Year of No Sugar (14 page)

I've indicated the trimesters during which we were doing the No Sugar Project in bold. As you can see, during our No-Sugar Year, Greta missed only two school days and Ilsa only three.
Well,
that's
pretty good
, I thought. Then I decided to look at the last third of our No-Sugar Year—during which we could be presumed to be enjoying the maximum cumulative health benefits of our year. I compared their fall absences from the previous year (2010) to those of fall 2011, our Year of No Sugar—(see bolded numbers). I noticed that from one fall to the next, they had each gone from five absences to either one (Greta) or zero (Ilsa).

Zero? Zero.

I decided to look further back—I mean this
is
elementary school, folks. Club Med for germs! Every year we, like all the other families we know, run the gauntlet of flus, head colds, wracking coughs, and of course the dreaded stomach viruses. Usually we're happy if we've managed to avoid some reasonable portion of the illness smorgasbord. I wondered, had we
ever
had a trimester with
no
absences? Turns out we had, more than once, so that big, fat zero fact wasn't as impressive in and of itself as I might've hoped.

But I found a few more interesting statistics. The school year, of course, doesn't coincide with the calendar year, or, consequently, our Year of No Sugar. What if we compared school absences during calendar years?

Hmmmmm. Because I like charts, I made another one:

As we've noted, during all of 2011—the all-important Year of No Sugar—Greta missed only two days of school and Ilsa three; so what about other years? In 2009, Greta had the same number of sick days (2) as during our No-Sugar Year—not so remarkable. However, in both 2008 and 2010 Greta missed fifteen days of school—an increase over our Year of No Sugar of um…650 percent.

Because Ilsa is younger, of course, we have less data to work with, and because we don't have Ilsa's pre-K absences broken down into trimesters, we can't say exactly how many absences occurred in 2010 versus 2009. We do know that the number of absences she had in 2010 would be at least five and at most twenty. This indicates an increase over our Year of No Sugar of falling somewhere between 67 and 567 percent. If we decide to compromise and meet in the middle (which we can do since I'm clearly a terrible scientist), we might say Ilsa very likely had somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 percent increase of absences in the year prior to No Sugar.

Now, did we have the occasional sore throat or sniffle during our year? Sure. So I can't say that eating no added sugar
made us into Super Family who could leap over nasty viruses with a single bound.

But I
can
say that if you look at the numbers, it suuuuuure does look like our kids were comparatively quite healthy during our No-Sugar Year—
and
that they were noticeably health
ier
during 2011 than two out of the previous three years.

So there you have it. The physical evidence of our No-Sugar Year came down to three
P
s: Poop, Palate, and Presence (as opposed to absence? From school? Aw, c'mon!). Anecdotal? Circumstantial? Perhaps. But nothing to sneeze at.

I did promise them I wouldn't make a chart about their poops, though.

 

³⁴
For example, in third grade, I know Greta missed the one and only week when they were taught fractions because we chose that week to bring the girls to Tuscany where we learned how to make fresh pasta and cook rabbit from a friend's honest-to-goodness Italian mama. Consequently, Greta has never missed an opportunity to remind me of this fact whenever fractions appear on her math homework. (Would it be wrong of me to suggest that knowing how to make gnocchi might be almost as important?)

³⁵
For pre-K absences, I had no record, since there are no report cards at that level. Through the detective work of some very accommodating school officials I was able to obtain Ilsa's records, albeit without breakdown within the year.

³⁶
During Greta's kindergarten through first grade the school was on a different, quarterly system.

³⁷
The quarterly system makes it difficult to tell precisely.

Now, with all this talk about sugar equaling love, or getting confused with love, it's kind of inevitable that a lot of folks would see denying a kid their God-given, American-sized portion of sugar as stopping just short of child abuse.

Inevitably, the aspect of our project that people found most compelling was the fact that the children were
doing it too
. And the questions they asked most often had to do with the children:

“How are they
taking
it?”

“Are they freaking out?”

“Do they act calmer without sugar?”

“How do you
do
it?”

The answers were often complex: Some days the kids adored the project, acting as if it was something significant and wonderful—something that bound us together and made our family unique; other times they'd rail against me and the project for totally ruining their lives, or make maudlin faces at the prospect of being in the vicinity of a treat they knew full well they were not going to be able to have.

But when I say “kids,” I really mean Greta, because Ilsa,
at age six, was really the more easygoing of the two when it came to, well, everything.

Greta, on the other hand, as an ideal teenager-in-training, tends toward the dramatic and is doing an excellent job living up to the legacy of her name (as in Garbo). Early on she made a point everywhere we went to announce to anyone within hearing range the specifics of our project, to which the usual response would be a puzzled, piteous grown-up look that seemed to say, “You poor thing, you have controlling hippie parents don't you? Do they make you eat lima beans for breakfast?”

