is it that our ancestors never had this problem? What's the key difference between the way people once ate and the way we eat now that makes all the difference?

He was determined to figure it out, and figure it out he did. After piecing together mountains of research, Gillespie ultimately made the decision to try one thing, just one: eliminate added fructose from his diet. In doing so he lost ninety pounds. Today, not only do he and his family abstain from sugar, but so do countless other friends, acquaintances, and members of his community around him, who were convinced simply by observing Gillespie's dramatic transformation.
³³

If watching “The Bitter Truth” had turned on the a-ha lightbulb in my brain, reading
Sweet Poison
turned on a second lightbulb, one that filled in the details where before there had been shadow. A non-doctor, Gillespie has a terrific knack for translating all the various medical findings and research into accurate but comprehensible layperson speak. He is also, incidentally, very funny, which can be helpful when you're hanging in there by your fingernails talking about phosphofructokinase 1 and the islets of Langerhans.

I enjoyed the book immensely and felt a great sense of confirmation in what we were doing. Maybe—just maybe—we
weren't entirely insane. But just as significant for me would be the discovery Gillespie had made with regard to cooking because what he had happened upon was the idea of using
powdered dextrose in cooking
. Powdered dextrose? I had never heard of such a thing. Heck, it wasn't even on the alternative sweeteners micro-shelf at Nature's Market! This was truly uncharted territory and I began to wonder: how weird was this really gonna be?

Following Gillespie's instructions in the book, I ordered a twenty-pound container of the fine white powder.
Could this be?
I wondered.
Could we really have a dessert that didn't have sugar in it
or
taste like bananas? And was actually
good
?
I fairly salivated at the prospect. At last the box arrived and it was…enormous! The orange plastic jar was roughly the size of a beach ball and was packaged similar to those colossal jars of weight-gain powder you see in vitamin stores. Seriously? I wondered…

Spurred on by what was left of my poor, neglected sweet tooth, I tackled David's recipe for Strawberry Ricotta Cheesecake. I was fully prepared to be deeply disappointed. I reminded the kids this was an experiment and might not be as wonderfully delicious as the name might suggest. But it did
look
pretty great in the oven, rising and browning just a bit on the top…and the smell was a warm, faint strawberry-inflected sweetness,
distinctly
dessert-y.

It cooled on the stove and sank a bit while we had dinner. After dinner, I eyed the cheesecake with great trepidation before finally cutting into it and distributing the plates. It sure did
look
good but…

One bite, however, and my skepticism evaporated. In its place appeared surprise—also, delight. I smiled big. I looked
around and saw that the kids were smiling big too—in between big bites of white fluffy dessert, dessert that contained
no fructose
…
no added sugar
. And it was GOOD!
Really
good!

If this was a made-for-TV movie, this would have been the exact moment that the soundtrack featuring the hallelujah chorus would break in, playing jubilantly over jump cuts of us stuffing our faces. I couldn't stop exclaiming how
good
it really was! I mean, it wasn't
S-W-E-E-T
but it was quietly
sweet
—which, it seemed, we were starting to prefer anyway. We all polished off our plates. The kids immediately were getting ideas: could we make ice cream with dextrose? How about sugar cookies?

A new world had opened.

_______

We had found something to bake with, without the toxic effects to our bodies of fructose and without endangering the world's supply of bananas. What more could we possibly ask for? Well, I'll give you one word: chocolate.

Sure, we had our Ovaltine, which was a decent hot chocolate stand-in, and I could even make a delicious brownie now that we had dextrose to mix with the cocoa, but
actual
chocolate was one thing we just were not going to get. Or so we thought.

And then one day Steve came home with a shiny, foil-wrapped bar. It looked an awful lot like my long-lost friend chocolate, and I felt sinful just looking at the thing. I gasped and averted my eyes.

But, “No!” he said. “Look—
we can eat this
.”

Now, when your name is Eve, you tend to be a little wary
of temptation scenarios, so I eyed my husband keenly. In my desperation to find sweet substitutes that our Year of No Sugar could accommodate, I thought I had seen it all. Could it possibly be there was something I had missed?

ChocoPerfection
was the name, with the tag line “Sugar Free…Naturally!” If it was good—which I highly doubted—how could it possibly be okay? Upon hearing of our project, our friend Ellen had given the bar to Steve.

“I,” she had said ominously, “am about to change your life.”

We eyed the gold wrapper. We read the ingredients. We reread the ingredients. There were two I wasn't familiar with: oligofructose and erythritol. Hmmmm. Sounded suspicious. I looked it up. Turns out, oligofructose is extracted from fruits or vegetables—in this case from chicory root. It is touted as being not only
not bad
, but it is, in fact, health promoting on account of the extremely high amount of dietary fiber (one ChocoPerfection bar brings with it an astounding 52 percent of recommended dietary fiber) as well as “probiotic” effects—which is to say it is believed to stimulate the growth of good bacteria in the colon.

