All posts by Eve Ogden Schaub

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About Eve Ogden Schaub

Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it. Author of Year of No Sugar (2014) and Year of No Clutter (2017) and most recently Year of No GARBAGE (2023). Find her on Twitter @Eveschaub IG or eveschaub.com.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 41

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Yeah. But what about…?

There are LOTS of “but what about…?”s that have cropped up over the last three-plus months of the No Sugar Project that I keep meaning to address, so here we go…

Medicine: as an obsessive and over-protective mom, medicine is off the table, as far as I’m concerned. Sugar Project or no, if my child is sick I am not, repeat NOT going to quibble about trying to find no-sugar Tylenol to quell their fever or some effective alternative to a tablespoon or two of canned fruit syrup to quiet a seriously upset tummy (did you know about that one? It works.) Nope. Medicine is not food, it’s a whole other category. However, as I’ve mentioned before, we have enjoyed remarkable health these past three months, given the time of year and the fact that we have not one but two children in elementary school, which as we all know is Club Med for germs.

All that being said, I’m still fully prepared to bitch about it. Do you remember the days when taking medicine was just awful? Like, gag-reflex-inducing-awful? I’m not saying we should bring back the bad-old-days, but it is troubling to notice that standard medicine cabinet items such as Children’s Tylenol and cough drops have truly been transformed into candy by the addition of HFCS. Ask any mom: it’s to the point where kids beg to have additional unnecessary doses. Now that kind of scares me.

(Thank you to Kate for bringing up this important subject! PS: Hope you are feeling much better.)

Lastly: what about vitamins? Thank you to Katrina- I think- for pointing out that the children’s chewable vitamins prescribed by our pediatrician almost certainly have sugar in them to make them palatable. This is a tougher one: are vitamins “medicine” or “food”?

Lemon and Lime Juice: Also tricky. Technically, we’re not drinking fruit juice, or consuming anything sweetened with fruit juice. However, what about when you aren’t sweetening, such as when you add lemon or lime juice? Technically, there’s still fructose involved, and technically, as fruit juice, that amount is going to be concentrated and minus the fiber and other micronutrients we’d be getting if we were eating the whole fruit, right?

Currently, I use lemon juice quite a bit: in salad dressing, hummus, and several pasta and vegetable recipes. Because of the lack of sweetness, it took a while for me to remember that it is still “fruit juice,” nonetheless. But can this fruit juice be justified on the No Sugar Project?

So I did some research. According to the handy dandy nutrient calculator found on the USDA National Nutrient Database, http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/index.html) there is 0.53 grams of fructose in the 48 grams of juice in an average lemon, and 0.27 grams fructose for 48 grams of lime juice.

So if we try to compare apples to apples (ha ha), by using that same amount (48 grams) how do other fruits measure up? If I am using this nutrient calculator right- of which there is absolutely no guarantee- unsweetened apple juice comes in at 2.75 grams of fructose. For unsweetened grape juice you get a whopping 3.53 grams of fructose. Orange juice, for some reason on this website only lists “sugars” (rather than breaking that down into separate components of fructose, lactose, glucose and so on.) Still, at 4.03 grams “sugars” per 48 grams raw orange juice… wow!

Okay, so I’m not sure how to handle this one. Do we have a “fructose threshold”? I don’t know. I don’t want to give up my hummus, so help me out here people. Comments? Rationalizations? Anyone?

Coconut Water: Just the other day I was in the health food store and picked up a bottle of coconut water to drink. Remember how very many drinks are verboten on No Added Sugar? Practically all of them… we can drink water, milk, and for the grown-ups: coffee and (our no added sugar exception) wine. Hmmmm…. I thought. Does “coconut water” count as “fruit juice?” After doing some research the answer seems to be yes. According to Livestrong.com, a serving of coconut water has 5.4 grams of combined simple sugars: glucose and fructose. No matter how you slice it, that’s got to be quite a bit of fructose. Too bad.

Dextrose: Remember my “ose” debate? I consulted with Dr. Robert Lustig, who kindly responded that “dextrose is glucose,” and therefore for our fructose-free purposes, fine. It was nice to have at least one “what about?” question end with a “why, yes, you can have that!” even if it was dextrose and not hot fudge sundaes.

Brown Rice Syrup: I have yet to encounter this ingredient, but I have found some recipes calling for it online, so it seems worth investigating. According to Wikipedia, it is “a sweetener derived by culturing cooked rice with enzymes” which is composed of maltose, glucose and maltotriose. Woo-hoo! No fructose in sight!

On the other hand, my friend Katrina weighed in: “Yeah, too bad it tastes like dog poo.” Oh. Well, then again she also thought our beloved GoRaw raisin granola bars tasted like “bird seed” (like that’s a bad thing!?) so who knows? She’s going to give me some to try out- stay tuned.

Malted Barley: My dear friend Wikipedia informs me that “barley malt syrup” is “produced from sprouted barley” and is made up of maltose, complex carbohydrate and protein. It is described as roughly half as sweet as refined sugar, but with a “malty” taste, “best used in combination with other natural sweeteners.” Yeah, well, so much for that part.

