Year of No Sugar (17 page)

So the afternoon progressed and we watched virtually the entirety of our town file through the line that snaked through the firehouse parking lot and all the way down to the road. I heard, at its peak, the wait for food was over an hour. But we never did join the line. We chatted with our neighbors. We checked our bids at the auction. We avoided the bake-sale table. We swung.

I came home with an empty feeling in me that only partly had to do with the fact that it was getting to be dinnertime. Everyone in the community had come together to help our neighbors Will and Eric, and we were a part of that, certainly. But we all know food is symbolic; food is important. When people break bread together, it means something. At least for the time being, our family was, in some small way, existing apart.

_______

The day
before
the event, like everybody else, we had gone to drop off our family's auction donation at the firehouse. It was very social, everyone standing around and marveling at the variety and quality of different auction items. (“Have you seen
this
one?”) But what I really reeled at was on a table across the room: the bake-sale table. Goodies of every conceivable shape and size were crowded across two nine-foot tables, jostling for space, in the process of being neatly cataloged and labeled by my friend Rhonda. Rhonda was one of the event's organizers and also a reader of my blog, who regularly posted comments and links to interesting sugar-related articles she came across.

_______

_______

Staring wide-eyed at the spread of frostings, sprinkles, chips, jellies, and coconut cream, I joked with Rhonda that I should take a photo of the awe-inspiring spread to post on my blog.

“Oh no!” she said, genuinely taken aback. “But…this is
good
!”

Her reaction stuck with me, because I think it has everything to do with how inextricably emotion and food are intertwined in our culture. I mean, of
course
it's good, right? The outpouring of emotion was physically visible in response to what was a shocking and violent event. People wanted to express love and comfort in the name of Will and Eric, to literally wrap them up in all that is warm and good and predictable, in an effort to make up for the scary thing that had changed their lives forever. What better way to do this than with a nice coffeecake or tray of raspberry thumbprints? We
all understand, implicitly, when dessert is intended this way, as a concrete manifestation of love.

Similarly, another day Steve and I found ourselves at a potluck memorial service (yes, in Vermont we can make anything a potluck), and it struck me in very much the same way: one huge, long table of actual lunch food ran parallel to an equally long and huge table filled
entirely
with sweets—perhaps twenty feet by three of sugar, sugar, and more sugar. Again, should we be surprised if the outpouring of emotion naturally gravitated toward carrot cake and not carrots?

I'm not saying this is bad exactly, but Rhonda's reaction made me realize how deep and primal our attachment to sugar as love and comfort runs. I mean, of
course
raising money for a good cause is inherently a good thing. But when we lay out a football field of sugar in the name of comfort, I also think it's important to take a step back and think about the lesson we're teaching our children.

Because, after all, who's going to be eating a lot of those cookies and brownies, anyway?

What Rhonda's comment made me realize is that it's all well and good to demonize sugar when you're talking about the Big Bad Corporations sneaking high-fructose corn syrup into our ketchup and mayonnaise; it's another thing entirely to go after Grandma's lovingly baked molasses cookies. The problem is, nutritionally, your body can't tell the difference between the “bad” sugar (from Big Food Inc.) and “good” sugar (from Grandma). Fructose is fructose. And an excess of fructose consumption, now at its highest levels ever and still climbing, is making our society sick.

I imagine that one day, when the data has become so abundant as to be incontrovertible, having a buffet of sugar that
rivals the actual food will be considered as socially unacceptable as smoking on airplanes or littering out your car window—things which we as a society once accepted as completely normal yet now we have come to realize the destructiveness of. Nobody is trying to say we can't smoke or drink or throw things away; they're just saying we have to be careful—
much
more careful—about how we go about it. Same with sugar.

Unfortunately, we seem to have a knack for being preoccupied with all the wrong messages. Remember when I was at the Mayo Clinic with my dad? One day we were eating lunch in the cafeteria when a rather heavyset couple sat down at the other end of our table. They had clearly gotten the “I'm trying to be good, or mostly good” meal; they each had purchased a large chef's salad with a breadstick, and she had added to her tray a banana and a skim milk, while he had a large diet soda and a piece of pie for dessert. I couldn't help but wonder to myself if they wouldn't have been better off enjoying a meal with much more fat but much less sugar/fake sugar. I mean, sugar (or the chemically fake stuff ) was in the salad dressing, the breadstick, the diet soda, and in the pie. It was freakin'
everywhere
on their tray, and it was as if I—through some mutant power that might qualify me to be a comic book superhero—was the
only one who could see it
. I idly wondered if perhaps one of them suffered from one of the many variants of metabolic syndrome, and if so, if anyone would ever offer the suggestion that they might be healthier forgoing the salad with dressing in favor of the pot roast and mashed potatoes.

Heresy! Right?

Now, I've made it clear I'm no doctor, no nurse, and no dietitian. But it just makes a lot of
sense
to me when Dr. Robert Lustig says that we're effectively missing the Technicolor
elephant in the living room when we caution people to watch their salt, watch their fat, watch their alcohol, but rarely if ever do we mention the deleterious effects of sugar and its omnipresence in our contemporary diet. Only veeeeeery recently have we seen sugar begin to become a part of the conversation, in part due to the efforts of people—Lustig, Gillespie—willing to say loudly and repeatedly what no one wants to hear. Another reason we may be willing, at last, to consider sugar's dark side is simply out of sheer desperation. It's beginning to seem like not a week goes by without another horrifying statistic being released about the obesity of Americans. Currently one quarter of young people in the United States now have diabetes or pre-diabetes! Seventeen percent of children and teenagers are now obese! By 2030 forty-two percent of all Americans will be obese! I know I'm repeating myself, but it's hard to imagine worse statistics than these.

