Year of No Sugar (11 page)

Then came another tricky one. One day it came to my attention that although we weren't drinking fruit juice or consuming anything sweetened
with
fruit juice, there was nevertheless one fruit juice we still were consuming: lemon juice. As my home cooking had stepped up to fill the void of packaged and boxed foods in our lives, I found I was relying on the tartness of lemon quite a bit: in my homemade salad
dressing, my homemade hummus, and several different pasta and vegetable recipes. But because I wasn't using it for
sweetening
, it didn't immediately register with me that it
was
, of course, still fruit juice. Could I somehow justify lemon juice on the No-Sugar Project?

So, I did some research. According to the handy-dandy nutrient calculator found on the USDA National Nutrient Database
²⁵
there are
0.53 grams
of fructose in the 48 grams of juice in an average lemon. So if we compare apples to apples, so to speak, how does it measure up? If I was using the nutrient calculator correctly—of which there is absolutely no guarantee—48 grams of unsweetened apple juice comes in at 2.75 grams of fructose, so about
five times
as much fructose as in lemon juice. And 48 grams is about
one-fourth of a cup
of apple juice, not a drinking glass full.
²⁶

After much soul searching, I decided that a tablespoon of lemon juice, which was not sweet and carried a fraction of the fructose load of other common fruits, would be allowed here and there. So shoot me.

And then there were beverages. Now, do you
know
how many drinks are verboten on No Added Sugar?
All
of them. Okay, I exaggerate.
Most
of them. Virtually the entire drink menu/beverage aisle/vending machine lineup everywhere you go contains ample fructose: obviously soda and juice, but also anything even remotely interesting—from lemonade and
iced teas to hot cocoa, apple cider, flavored milks, and vitamin waters. Of course, we don't
need
anything other than water, right? Right?

But for our purposes, we did have a
small
range of choice. In addition to good old regular water, we had sparkling water (fancy!) and milk, as well as unsweetened coffee or tea for the grown-ups. Maybe it's telling that both Steve's and my one-item exceptions for the year (his: diet soda, mine: wine) were both beverages. Our society just loooooves to improve on water. However, because we were accustomed to a land of limitless choices (if sugar in a variety of textures, colors, and artificial flavorings
is
choice), in the interest of family morale, I was constantly on the lookout for any form of beverage variety we could find.

Then one day I came across a throwback beverage: Ovaltine. And before you can say “
Ovaltine
?” I must clarify that this was not the very same Ovaltine for which so many adult Americans are nostalgic and with whose labels one might have once sent away for a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring. In
that
Ovaltine, sugar is the number one ingredient. No, this was
European
Ovaltine that I came across at the famous Vermont Country Store, which prides itself on purveying hard-to-find items that are nonetheless still beloved by
somebody
out there—such as “Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific” shampoo, “Tigress” perfume (“Are you wild enough to wear it?”), and, my personal favorite, cod liver oil. Yup. Just in case anybody out there was feeling nostalgic about
that
stuff.

Presumably Europeans are fussier than Americans about how they like their hot beverages and, as with tea or coffee, prefer to add the amount of sugar that suits their specific
taste. Finding this product made my month. Adding it to warm milk created a hot chocolate-ish experience
²⁷
without the sugar, and we all immediately commenced enjoying it for breakfast and snacks.

Not long after that, I encountered another candidate for our oh-so-selective Club of Beverages. I picked up a bottle from the case of our local health store with curiosity. Hmmmmm, what
is
“coconut water”? I wondered. Did it count as fruit juice or something else? Again, some sleuthing was in order.

As it turned out, coconut water was no European Ovaltine, or even lemon juice for that matter. According to
Livestrong.com
, a serving of coconut water has 5.4 grams of combined simple sugars: glucose and fructose. No matter how you sliced it, that
had
to be quite a bit of fructose—similar to the amount found in apple juice. Too bad. Coconut water was out.

