Year of No Sugar (10 page)

And honestly, it was waaaaay better than a lettuce and mustard sandwich.

In our entire year, in fact, there was only one time that I felt too intimidated to even
ask
about the sugar content of the menu items. It was over the kids' February break. We had decided to make a trip to Philadelphia and see some fun historic sites: Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Ben Franklin's outhouse—the works.

Evidently our hotel had never heard of the “complimentary breakfast” phenomenon that is sweeping the rest of the Western world, so we ate almost every day at a small diner around the corner. It was the kind of place that's so retro they don't even
know
they're retro. I was in love with the Formica U-shaped counters lined with swiveling chrome stools.

Now, I'm not sure if it was the Russian waitress with three stars tattooed behind her right ear, the two local guys who came in every morning and ordered Coke with their French toast, or the fact that there would simply be nothing left for
us to eat but eggs with eggs and eggs on the side, but I just
couldn't
bring myself to ask. I just couldn't.

So, primarily, we stuck to the things we
knew
were safe: bland, unsweetened oatmeal; grapefruit; and of course, eggs. But we were still
hungry
.

In desperation, I enacted the “Philadelphia Breakfast Exemption,” which read as follows:
Don't
ask about the bread. Just don't.

After we had democratically seconded the motion and passed the emergency measure by a clear margin, we gratefully enjoyed some whole-wheat toast and bagels during our stay. Was there a really, really good chance there was
some
amount of sugar in those bread products? Like a thirty-second of a teaspoon? Yes. I was determined, however, not to let such an emergency situation happen again.

Consequently I now present to you, dear reader, the
Official Waitress Interrogating Primer
: or
How to Make Sure Your Food is Free of Fructose, If Not Waitress Spit:

Okay, actually, what I
really
say is this, verbatim, every time: “I have a bit of a strange question. We're not eating (ever-so-subtle pause, followed by delicate emphasis)…Any. Added. Sugar. (Follow-up pause.) I was looking at the sautéed beef tongue, but I was concerned about…
the sauce
. Do you think you could check with the kitchen for me on that?” And then—and this is key—BEFORE your waiter disappears in the great maw of the kitchen, never to return again, quickly ask about
any other items your family is considering ordering
. Although he/she might be temporarily annoyed at having to deviate from the ordinary waiter-client script, believe me, he/she will appreciate not having to make seven separate trips to interrogate the chef—and you won't have to have your dinner at one in the morning, while the cleanup crew vacuums ever-so-subtly under your feet.

In our year, we found it helpful, and a relief, to get to know the menus of the restaurants in our area and which items on the menu we could have without fear of sugar sneaking. We were lucky to find one (!!) wonderful, reasonably priced bistro nearby that made nearly everything from scratch and whose waitresses became so used to our requests that they'd know what we wanted before we ordered it—and who regularly asked us how the No-Sugar Thing was going. The kind of place where the specials are written in colorful marker on a piece of cardstock. The kind of place where they put homemade French bread pizza on the children's menu simply because Ilsa requested it so often. This familiar establishment practically brought tears of gratitude to my eyes at the end of a week of cooking sauces, breads, and chicken broth from scratch. All I can say is—thank God for The Trolley Stop.

In Poultney, Vermont.

Please tell them I sent you.

Of course, you're going to have to keep in mind that you're not going to be eating at any fast food or all-you-can-eat
anything
. Generally speaking, the restaurants will have to be sit-down and of the variety that makes at least some portion of their food from scratch. Once you start to ask, you'll be amazed at the number of restaurants in which the ingredients are an absolute mystery to everyone—including the “chef” (we are using the term loosely here). How can this be? Because the food arrives at the establishment
already made
—sauces, pastas, meat dishes—and all your restaurant does is heat them up. Ma's Kountry Cookin' indeed.

After a while, you will come to learn that there is always,
always
sugar in the sauce. Also, the dressing, the breading, and very,
very
likely the soup. Remember: even
ingredients
have ingredients. Chicken broth
sounds
fine, right? But unless it's made in house, I will bet you my sweet Aunt Matilda it has added sugar. When dining in restaurants, the safest bets are always the plainest ones: steak with fries. Fish with vegetables. Spaghetti with garlic and oil. While traveling in Minnesota with my dad, I had a staggering amount of baked walleye with steamed vegetables—yum! (And I had never even
heard
of walleye before. See the new worlds No Sugar can open up to you?)

After a while, you too will come to know in advance which items are Generally Pretty Safe. Ironically, we sometimes found ourselves in the position of having to choose the French fries or the potato chips over the whole-grain bread basket—but such was the nature of our challenge. If we hadn't realized it before, we were certainly becoming acquainted with it now: not eating added sugar as a family was a gargantuan endeavor. No one ever said everything we ate was going to be healthy on every
other
account.