Now I must take a moment to once more explain how NOT SAVVY I am with regard to nutritional matters: full disclosure… science and my brain don’t like one another much. So, honestly, I had to read further to realize why “complex carbohydrate” couldn’t mean “fructose” in disguise. Well, you probably paid attention in health class and already know the answer: fructose is a “simple sugar” aka “monosaccharide,” which is to say not complex. Complex carbohydrates are chains of three or more sugar molecules linked together, which apparently makes all the difference.

Which brings us back to the “-ose” question. The suffix “-ose” refers to simple sugar, again according to Wikipedia: “For example, blood sugar is the monosaccharide glucose, table sugar is the disaccharide sucrose, and milk sugar is the disaccharide lactose.”

So complex carbohydrates are fine. Simple carbohydrates, aka simple sugars, aka mono- and di-saccharides are also fine, as long as we avoid that one nasty, bad seed mono-saccharide: fructose. Well when we put it that way, it doesn’t sound so very hard, does it?

Agave: I had been wondering about agave/ agave nectar/ agave syrup… first of all, what is it? Thanks to Wikipedia I now know that it is a Mexican perennial succulent, similar to ornamental Yucca plants. Yum.

Second of all, terms like “nectar” and “syrup” would seem to indicate the extraction of the sweet “juice” of the plant, leaving behind the fiber and any other beneficial micronutrients. So I wondered- is there a a form of agave which includes the plant fiber? Turns out no, unless you consider razor strops or hand soap (two of the uses for the non-sap parts of the plant) edible. Oh well.

“Contains Less Than 2 percent Of The Following”: A friend of ours who is a doctor recently pointed out, and rightly so, that abstaining from products with a vanishingly small amount of sugar doesn’t really do anything nutritionally… meanwhile we are still having wine (my and my husband’s one “exception” item) which has comparatively significant amounts of fructose, being fermented fruit juice, of course. (According to the USDA website listed above an average 5 oz glass of red wine contains .91 grams of total sugars- it is not broken down further into glucose and fructose.)

Well, true. I suppose, in the alternative we could say that we could eat any food for which the sugar falls in the “less than 2 percent” category, and have that be our exception, except that that sounds awfully clinical to me. Plus, I’d sorely miss my nightly glass of wine, and feeling more deprived than I already do now is not very high on my list of things to do. I don’t know. What do you think?

A Year of No Sugar: Post 40

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People are funny when it comes to sugar. Last post I wrote about a fundraising event we attended over the weekend to benefit the owners of a local general store that burned down in the night: the owners, who are much beloved by our community, barely escaped with their lives, jumping out the second story windows, and managing to save only one of their three dogs. Another local man who was sleeping in a small building next door was killed.

So the fundraiser was a tremendous outpouring of emotion in response to the sudden and tragic nature of this event. In addition to a massive dinner with live music, there was to be an equally massive silent auction and two different raffles going on throughout the afternoon, as well as a bake sale.

The day before the event, like everybody else, we went to drop off our family’s donations at the firehouse. It was very social, everyone standing around and marveling at the variety and quality of different auction items, (“Have you seen this one?”) But what I reeled at was on the other table: the bake sale table. Goodies of every conceivable shape and size were crowded across two nine foot tables, jostling for space, in the process of being neatly cataloged and labeled by my friend Rhonda. Rhonda was one of the event’s organizers, and she’s nice enough to not only read my blog, but even regularly post comments and interesting sugar-related articles she comes across.

Staring at the spread of frostings, sprinkles, chips, jellies, and coconut cream, I joked with Rhonda that I should take a photo of the awe-inspiring spread to post on my blog.

“Oh no!” she said, genuinely taken aback, “but… this is good!”

I’ve been thinking about her reaction ever since, because I think it has everything to do with how inextricably emotion and food are intertwined in our culture. I mean, of course it’s good, right? The outpouring of emotion was physically visible in response to what was a truly shocking and violent event. People wanted to express love and comfort in the name of store owners Will and Eric- to literally wrap them up in all that is warm and good and predictable, in an effort to make up for the scary thing which has changed their lives forever. What better way to do this than with a nice coffeecake or tray of raspberry thumbprints? How often is dessert intended as, and taken for, a concrete manifestation of love?

Similarly, I was recently at a potluck memorial service (yes, in Vermont we can make anything a potluck) and it struck me in very much the same way: one huge, long table of actual lunch food ran parallel to an equally long and huge table filled entirely with sweets. Again- should we be surprised if the outpouring of emotion naturally gravitated towards carrot cake and not carrots?

I’m not saying this is bad, exactly, but my friend’s reaction made me realize how deep and primal our attachment to sugar-as-love-and-comfort runs. I mean, of course raising money for a good cause is inherently a good thing. But, when we lay out a football field of sugar in the name of comfort, I also think it’s important to take a step back and think about the lesson we’re teaching our children.

Because, after all, who’s going to be eating a lot of those cookies and brownies, anyway? I know this isn’t going to be a popular idea, but I am reminded of how Dr. Robert Lustig explains that handing your kid a soda is the nutritional equivalent of handing your kid a beer.