_______

Of course, we were enjoying fruits of all shapes and sizes, and I had had a degree of success with my banana-, date-, and coconut-sweetened baked goods. But I wanted more. My tummy was crying out for something satisfying that didn't taste like it was plucked from Carmen Miranda's hat.

For the most part, the alternative sweeteners you'll find used as ingredients in the products on the shelves of the health food store or in the health food aisle at the supermarket are
pretty disappointing. “Evaporated cane syrup” and “organic apple juice”
sound
a lot healthier and nicer, but in fact aren't any better fructose-wise than their high-fructose corn syrup counterparts (and in some cases they're worse—more on that in a minute).

_______

_______

“Barley malt syrup” cropped up in ingredient lists occasionally, which was something we
could
have, but unfortunately it is often used in conjunction with other fructose-containing sweeteners—commendable for lowering the overall fructose load, yet still off the table for us.
²⁸

I checked out the ten inches of shelf devoted to alternative sweeteners at our friendly neighborhood health food store and came up with two promising possibilities: agave and brown rice syrup.

Agave was the first in line. A sweetener derived from a Mexican perennial succulent, similar to ornamental Yucca plants, I had friends who swore by it. Plus, agave had been getting a lot of press lately as being the “healthy sweetener.” I was curious but circumspect: could this really be the new wonder sweetener? The fact that agave was usually found marketed in the form of “syrup” or “nectar” sounded like a red flag, but for us, all it really came down to was one question: did it contain fructose? Or not?

The short answer is that agave
does
contain fructose—and how. Whereas you might recall that table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup contain in the neighborhood of 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose, agave syrup can contain as much as
90 percent fructose
. Remember how I said natural sweeteners
could be worse
for you than table sugar? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: agave! Amazingly, agave is often recommended to diabetics as being glycemically neutral, meaning it does not raise one's blood sugar. Pop quiz! And
why
doesn't it raise blood sugar, class?

Because fructose, as we now know, is the stealth food. You'll recall the problem: fructose doesn't trigger the release of insulin (great!) because it's too busy traveling directly to the liver (bad!). There, for lack of anything better to do with it, the liver gets rid of it by creating lots of fatty acids that will then swim around in your bloodstream and block the insulin from delivering the glucose (the good stuff! energy of life!) to your cells. You'll recall my brilliant analogy of the traffic jam at rush hour and our friend Fred McInsulin. The whole reason diabetics have high insulin, folks, is because the fatty acids (read: fructose) are preventing the insulin from going where it needs to go. Eating MORE fructose may not raise your
insulin levels right away, but it will create the fatty acids that will ultimately make it harder for the insulin to get where it needs to go, resulting in? That's right: higher insulin levels.
²⁹

So, to sum up, eating agave syrup instead of sugar seemed to me to be the equivalent of burning your house down before the tornado comes.
³⁰
Agave syrup may be “natural” and “raw,” but, you know, so is arsenic.
³¹

Next on the shelf was brown rice syrup. Hmmmm, could we have
that
? “A sweetener derived by culturing cooked rice with enzymes,” according to Wikipedia (which is surely never wrong), it's made up of “maltose, glucose, and maltotriose.” Woo-hoo! There was no fructose in sight!

My friend Katrina weighed in: “Yeah, too bad it tastes like dog poo.”
Oh
. Well. But then again she also thought our beloved Go Raw granola bars tasted like birdseed (like that's a
bad
thing!). I bought a jar of the sticky, amber-colored sweetener, and over the next few months, baked with it quite a bit. I found it became an invaluable tool in my baking arsenal, a very suitable substitute for similarly textured sweeteners, such as honey, molasses, and maple syrup. Although I wouldn't think of eating the stuff by the
spoonful
, it definitely didn't taste like dog poo. Not that I would know.

_______

So we were all getting along pretty well, drinking our sparkling water, eating our raisin granola bars, and baking with brown rice syrup when it came about that for several days I wasn't feeling so well, and as a result, I was getting behind—behind on my cooking, behind on my shopping, behind on my meal planning. Somehow we were muddling through, but one night, when I was feeling particularly desperate, half-ill and starving, I hauled out from the back of our freezer an industrial-size bag of frozen Bertolli chicken with cream sauce and bow tie pasta. Yes, the ingredient list was longer than my arm and appeared to have been at least partially written in some unknown foreign language, but this was a food emergency. At least there was no sugar, I reasoned, since I had purchased this on my first no-sugar run to BJ's a few weeks before.