Then we have erythritol. I found out that it is a “sugar alcohol,” which generally isn't such a good thing, since sugar alcohols such as xylitol and Maltitol are known to be associated with laxative properties and “gastric distress.” Ew! However, according to unerring wisdom of the Internet, erythritol is unique: unlike other sugar alcohols, it is absorbed in the small intestine and then excreted. Translation?
No
tummy troubles.

The upshot was that, together, oligofructose and erythritol might just have a pretty good thing going. They supplement one another's sweetness and counteract one another's
aftertaste. There were only two downsides that I could see, and they didn't appear to be deal breakers: firstly, after we tried our bar from Ellen, I found that that boatload of fiber made my tummy gurgly. Now, could I live with that if it meant I could have real (tasting) chocolate? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full. My second complaint was its expense: one tiny 1.8-ounce bar goes for between three and four dollars—nearly a dollar a bite. Again, if that meant I could have an actual (tasting) authentic (seeming) bona fide (your results may vary)
chocolate bar
once in a while during our long, long, LONG Year of No Sugar? Pardon me while I go mortgage the house. I have chocolate to buy, people.

Just like with dextrose powder, we would have to order these bars online. (We had entered the Land of Extreme Groceries, apparently.) That's when we found out that the same company also made a granular “sugar” for use in baking. At forty some dollars a pound, it wasn't exactly going to make the folks at Domino quake in their sugar-encrusted boots, but to us it sounded like we might just have hit the jackpot. We placed an order for a batch of the dollar-per-bite bars and one
very
pricey little bag of “sugar.”

When our package at last arrived, it didn't take long to realize that the faux sugar was a bit of a disappointment. We tried a few test batches of peanut butter cookies and found that the texture was off—a little too crunchy, dry, and grainy—plus there was a distinct aftertaste to it. The bars, however, were just like that first one we had tried: good. Not amazing but
good
. In fact, they were just chocolate-like enough that we actually felt like we were cheating.

Which was actually a good point:
were
we cheating? The more I thought about it, the more I just felt…
weird
about the
whole idea. I couldn't help but feel that somehow this was not entirely okay.

I tried to puzzle it out: from everything I could discern, oligofructose and erythritol
don't
turn to fat in your bloodstream,
don't
raise blood sugar levels, and
don't
even cause hammer toes. I wondered: Is this an artificial sweetener because it isn't sucrose/fructose, or is it a natural sweetener because it comes from chicory root? If the point is to avoid fructose, as well as artificial sweeteners that have known negative effects on the body, then we
were
doing that! If the point is to avoid not only extracted fructose, but any stuff that
simulates
fructose, then we
weren't
doing that! Help!

I felt so conflicted and confused that once again I emailed my question to Dr. Lustig and waited breathlessly for—at last!—a definitive answer. What he graciously sent me, instead, was this:

“As to non-nutritive sweeteners, there are pharmacokinetics (what your body does to a drug) and pharmacodynamics (what a drug does to your body). We have the former (that's how they got FDA approval), but none of the latter. So I can't recommend any of them. But stay tuned, this information may be coming in the future.”

Hmm. Well, that's essentially where I had ended up before: I don't know. The thing I realized is that Dr. Lustig is a doctor and I'm a writer; he was offering a doctor answer to what was, for me, a writer question.

So I kept searching. I returned to my other big inspiration: David Gillespie had this to say in his book
Sweet Poison
:

Hmm again. I was getting closer to an answer. Gillespie wasn't talking about oligofructose, per se, but as Lustig had pointed out,
all
these new sweetening options are big question marks at this point. And question marks, Gillespie reminds us, don't have a terrific track record when it comes to our bodies' health.

But back to ethics: it still just felt like cheating to me. Steve was a big ChocoPerfection fan and much less conflicted about the whole thing than I was. His argument was that even with our special chocolate bars, spending a year avoiding all added sugar was still really,
really
hard. Which is true. And yet, don't you just have to go with your gut, so to speak?

So we slowly,
slowly
finished off the special chocolate bars and decided not to order more. The bag of “sugar” was shoved to the back of the pantry shelf. Sigh.

Banana, anyone?

 

²³
How many times have I looked over in a restaurant to see a child enjoying French toast and apple juice and wondered if the parents would be equally fine with ordering them the nutritional equivalents of cake and soda for breakfast instead?

²⁴
Thanks to a new label I have recently discovered, our kids' prescription vitamins, in fact, do not contain added sugar. Yay!

²⁵
United States Department of Agriculture, National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference
http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/show/2274?fg=&man=&lfacet=&count=&max=25&sort=&qlookup=lemon&offset=&format=Full&new=

²⁶
An eight-ounce glass of juice might be considered standard. How much fructose would be in
that
? Approximately 12.99 grams.

²⁷
European Ovaltine's ingredients are things like malt extract, milk, cocoa powder, whey, and a slew of elaborate-sounding vitamins (such as “ferric orthophosphate” and “thiamine mononitrate”). Not exactly Michael Pollan's five ingredients or fewer, but we'd take it.