Year of No Sugar (4 page)

I had been looking for the Occam's razor solution (to badly paraphrase, “The simplest answer is usually the correct one”) to the problem of modern eating. After reading Michael Pollan counsel with Zen-like simplicity, “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants,” I decided this was the closest I'd heard to something sustainable that made sense. From that point on, I positioned myself as a concerned mom who cares about what her family eats
within reason
. If the supermarket didn't carry free-range meat, I'd grudgingly buy the regular chicken. If I couldn't find nice-looking apples that were organic, I'd buy the local ones that weren't. I'd visit the farmer's market and try hard to buy local, but I would surely buy a jalapeño from Mexico if it meant I could make my turkey chili that night. You couldn't be Mary Practically Perfect Poppins all the time, so I gave it my best shot and then let it go. You might call it the “happy medium, dammit” approach.

And then, one day, I became aware of a disturbance in the natural order of things.

I distinctly remember the first time it came up. We
were planning Greta's fifth birthday party, and one of the mothers had asked about the ingredients of my cupcakes. I rattled them off easily, confident there would be no objections to my from-scratch home baking: flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla—

“Oh,
vanilla
,” she stopped me. “Ariella can't have vanilla. It has corn syrup in it. It makes her
crazy
.”

“Corn syrup?”
Really? What an odd thing to bother worrying about
, I thought. Although the mom assured me that it was in “
everything
” and that her daughter became erratic and hyperactive anytime she consumed anything with this ingredient in it, I was silently skeptical. After all, this was not some Day-Glo impostor from the “bakery” aisle at the supermarket; this was
home
baked! Made with
love
! As far as I was concerned, homemade food
was
health food. Period. Wasn't that what Michael Pollan had effectively said?

Later on, I came to realize that what my friend had been talking about was, in fact,
high-fructose
corn syrup. And about three milliseconds after making that connection I began to notice that, well, yeah, HFCS
was
everywhere, actually. Pretty much every time I read an ingredient list on a box,
there it would be
, like an annoying ex-boyfriend who can't take a hint already.
Huh. Well, that is a little weird
, I thought. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, high-fructose corn syrup was coming up in conversations, people were talking about it in wide-eyed, “Oh, but haven't you
heard
?” tones. HFCS, it seemed, was fast becoming the Area 51 of the food world: prone to controversy, conspiracy theories, and eventual dismissal by most of the couldn't-be-bothered population at large. Yet, right then, at that moment, it seemed that the “couldn't be bothereds” were shrinking, and
the conspiracy theorists were gaining. Overnight, commercials and magazine ads appeared featuring attractive moms duking it out over whether containing high-fructose corn syrup
meant
anything. Suddenly, products began touting their lack of it on packaging: “Made with Real Cane Sugar!” which really meant: “No Mysterious, Chemically-Sounding Potentially-Maybe Bad Stuff!” Entire websites cropped up devoted to promoting high-fructose corn syrup's nutritional evil or innocence.

It seemed that the reason people were so quickly and easily freaked out was based exclusively on the fact that we had suddenly—as a culture—all come to the simultaneous realization how
in everything
this stuff was. Americans can put up with a
lot
of stuff, as long as they have at least the illusion of a choice in the matter; here, the supermarket illusion of choice had been revealed to be no choice at all—there was no escaping demonic-sounding “HFCS.” Ooo! It was as if the food industry had made our decisions for us, overnight, at some questionable warehouse on the outskirts of town, and we were all waking up the next day realizing it after the fact. They seemed to be saying to us: oh, so you
want
to buy bread at the supermarket? Crackers? Salad dressing? You say you're too
busy
to make these things yourself at home? Well, we're businessmen; we can be reasonable. Listen—we're gonna make you an offer you can't refuse…

I was skeptical, though. Just like acai berries are magically
good
(never mind why), high-fructose corn syrup is magically
bad
(never mind why)? Yet, like many concerned consumers, I just didn't like the
sound
of it. What the hell
was
it? Why was it everywhere? Why was it so hard to find crackers or cereal or even
bread
without it? How much of this stuff were we eating,
anyway, without ever having realized it? And what was wrong with using sugar or honey or something, you know, more
natural
? So, based on this oh-so-highly-scientific analysis of the facts, our family abruptly stopped buying products containing high-fructose corn syrup. There were still plenty of other things to buy, and it only entailed a
bit
more label reading. Michael Pollan advised buying food products with no more than five ingredients anyway, so we tried to stick to that too. We made our bread at home with local honey; we bought raw sugar for homemade cookies and pies. And once again, we felt like good people who cared about what our family ate.

For a while.

 

²
Adam Gopnik, “Sweet Revolution,”
The New Yorker
, January 3, 2011, 51.

And so it came to pass that our author watched the ninety-minute video by Dr. Robert Lustig. And the words of the prophet burned with the light of truth in her eyes. She was not blinded, nay, but she was truly perturbed. And she saw with a new vision, that the vile substance which, yea, had brought pestilence and disease in its wake, was indeed everywhere. And she was totally freaked out.

Here's the thing. I'm never going to be confused for a doctor or a nutritionist, or anybody who has credentials of any sort, really. I'm pretty much
not
the person you'd ask to explain any medical theory of any kind. It's okay—I
know
I'm not the next Sanjay Gupta, and I can live with that.

