We have a huge national problem with the
massive unavoidable sugar content of our diets.
What this spells out is that we are actually diminished and unable to
observe it at all. That is bad.
On the personal side, I spent over twenty
years in the securities industry and this involved drinking an endless cup of
coffee. I got in the habit of adding a
couple of teaspoons of sugar. Then one
day I added up my cups, and measured out how much sugar I consumed. It was clearly over half a cup. This shocked me and the next long weekend, I
took two aspirins and quite coffee. This
ended the sugar loading then and there.
Now what is interesting is that up until
this time I could count on at least one unpleasant cold every year. I stopped having these colds and I never
associated that with the end of the sugar loading until now. Since then and only in the past year, I have
also tossed flour based products out of my diet and my blood sugar has nicely
dropped to a safer level.
Thus the take home is to retire both sugar
and flour from your diet as much as possible.
Once gone you will find that you can only consume small amounts rarely
Our Year of No Sugar: One Family’s Grand
Adventure
Published Apr 1, 2014
By Eve O. Schaub,
Once upon a time, I was
healthy; at least I thought I was.
Sure, I lacked enough
energy to get me through the day, but with all the commercials on TV touting
energy drinks for America’s tired masses, I always assumed I wasn’t the only
one suffering. And sure, everyone in my family dreaded the coming cold and flu
season; but again, I thought come January everyone develops some degree of
germophobia.
At least, that’s what I
thought until I heard some disturbing new information about the effects of
sugar. According to several experts, sugar is the thing that is making so many
Americans fat and sick. The more I thought about it the more this made sense to
me — a lot of sense. One in seven Americans has metabolic syndrome. One in three
Americans are obese. The rate of diabetes is skyrocketing and cardiovascular
disease is America’s number one killer.
According to this theory,
all of these maladies and more can be traced back to one large toxic presence
in our diet… sugar.
A Bright Idea
I took all of this new
found knowledge and formulated an idea. I wanted to see how hard it would be to
have our family — me, my husband, and our two children (ages 6 and 11) —
spend an entire year eating foods that contained
no added sugar. We’d cut out anything with an added sweetener, be it
table sugar, honey, molasses, maple syrup, agave or fruit juice. We also
excluded anything made with fake sugar or sugar alcohols. Unless the sweetness
was attached to its original source (e.g., a piece of fruit), we didn’t eat it.
Once we started looking
we found sugar in the most amazing places: tortillas, sausages, chicken broth,
salad dressing, cold cuts, crackers, mayonnaise, bacon, bread, and even baby
food. Why add all of this sugar? To make these items more palatable, add shelf
life, and make packaged food production ever cheaper.
Call me crazy, but
avoiding added sugar for a year struck me as a grand adventure. I was curious
as to what would happen. I wanted to know how hard it would be, what
interesting things could happen, how my cooking and shopping would change.
After continuing my research, I was convinced removing sugar would make us all
healthier. What I didn’t expect was how not eating sugar would make me feel better in a very real and tangible way.
A Sugar-Free Year Later
It was subtle, but
noticeable; the longer I went on eating without added sugar, the better and more
energetic I felt. If I doubted the connection, something happened next which
would prove it to me: my husband’s birthday.
During our year of no
sugar, one of the rules was that, as a family, we could have one actual
sugar-containing dessert per month; if it was your birthday, you got to choose
the dessert. By the time September rolled around we noticed our palates
starting to change, and slowly, we began enjoying our monthly “treat” less and
less.
But when we ate the
decadent multi-layered banana cream pie my husband had requested for his
birthday celebration, I knew something new was happening. Not only did I not
enjoy my slice of pie, I couldn’t even finish it. It tasted sickly sweet to my
now sensitive palate; it actually made my teeth hurt. My head began to pound
and my heart began to race; I felt awful.
It took a good hour lying
on the couch holding my head before I began to recover. “Geez,” I thought, “has
sugar always made me feel bad; but because it was everywhere, I just never
noticed it before?”
After our year of no
sugar ended, I went back and counted the absences my kids had in school and
compared them to those of previous years. The difference was dramatic. My older
daughter, Greta, went from missing 15 days the year before to missing only two.
Now that our year of no
sugar is over, we’ll occasionally indulge, but the way we eat it is very different.
We appreciate sugar in drastically smaller amounts, avoid it in everyday foods
(that it shouldn’t be in, in the first place), and save dessert for truly
special occasions. My body seems to be thanking me for it. I don’t worry about
running out of energy. And when flu season comes around I somehow no longer
feel the urge to go and hide with my children under the bed. But if we do
come down with something, our bodies are better equipped to fight it. We get
sick less and get well faster. Much to my surprise, after our no sugar life,
we all feel healthier and stronger. And that is nothing to sneeze at.
Eve O. Schaub is the author of Year of No Sugar: A Memoir. She holds a BA and a
BFA from Cornell University, and a MFA from the Rochester Institute of
Technology. Her personal essays have been featured many times on the
Albany, New York, NPR station WAMC. You can join Schaub’s family and take your
own Day of No Sugar Challenge on April 9, 2014.
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