But of course, silly me had to
double check
, which, if you are on No Sugar, can be a big mistake if you'd like to actually eat anytime in the near future. What I found in the fine print, in microscopic parenthesis, under a sub-ingredient listing for chicken “seasoning,” was
that word
again:
dextrose
. Dextrose?

%^&*#$!

Remember the Panera salad dextrose? I had since encountered dextrose in other places, such as in the all-important French fries they sell at the ice-skating rink, but I had nonetheless been remiss in figuring this one out. I still didn't know
what the heck it was
…sugar? Not sugar? Fructose containing? No fructose? Was there no end to these intimidating, scientific “food” words? Grrrrrrrr.…

But right then, at that
particular
moment, I felt crappy. I was hungry enough to eat a goat. And there was pretty much
nothing else in the kitchen at that moment that seemed even remotely appealing. So I cut open the bag, dumped it into the pan, cooked it for the requisite ten minutes, and we ate it… mysterious dextrose or no.

Upon completing our meal, my first thought was that something was…
amiss
. What was it? It seemed really odd to me how quickly our meal had come together—I mean, a meal like chicken and bow tie pasta with spinach and cream sauce doesn't just happen all by itself! How long would a recipe like that normally take me? At least an hour but very likely more. Not to mention all the dirty dishes that would result from washing spinach, separately cooking chicken, carefully simmering the cream sauce in a pan while boiling the pasta in another pot…

It occurred to me that this meal had been sponsored: Brought To You By Dextrose! (As well as its friends Isolated Soy Protein Product and Sodium Phosphate!) The inverse correlation was very clear: the fewer chemicals and additives, the greater amount of meal prep/cooking and cleanup time, and vice versa.

But it had also become clear to me that I seriously needed to do some homework. When I looked up “dextrose” on the Internet, I found a host of confusing answers: “Better known today as glucose, this sugar is the chief source of energy in the body.” Okaaaaay. Some sites defined dextrose as “corn sugar” that is “30 percent less sweet than pure or refined sugar.” Okaaaaay. I was feeling pretty dense. Which was it? Is dextrose something that is generated in our bodies to provide energy,
or
is it an added sugar?

True confessions time: biochemistry was not my best subject. Sure, I knew some things about the suffix
-ose
. Thanks
to “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” I knew the differences between terms like
su
crose,
glu
cose, and
fru
ctose: that glucose was the energy your cells use to function throughout your body; that sucrose was table sugar, a combination of equal parts glucose and fructose; that fructose, of course, was the root of all evil in the known universe and the spawn of the Evil Emperor from planet Naboo. But where the heck did
dextrose
come in?

Lucky for me I had someone who I could ask, someone who I considered to be the ultimate authority on all things fructose: Dr. Robert Lustig himself, the man behind “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” the very man who had inspired all our gastronomic shenanigans in the first place.

Bear in mind, however, that I have never met Dr. Lustig—I was, and continue to be, one more nutcase who happened to dig up his email address online in order to ask him all kinds of strange and annoying questions. The amazing thing is—he answered them. The first time I communicated with Dr. Lustig was before we began the No-Sugar Year. I wrote to tell him about our upcoming project and to ask him some questions, which I now see as incredibly stupid in retrospect—did wine contain fructose? What about honey? Duh! The patient man, he answered. And after that, I left him alone. For one thing, I was totally intimidated. I mean, he had
over a million
YouTube hits!
³²
He must've had about twelve thousand things more important to do than answer my idiotic questions—he probably had to go consult with NASA or appear on
Dancing with the Stars
or something! He probably had to go meet with
the First Lady to talk about reducing the amount of fructose in the White House complimentary
mints
or something!