Tag Archives: kids and sugar

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 43

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So yesterday it finally happened, My older daughter called me on it.

She had been complaining about how most of the kids in fifth grade get school lunch and today that meant sugar cookies. I was startled to learn that out of a class of about twenty-four children, Greta is one of only three who bring home lunch. “I know it’s hard honey,” I said feeling genuinely sad. I know that A Year of No Sugar means one thing to a forty-year old, and quite another to a nearly eleven year old.

“Mom,” she said, suddenly, “What do I get out of it? What’s good about it for me?”

“Well, it’s our family project,” I said, a little uncertainly. “We’re doing it together.”

“Yeah I know, but you’re going to get a book out of it. So it’s really for you. Right?”

Whoa.

“Well, yeah,” I said, thinking: and that would be the best case scenario. Right now, having something so concrete as a published book to prove what we’ve done here meant anything isn’t guaranteed. “But you can be part of the book too,” I reminded her, referring to her journal entries and Smoothie recipes she’s been compiling, “if you want to.”

“I know,” she said, reasserting “But it’s really for you.”

“Well, sort of,” I said lamely. “I am sorry it’s so hard.” And after a pause, “That doesn’t make it any easier, does it?”

“No.” she said.

“Well then how about I make it up to you by… buying you a fancy new pair of shoes?!” I exclaimed. Parent tip #24: when all else fails resort to outright bribery. (I should point out that we had just arrived in the parking lot of the shoe shop in order to find her a pair of “fancy” shoes for her upcoming birthday. We looked all afternoon and never did find any- this being Vermont where patent leather shoes are in significantly lower demand than muck boots- so we bought bagels with cream cheese instead.)

“Okay” she said laughing.

Phew. That was a close one. The worst part about this exchange is that she’s got a valid point. I mean, I could pull out some charts and graphs explaining the growth of sugar consumption in the US and how it mirrors lovely things like incidence of pancreatic cancer and metabolic syndrome… but she’s about to be eleven. I’m pretty sure, in the war between pie graphs and pie, I’d lose.

So the health argument is pretty much out; the “you can help” argument is marginally persuasive, but not a surefire winner. And of course, there’s the fact that I’m still searching my soul for the real Why of this project: I mean, you can have a blog or a book about anything… why this? As someone recently asked me point blank: what’s the payoff?

I’m not trying to lose weight. Certainly, I’m trying to be healthier, which, by subjective standards the whole family does seem to be. But to effectively separate me from my Reese’s Peanut Butter cups there would have to be more to it than that… What seems to be stoking the fire of my resolve is the fact that I have been convinced by intelligent, thoughtful people like Dr. Robert Lustig (The Bitter Truth), like David Gillespie (Sweet Poison), who connect the dots in such a convincing way as to make you feel as if a veil has finally been lifted from your eyes and suddenly it all makes sense.

Like any new convert, I have developed a fervor about this knew revelatory knowledge and I feel people should know about it and shouldn’t be afraid to find out- if true- what it might all mean. Like I’ve reported on other posts, the hardest part for me in our Year of No Sugar isn’t resisting temptation, it’s dealing with the conspiring societal norms which come together in a tsunami-fashion to break down the walls of our better judgement. With this project I figured that if we could just show in a dramatic way what was possible, and consequently bringing a greater public awareness to the issue, that might be enough for others to follow in a more moderate fashion.

How to explain this to my near-eleven year old? How about: “We’re just trying to change the world, honey.” I’ll try that next time, and let you know how it goes.

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 34

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Food extremism is nothing new to my husband Steve. He grew up in a home that was a bit of a nutritional house divided: his mom serving the foods most people were eating in the mid-west in the seventies and eighties- pot roast, mac and cheese, pudding, etc.- while his dad frequently ate a different meal altogether, experimenting with various different nutritional theories he was reading about in specialty magazines like “Dr. Shelton’s Hygienic Review.” (motto: “Let Us Have Truth Though The Heavens Fall.”)

Steve’s father, who passed away a few years ago, was a vegetarian before people even knew what that was, back when health food stores were still fringe operations frequented and operated by folks who still thought communes might be a really good idea. But Bill Schaub was no long-haired hippy; he was a trim, clean-shaven lawyer who would one day rise to become Regional Director of the National Labor Relations Board and be conferred the rank of Meritorious Executive in the Senior Executive Service by President Bill Clinton. I try to picture him walking into the Toledo-area granola shop in his suit, his aftershave clashing with the smell of patchouli and wheat grass.

My husband recalls the time his father took him to see the watershed movie Star Wars. Steve was not very excited to go, because outings with his father were often nutrition oriented and pretty dry stuff for an eight year old: “I thought we were going to a lecture on carrot juice or something.”

In another favorite Bill Schaub story, he grew a mustache, (of course! it was the seventies!) This development coincided with the peak of his interest in the nutritional value of mangos and his decision to import boxes of the fruit himself, which of course resulted in his brown mustache turning mango-colored from the sheer volume of orange fruit that passed his lips.

There are lots of Bill Schaub anecdotes like this, illustrating his passion and single-mindedness when it came to the subject of nutrition and food. Steve is his father’s son, and inherited from him not only an attentive attitude toward food and nutrition, but also the unusual ability to endure strange and restrictive diets for various goals.

For example, in addition to our family’s ongoing No Sugar Project, Steve has for the last seven weeks also been shunning all dairy, and all bread products. Also no potatoes. Basically just meat, eggs, and any vegetable and fruit which you could eat raw. You can imagine how much fun we are in restaurants.

Eve: “I have a strange question. Does the lasagna have sugar in it? And also, what about the soup?”

Steve: “Can you tell me, is there gluten in the sausage? What about in the cabbage? I’m also not eating dairy…”

Eve: “No, the kids don’t want lemonade, could they just have water…?”

Oh yes, the waitresses just love us.

The thing is it has worked. I mean, Steve looked completely fine before, and thin compared to your average American profile. But in a few weeks on this Paleo / Raw diet he’s lost over twenty five pounds. I know! We’ve been buying him new pants since nothing fits anymore- he looks great. More importantly, he’s clearly happier.

Interestingly, Steve’s father had an addiction to sweet things- cookies, ice cream- which he battled with all his life. Steve’s own addiction is much more specific: diet Dr. Pepper. Not to put to fine a point on it, Diet Dr. Pepper is Steve-crack.

The other day Steve sheepishly brought home a case of the stuff, justifying, “well, I thought it could just drink it in the evening as a snack…”

After I gently pointed out the Steve-crack phenomenon, even he agreed it probably should stop. I know it’s not easy- we all like to have our crutches to lean on when we feel depressed and deprived. For me, “mother’s little helper” is more vague… once upon a time pre-project I would’ve enjoyed a bit of chocolate or cookie after every lunch and dinner- a sweet of some kind albeit a small one. I still miss that ritual, that sweet little ending to a meal. Lately I supplement that desire with an alternate treat- a banana, an unsweetened cappuccino, a GoRaw granola bar with raisins in it. It gives rise to the question: do we have to chose between health (long-term happiness) and desire-gratification (short-term happiness)?

The other day Steve was talking about his dad. “If my dad was alive today he’d be fascinated by this project,” he said. “He’d be sending us articles and talking to us about it all the time…” I know. It’s sad he isn’t here to share it with us.