This is what we know, but don’t want to know: sugar (fructose) is a poison, just like some other favorite poisons like alcohol and cigarettes. Alcohol is an acute poison, so we notice its effects right away. Fructose, on the other hand, is more like cigarettes, in that it’s a chronic poison, we notice its effects only after years of exposure, when it can be harder to pinpoint and easier to debate… or ignore.

What Rhonda’s comment made me realize is that it’s all well and good to demonize sugar when you’re talking about the Big Bad Corporations, sneaking high fructose corn syrup into our ketchup and mayonnaise; it’s another thing entirely to go after grandma’s lovingly baked molasses cookies. The problem is, nutritionally your body can’t tell the difference between the “bad” sugar (from Big Food Inc.) and “good” sugar (from Grandma)… fructose is fructose. And an excess of fructose consumption, now at it’s highest levels ever and still climbing, is making our society sick.

I imagine that one day, when the data has become so abundant as to be incontrovertible (as also happened, finally, with cigarettes) having a buffet of sugar that rivals the actual food will be considered as socially unacceptable as smoking on airplanes or littering out your car window- things which we as a society once accepted as completely normal yet now we have come to realize the destructiveness of. Nobody’s is trying to say we can’t smoke or drink or throw things away, they’re just saying we have to be careful about how we go about it. Same with sugar.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 39

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A few months ago, when I first contemplated the idea of a “Year of No Sugar,” images of cravings, temptation and deprivation came to mind. My personal mental picture involved me in an old-west-style show-down with one of those square Ritter chocolate bars: “Let’s go, chocolate,” I’d sneer, perhaps from under a sombrero, “You and me. Mano a mano.” You know, if chocolate had hands.

But in truth the hardest moments aren’t solitary, quite the opposite. In fact, if I could just home school the kids and avoid all restaurants and social events for the year- in other words if we could just move to an new address under a convenient rock- the project would seem to be a comparative snap. Turns out, at least for me, the social isolation of being on a different wavelength from the rest of the world around you can be one of the most difficult parts of all.

Dutchies Before The Fire

For example. Yesterday we attended the biggest local event I’ve seen in my fourteen years in Pawlet: a fundraiser to benefit the owners of Dutchie’s general store in West Pawlet. Dutchie’s was a local fixture and a historic building which burned to the ground in the middle of the night two weeks ago. The event was so sudden, so shocking, so deeply upsetting to the community, that within hours plans were being fomented on Facebook for what would blossom into a huge community expression of support and love: the final event featured a pig roast and chicken barbecue, a silent auction of over a hundred items, a bake sale of gargantuan proportions, live music by a favorite local honky-tonk band, a swing set raffle, tractor rides and face painting. Phew! We showed up at five after two in the afternoon- as the event was scheduled to begin at two- to find hundreds and hundreds of people already in line for all of the above. But most of all they were in line for the food.

Now you’d think by now I’d have figured this food thing out, but maybe I’m just dense. Honestly, it didn’t occur to me that we wouldn’t be able to eat the majority of food on the menu for this event until we were already there. Meat and pasta salad? Fine, right? But baked beans, chicken with barbecue sauce, coleslaw… sugar was certainly in all of them. And you can’t very well go to an event like this, with hundreds in line behind you waiting their turn, and start asking volunteers nit-picky questions about the pasta salad. You just can’t.

Fortunately, we had been assuming we’d eat there later in the afternoon as an early dinner, and we had eaten lunch, so we weren’t starving. Instead, we focused on everything else: we bought event t-shirts, we bid on items at the silent auction, the kids swung (swang?) on the raffle swing set and got their faces painted. Practically everyone in town made an appearance that afternoon, and in a town of just over 1,000 people that amounts to a great big party where you know virtually all of the guests. Initial reports indicate that at the end of the day over $27,000 was raised to help Dutchie’s owners Will and Eric, who wandered around the event looking honestly dazed by such an outpouring of support.

Then friends of my two girls started appearing licking soft-serve ice creams. Of course this was hard. Reeeeeeally hard. You know how parents used to say “This hurts me more than it hurts you?” As a kid you never believe it, but, as a parent you learn the true meaning of this. I would’ve given anything to hand them each a dollar and tell them to, of course, go get an ice cream. But. What kind of message would that’ve sent? How many more special events were to come this summer at which “special exemptions” would be begged? How many more times would we give in, and at what point would our project cease to have any real meaning?

So the afternoon progressed and we watched virtually the entirely of our town file through the line that snaked through the firehouse parking lot and all the way down to the road. I heard at it’s peak the wait was over an hour. But we never did join the line. We chatted with our neighbors. We checked our bids at the auction. We avoided the bake sale table. We swung.

I came home with an empty feeling in me that only partly had to do with the fact that it was getting to be dinner time. Everyone in the community had come together to help our neighbors Will and Eric, and we were a part of that, certainly. But we all know food is symbolic, food is important. When people break bread together it means something. At least for now, our family is, in some small way, existing apart.