Even though I was pretty sure my kids would survive the year relatively untraumatized, like most parents, I still agonized. Would they ever forgive me? Would they grow up feeling deprived and alienated? Would they one day hoard sweets in their shoe closet?

But I forged on. I learned quickly NOT to take them with me to the supermarket so they could drool over all the lovely products in shiny packages that we weren't buying. I became big on after-school snacks like popcorn and hummus and my latest attempt at a decent no-sugar cookie. I learned to pay $1.50 for an apple at the ice-skating rink snack bar, even though the apples and other snacks we brought from home were exponentially better
and
cheaper.

“It's more
fun
to buy it here, Mommy,” Ilsa illuminated me.
Okay
, I thought. We weren't buying the soft pretzels or hot cocoa or French fries or Gatorade that everyone else was, but at least we could buy something from the concession stand too—and I realized that when my kids were feeling deprived, that $1.50 apple could make all the difference.

_______

Now, let me just say this right up front: I love our elementary school. I adore it. I want to marry it. Starting when Greta was in pre-K, we'd been attending this school for six years now and have enjoyed every minute of the warm, welcoming community of learning it provides—no kidding. I wish
I
had gone to a school this good as a kid. In the past, they have even done great things on the healthy food front, such as plant a school garden and invite parents to contribute their favorite soup recipes for lunch. Currently there's even a grant-funded healthy snack program that gives the kids fruits and vegetables in between meals.

_______

_______

Unfortunately, none of this alters the fact that the school food, the day-to-day menu, is
packed
with added sugar. Even I, who had been focusing on the added-sugar issue with a myopic vengeance since the turn of the year, was shocked one day when, out of curiosity, I sat down to really
look
at the breakfast menu that regularly came home in backpacks with a slew of other color-coded papers.

Once again, though, there was a certain amount of decoding involved. When they say “assorted whole-grain cereal” read: Frosted Flakes. When they say “Nutri-Grain fruit bar” read: high-fructose corn syrup. When they say “graham crackers” read: crystalline fructose (or lab fructose—the sweetest ingredient our food scientists have managed to come up with to date. Think: sugar heroin).

So, I decided to get out my highlighter. I counted a total of thirty possible options on the breakfast menu including condiments and syrup; out of those thirty items, eighteen had added sugar—
more than half
. But it got worse.

Looking closer, the school menu advertises “Milk Variety Is Served with Every Meal!” What does “milk variety” mean? This means
chocolate
milk. Okay, so if we assume a child chooses
chocolate
milk with his or her breakfast every morning, we are now up to
twenty-four
items out of thirty possible breakfast choices, or
eighty percent of breakfast items containing added sugar
.

And then there's this: every day children having breakfast are given a piece of fresh fruit. Of course, the fruit has fructose in it too—although, as we know, eating it with the corresponding fiber and micronutrients, they're at least effectively balancing that portion of fructose out. So while it isn't added sugar, per se, it is still yet even
more sugar
.

Therefore, if we are looking at the number of items containing fructose (read: poison) in our breakfast menu for March 2011, and assuming a choice of chocolate milk every day? We can now bring our total of items containing sugar/fructose to
twenty-nine out of thirty, or roughly 97 percent
. What is the one item left
not
containing fructose? Cream cheese for our bagel on Tuesday.

This isn't atypical for breakfast in general, which, as we know, wins the award for “Meal Most Likely to Contain Tons of Sugar When You Least Expect It.” In fact, one of David Gillespie's five cardinal rules for avoiding fructose is “Be Careful at Breakfast.” Oooo! That sounds ominous, like a horror movie for diabetics.

All this being said, I know the arguments: “some breakfast is better than no breakfast at all,” and “my kid won't drink milk if it isn't chocolate.” Personally, I don't buy this. Part of the problem is that as parents and as a society, we are providing too many choices.
³⁸
Did Laura Ingalls refuse to drink her milk if it wasn't chocolate? To eat her cereal if it didn't have Day-Glo marshmallows in it? I have to believe that, if your kid is hungry enough, they'll eat. If they're thirsty enough, they'll drink. Are Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms
really
the best we can do? I know that the school valiantly puts up with all us
demanding parents, each of whom wants or expects something different; I know if the school had to pay attention to
every
parent's pet peeve concern we'd probably have to cancel school altogether until we could figure out how to encase each child in a nice firm bubble. Still, I cringe when I read the wrappers that I dig from the bottom of my kids' backpacks and learn about the high-fructose corn syrup in their Rice Krispies, the partially-hydrogenated vegetable shortening in their Goldfish Grahams, and lovely sounding things like methylcellulose, diglycerides, and something called “propylene glycol esters of fatty acids” in their Nutri-Grain bars. Yum.