So maybe, just maybe, if enough of us pester our poor waitresses for ingredients and start reading the depressing labels on the foods in our supermarket, just
maybe
the momentum will stick and the dialogue will at last start to change. Very early on in our Year of No Sugar, my mother sent me a short newspaper article in which it was noted that the “just-released…Dietary Guidelines say that we should ‘significantly reduce' our intake of added sugars…”

“That's because diets high in added sugar are linked not only to obesity, but also to an increased risk of high blood pressure, triglycerides, inflammation, and low levels of good HDL cholesterol.”
⁴²

Yes!
Thank you! Not only that, then the article goes on to list all the products you'd never suspect to find sugar in such as salad dressing, ketchup, bagels, pasta sauce, and bread. Sound familiar? Of course, as we now know, if she had wanted to, the author could've added exponentially to her list: chicken broth, mayonnaise, breakfast cereal, dried fruit, English muffins, baby food, pita bread, coleslaw, virtually every sauce known to man…She really should've given me a call.

That's okay. The article was tiny, but I was impressed that it existed at all. Some time after that, Gary Taubes wrote the extensive article “Is Sugar Toxic?” for the
New York Times Magazine
. And after that HBO released a four-part documentary on obesity in America titled
Weight of the Nation
. And a little while after that, Mayor Bloomberg banned the bucket soda in New York City.
⁴³
I wondered, could it be that we might be just beginning to have a revelation that reverses so much of what we've been told about nutrition for so long?

In his YouTube lecture, Lustig had stated it as plain as can be: “It's not the fat, people.
It's not the fat
.”

I wished, somehow, I could have communicated that to our table mates at Mayo Clinic that day and saved them from who knows how many bad salads, not to mention a lifetime of trying to be “good” and wondering why it still isn't working.

 

⁴²
Molly Kimball, “Secret Sweets,”
The Times Picayune
, February 11, 2011.

⁴³
Despite the fact that this measure was subsequently struck down by the State Supreme Court (March 2013), I still adore Bloomberg for this. Whether it was legally correct or not, I love the fact that he stuck his own political neck out in order to get us debating the horse-trough-size soda cup.

One day I woke up and realized that we had made it to a significant milestone: we were officially past the six-month mark. Halfway!! Could it be that we had really made it so far? Could it really be that we had so much farther to go? June had been clammy and wet, so by the time July rolled around, most area residents were figuring summer had simply decided not to come this year. This is Vermont; it happens. But just as I was waking up to realize our No-Sugar Year was halfway to its finish line, I was also waking up to realize that summer really was going to arrive after all. All of a sudden the marble quarry–swimming hole was full of people showing off their farmer tans. Before I had fully realized it had started, strawberry season was practically over, so I hurried out and bought two quarts, never mind going picking.

Yes, summer had finally arrived, just in time for us to go away. We were preparing for a trip—a big trip. We would be leaving in a few days for two weeks in Italy.
⁴⁴

Now I know what you're thinking. You're
not
thinking,
Gee, did Eve's family visit the Leaning Tower of Pisa? The Vatican? The Coliseum?
I know you're not thinking that because that's not what everyone at home was asking me. What everyone at home was asking me was: “Oo!
What
are you going to do about the Sugar Project?”

Yeeeaaaaah. Good question. It was one to which I had given much thought but had yet to receive any brilliant revelations about. At the time, my circular thought pattern ran something like this: the Italians are serious about their food—in particular fresh, homemade food; this will be extremely helpful.
⁴⁵
Also very helpful will be the fact that the Italians aren't too big on desserts—gelato and tiramisu notwithstanding. The first time our family went to Italy two years before, I recall more than one instance in restaurants when we had to ask if, in fact, there
was
any dessert to be had. We were much more likely to be offered an after-dinner drink of limoncello or amaro than a dessert menu. It was often an afterthought, as in: “Oh! Yeah—sure we have dessert!
Would
you like dessert?”

On that trip, the desserts we did order struck my American palate as…not very good. Instead, they were creamy and cakey and lemony and almondy. They were not what I would call…
sweet
. I didn't care for them very much—at that time, I was still looking for that taste explosion at the end of a good meal to signify its end, like fireworks at the end of the Fourth
of July. I mean, you just can't go
home
till the grand finale practically blows your eardrums out—or taste buds off as the case may be. We Americans are not big on subtlety.

Therefore, by comparison, my logic went, we should be in good shape, right? No one would be tempting us with deep-fried Oreos or Death-by-Chocolate Sundaes.

However, gelato is good. Really,
really
good. Did you know that you can sometimes request
crema
and they will put a perfect, tiny little dollop of whipped cream on top of your gelato cone? Did you know it was projected to be between eighty and ninety degrees the entire first week of our trip? Do you think, at the tourist-thronged landmarks we were sure to be visiting, we were going to be encountering gelato every blinking where we went?

This, I realized, was going to present a problem. If we had any hope of surviving the trip with our No-Sugar Project intact, Steve and I needed to come up with our Official Italian Strategy.

So one night when we had a babysitter, Steve and I hashed it out over dinner.

My husband started out the bargaining. “How about one dessert per day?” he helpfully suggested. I about spit out my drink. I pointed out that, on a fourteen-day trip, this would result in us having more desserts in the month of
July
than we would otherwise have in the entirety of our yearlong project.