You'd think it'd be simple to exclude sugar from your diet, right? Not
easy
perhaps, but at least reasonably
simple
. You wouldn't have to be Einstein. Just look at the ingredients, and then when you find sugar—
don't eat it
. Right? Simple. Yet right away, we began running into mysterious ingredients that seemed bent on defying my foolproof plan.

“But
what about…
?” became our constant refrain. Like a Whac-A-Mole game gone wrong, just as we painstakingly resolved one “can we or can't we?” issue, another would pop up to take its place. In our Year of No Sugar, we needed a litmus test.

This brings us to the part that trips a lot of folks up. I wish I had a dime for every time someone has said to me, “But WAIT! If you're
just
avoiding fructose/still eating fruit/still eating pasta, you're
still eating sugar
, right?” Well, that depends on what you mean by “sugar.” Remember,
table
sugar (aka sucrose) is made up of roughly equal parts glucose and fructose; glucose is what your body wants. It is the gas that makes the car (your body) go. Some foods convert quite
readily to glucose (breads, pastas, and other simple carbohydrates, for example) while others require more work and time to convert (meats and other proteins). This is why diabetics have to watch not just what they eat, but also in what proportion they eat it—too many slices of bread can send their blood sugar skyrocketing.

So, were we talking about a year of no
blood
sugar? Which is to say a year of no
glucose
? Well, no, not unless we were trying to starve ourselves to death.

When we said a Year of No Sugar, we meant a Year of No Added Fructose. Why are these two terms equivalent? Because you can have sugar without glucose and you can have glucose without sugar,
but you can't have sugar without fructose and you can't have fructose without sugar
. Fructose is what makes sugar, sugar. And at the risk of beating this dead horse into dust particles: fructose
is the bad guy
; if our diet were a western film, fructose would be wearing the black hat and spitting chewing tobacco at children and small animals. Fructose, you'll recall, is poison. Fructose is the ingredient that our body can live entirely without, thank you very much, and would be much the better off for it.

But because fructose is so
delicious
, and perhaps even
addictive
, we brilliant humans have farmed fructose, extracted fructose, injected fructose into every darned thing we can get our hands on—from bacon to baby formula. Actual fruit, which is where fructose naturally comes from, contains comparatively small amounts of fructose and so is the least of our worries. The problem is not the fruit—whose fiber and micronutrients make up for the tiny bit of fructose-poison that goes along for the ride—the problem is
every-bloody-thing else
. The problem, in a nutshell, is
added
fructose—in short, nature got it right
and know-it-all-humans continue to get it horribly wrong. This is why
apples
are good but apple
juice
is bad.
²³
And if you start to look, you will realize that added fructose, under all its guises and pen names, is in virtually every single package of food that you can buy.

So whenever someone asked me, as they inevitably would, “Oh, you're
only
avoiding
fructose
?” as if our family were swearing off avocados or pâté for the year, instead of the whole damn supermarket, you'll forgive me if I tended to get a little exasperated.

Back to the litmus test. Because the Dr. Lustig–inspired line of reasoning held that fructose was nutritional evil, whenever evaluating some murky or questionable ingredient, I always looked to three questions:

Is it food?

Does it contain fructose? And,

Is that fructose extracted from some other source?

Some questions were easy. Take medicine. As the song goes: “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down…” Although, to be more accurate, we could say a spoonful of high-fructose corn syrup, sucralose, and Red Dye #40 makes the medicine go down.

Now, as an obsessive and overprotective mom, medicine was
off
the table as far as I was concerned.
Way
off. It wasn't even in the same
room
as the table. No-Sugar Project or no, if my child was sick, I was not, repeat,
not
going to quibble about trying to find no-sugar Children's Tylenol or some effective alternative to a tablespoon 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.

That being said, using my new superpower of heightened sugar awareness, I was nonetheless a little horrified to note that the drug industry has clearly gotten on board the “more is
more” wagon when it came to adding sugar to their products. This is definitely recent. Do you remember the days when taking medicine—
any
kind of medicine—was just
awful
? Like, gag-reflex-inducing awful? I'm not saying we should bring back the bad ol' days when we had to compound
feeling
like crap with taking medicine which
tasted
like crap, but it is troubling to notice that standard medicine cabinet items, such as fever reducer and cough drops, have been essentially transformed into
candy
. Ask any mom: it's to the point where kids beg to have additional unnecessary doses. Now that kind of scares me.

Nonetheless, the question of medicine was easily dispatched with. But here came the Whac-A-Mole—what about
vitamins
? A friend pointed out to me that the children's chewable vitamins prescribed by our pediatrician almost certainly have sugar in them to make them palatable. This was a tougher question. Vitamins aren't quite medicine, yet neither are they food. After some thought, I decided that since they are an item we get by prescription (no Flintstone Gummies here), they would remain in the medicine category, and therefore be permissible.
²⁴