But our family had decided to
not eat added sugar for a year
(the parameters of which I promise to explain in detail in the chapters to come), and it's important to understand that this wasn't simply a whim or a fun, kicky idea or even a masochistic challenge. Rather, it was really and truly the result of being
convinced
, in a fundamental way, that
sugar is everywhere, it's making us all fat and sick, and almost no one realizes it
—and then wanting to do something about it. Something
real
that would demonstrate to us, and others, what it entails to get away from sugar.

You know the commercial where the one smart, concerned-looking mom is making the other mom feel really stupid for avoiding high-fructose corn syrup? “Whether it's corn sugar or cane sugar, your body can't tell the difference” is the industry tagline. The funny thing is, they are right.

In “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” Dr. Robert Lustig explains that, contrary to popular opinion, high-fructose corn syrup is
not worse
for you than ordinary table sugar; it's simply
equally bad
. The reason? Because of the
fructose
. And here is where the argument becomes tricky. When you stop talking about sugar and start talking about
fructose
, and bringing out words like
ghrelin
and
leptin
and
antidisestablishmentarianism
, people start to glaze over and get fidgety. Tell them that
fat
makes you
fat
, or
carbs
make you
fat
, or foods that are
beige
make you
fat
, and people listen, remember, and believe. But tell them that fructose fails to suppress ghrelin? Not so much.

Consequently, what follows is my best attempt to summarize the not-always-so-very-straightforward argument as to what sugar (fructose) does in your body (bad things) and why it is such a scary thing (it's killing us). As our project began to unfold, I would come to rely heavily on the arguments of two important no-sugar advocates who understand biochemistry a lot better than I ever will: the aforementioned Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at UC San Francisco, and David Gillespie, author of a very interesting book published in Australia titled
Sweet Poison
. (Statistics from other sources such as the CDC or JAMA are cited.)

So without further ado, let's unveil our Handy Dandy Cheat Sheet:

That's a lot to swallow all at one time, isn't it? But let's take it point by point:

1.
All
sugar contains fructose
: Name a sugar, any sugar: table sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, molasses, agave, evaporated cane syrup, honey, fruit juice, powdered sugar, brown sugar, crystalline fructose, and so on. In each, the sweetness has been extracted from the original sources, be it fruit, beets, maple sap, honeycomb, or sugar cane.

In most sweeteners, the sweetness comes from a combination of both glucose and fructose.
³
Percentages of fructose in sweeteners vary: both table sugar and HFCS are roughly half fructose, half glucose, whereas supposedly healthy agave contains up to
90 percent
fructose. Now here's an important part: Glucose is Good. Glucose is what your body, and all living things, use to transport energy through the body and is what Lustig refers to as “the energy of life.” It is the inability of the body to access that
good
glucose that results in diabetes, but more on that in a minute.

2. Fructose does not satisfy hunger
so you eat more food than your body needs.
Once upon a time, our bodies only encountered fructose in tiny amounts from seasonal fruit. Not only was that fruit fairly hard to come by, but lots of fiber and micronutrients necessarily came with it, thereby helping balance any potential negative effect of that small amount of fructose.

Problems would only begin to arise about seven thousand years ago, when humans got a bright idea. One day, after
enjoying sucking on stalks of sugar cane for centuries, people decided to try
extracting
the best part. The resulting sweet sap became wildly popular of course, so much so that folks who didn't have ready access to the sugar cane began experimenting with other things toward a similar end, such as extracting the juice from a particularly sweet variety of beets. Nonetheless, these were labor-intensive processes and sweeteners would remain prohibitively expensive for some time. It wouldn't be until the industrial age that sugar would suddenly and irrevocably begin a downward spiral in price, and correspondingly, people began adding it to more and more things. Finally, in 1975, HFCS arrived on the scene as the ultimate cheap ingredient—made from government-subsidized corn and used as filler in everything from lunch meats and soup to baby formula.

Unfortunately for us, however, fructose does a very funny thing biochemically speaking, something we couldn't have begun to notice until huge volumes of people began consuming huge amounts of the stuff over long periods of time. Fructose, as it turns out, exploits a loophole in your body's carefully orchestrated ballet of hormones: fructose does not suppress ghrelin (the hunger hormone)
nor
does it stimulate insulin or leptin (the full-feeling hormone). You get the fructose's
calories
, of course, but
you are still as hungry as if you hadn't eaten them
. So you keep eating.

Here's a scary instance of what this really means in practice: studies have shown that a teenager who drinks a soda before a meal
will eat more
at that meal,
⁴
not less—and in our
culture, of course, that likely means you will eat
more sugar
. Talk about a vicious cycle.

Now imagine if our country's food system were dominated by eating, say, cardboard. We all found cardboard unbelievably delicious, so we crushed it up and put it in
everything
. Only trouble being: cardboard isn't something our body needs or wants, so it doesn't register with our hormones—it doesn't make us feel full. So we keep eating it and eating it. Our bodies have to do something with all that cardboard, so we all start growing “cardboard bellies,” all the while wondering why we are always so hungry, why it is always so hard to lose weight. This is what fructose is like.