Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

A Year of No Sugar: Post 7

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Here’s one for you: how is a DRY CLEAN ONLY tag like sugar? (This inspirational metaphor came to me after I discovered this morning I had shrunken my favorite winter hat in the wash after failing to read the tag.) Answer: precisely the moment you make the assumption it isn’t there, is when it will be. Call it Murphy’s Law of Hats and Sausages if you will.

You see, Friday night I had grand plans of trying out a new soup recipe, so I headed with the kids in tow to the store with a shopping list that read:

  • 3 oz. Spinach
  • 8 oz. Tortellini
  • 1 lb. Sausages
  • milk

I was feeling optimistic about cooking more meals from “scratch” and thereby avoiding the sugar issue altogether.

Silly me. Although the spinach and milk posed no problem, I was in for a surprise at the refrigerated pasta products section as package after package of tortellini revealed the presence of sugar thirteen or fourteen ingredients down. Strike one. Fortunately, I was delighted to find that the small bags of cheese tortellini by the dried pasta section would work.

Next, wandering by the seafood section the kids clamored for one of our favorite treats: smoked salmon. Because I’ve been feeling like the sugar drill sargent of late, any edible indulgence that doesn’t involve sugar is suddenly very, very attractive. Buuuuuuut- can you guess? Oh yes, our favorite brand of smoked salmon let us down in the sugar department. Luckily the brand next hook over would do.

On to the sausages. And you can see where I’m going with this, can’t you? You wouldn’t think it’d be hard, but try finding supermarket sausages without sugar, I dare you. By this time I was pulling my hair out in large fistfuls wondering if we’d be reduced to eating dirt sandwiches for the next twelve months. What have I gotten us into? I wondered. It was at this moment I found a package of sweet sausages which listed in the ingredients dried apples and fruit juice.

Now, making rules for our project thus far has involved splitting quite a few hairs and the fruit juice issue has been a big one. As Dr. Lustig points out in his lecture Sugar: The Bitter Truth, fruit juice is sugar- and without the fiber of the originating fruit it is every bit as detrimental as the other forms of sugar we know and love. Our rule regarding fruit juice has therefore become this: no products containing fruit juice unless they contain actual fruit as well. Therefore we have been able to buy Polaner All-Fruit Jam with which to flavor our yogurt, as well as fruit sauces, fruit leather and fruit gummi-like snacks for the kids to take in their lunches. It felt like a bit of a stretch, but technically the sausages did have both fruit pieces and fruit juice- so the sausages went into my basket with a sigh of relief.

Phew! I was deeply grateful catastrophe would be averted for yet another night. That night as I prepared the soup I realized I will have to revamp my definition of “convenience foods” to include virtually anything that has a list of ingredients. Nonetheless, despite everything, we had done it. Tonight we would eat, a nice, interesting, and fairly homemade meal- with no sugar.

I went to pour in the six cups of organic chicken broth I have stored by the box in our pantry, when a terrible thought occurred to me. I stopped. No. Couldn’t be. But what if….? Cautiously, as if defusing an explosive, I turned the box over to check the ingredient list: Organic Chicken Broth… Organic Chicken Flavor… Natural Chicken Flavor… Organic Evaporated Cane Juice- DAMN!

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A Year of No Sugar: Post 6

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I am now a savory person living in a sweet world. Do I feel deprived? Well- I cannot tell a lie. A bit. Yes. Definitely.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m speaking relatively here. Are there lots of topics probably way more important than whether or not Eve Schaub got to put honey in her coffee this morning? Yes.

That being said, I wouldn’t be bothering with our family “experiment” if I didn’t think it had value. In fact, if you listen to the lecture which inspired the idea of attempting our family year without sugar, you might just wonder why more people aren’t talking about sugar and it’s omnipresence in the contemporary western diet- quickly becoming the contemporary diet of all industrialized nations. In this talk posted on YouTube, “Sugar: the Bitter Truth,” pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig makes the case for sugar being the root of every evil from obesity and Type 2 diabetes to hypertension, cardiovascular disease and stroke. If we could find a way to reduce the incidences of all of these maladies, wouldn’t it be worth talking about? If there’s another way to look at- or perhaps even opt out of- the treadmill of diet and disease in our culture, shouldn’t we be talking about it?

So when I say deprived, I mean relatively so. I know- there’s a tiny little violin playing somewhere just for me. And yet, it’s funny the things over which one feels more mournful than others. Last night at dinner at our favorite local restaurant, I managed not only to forgo the Oh-My-God Bread Pudding, (gasp!) but when our dear friend Carol enjoyed it, amazingly enough, it really didn’t phase me. Really! However, it was another matter entirely this morning as I stared longingly at the Crispy Hexagons cereal box on the shelf… (forgot to toss those out- darn!)

Another phenomenon I’ve noticed is the “waiting for the other shoe to drop” feeling I’ve been getting at recent meals: it’s as if I’ve just seen three quarters of a play when suddenly- the curtain goes down and everyone goes home. It is so thoroughly ingrained in me to expect a little- or a big- sweet finale at the end of a meal, but especially at the end of a labor-intensive home-cooked meal or a rare evening-out meal, that I find myself experiencing a sort of phantom dessert syndrome. “What, no fireworks? No crème brulee or tiramisu? Not so much as a mint?” my brain chemistry complains.

Yep, one week and my brain is already talking to itself. Well, this should be an interesting year.

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A Year of No Sugar: Post 5

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Health Food??

Today I spent a fair amount of time at BJ’s Warehouse in the attempt to buy food. This is a really good idea, at the rate at which I am getting rid of food around here.

Happily- I did manage to fill my cart, but not without some serious label reading. More than once I picked up a package which listed sugar as the umpteenth ingredient (gotcha!) only to go back to the drawing board and find another brand of the same sort of item which (hooray!) did not. Two seemingly identical bags of pistachios revealed their true nature when flipped over: one had sugar listed among a myriad of other ingredients, the other listed pistachios and sea salt.

See, now was that so hard? Is is so hard to just put food in our food? I mean, I’m just saying.

But forgive me: I’m tired and cranky from all that small type and realizing I had to throw my favorite breakfast cereal out this morning (Crispy Hexagons, how could you?) Okay, some sugar items are pretty blinking obvious- Nutella, hello?- but I continue to be blindsided by many others, ie: the number of items from the health-food store/section of the supermarket that I have now been forced to take an honest, unflinching look at… call it the Evaporated Cane Syrup Brigade, if you will. What? You mean I can’t have peanut butter Clif bars anymore?? Wait, nobody told me that!

Meanwhile, last night when dinner was over our five-year-old started describing the kind of little thingies-with-the-something-inside she would like for dessert and I gently reminded her about the “family project.” She was sad for a moment- but quickly rebounded, much to my surprise. Despite our preconceptions about the love affair between children and sugar, I’m beginning to wonder if the family project may actually end up being harder on Mom and Dad. After all, we’ve been around a lot longer, we’ve had a lot longer to get hooked.

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Information About The No Sugar Project