Year of No Sugar (2 page)

Nonetheless, everything seemed to be going along fairly well until I got to the part about making designs in the frosting using the tines of a fork. After chocolate shavings and shaking powdered sugar through a doily, this was pretty much my Big Finish. It was then that I realized—with horror—that I had
Forgotten. The. Fork
.

Oh.

This was one in a series of moments in seventh grade when I fervently wished I had a shell in which to curl up and disappear, but lacking that, I instead turned a lovely shade of beet and attempted to
mime
the fork part. Worse public speaking debacles have happened, I imagine, but you couldn't have convinced me of that then.

However, despite the Fork Faux Pas and my appalling lack of public speaking skills, all was not lost. My English teacher
liked
the speech, but she
loved
the cake. I have a distinct memory of her pink, round face beaming as we all dug into our slices.
¹
I received what was in all likelihood a wholly
undeserved A. That was proof enough for me in the power of sweet.

As far back as I can remember, I've
always
loved to bake. Once, when I was perhaps seven or eight years old, I created a carefully hand-lettered menu and invited everyone in the family to my “restaurant.” Forensic analysis of that menu now reveals that I let Mom worry about the incidental entree of steak and baked potato (yeah, whatever), while I focused on what was
really
important:
apple cobbler for dessert
. The menu even featured a fanciful illustration of the
pièce de résistance
on the cover. As far as
I
was concerned, I had made dinner.

Like most kids, I knew dessert was something special, something magical. Every once in a while, my mother would handily transform a pile of fruit into a pie, handing us down the pastry scraps, which my brother and I would roll into little balls and eat raw while we climbed trees in the backyard. I pined for an Easy-Bake Oven in which to make my very own magical concoctions, but sadly, Santa ignored my culinary aspirations (also, my request for a Barbie Styling Head and Wonder Woman Underoos). So I pestered my mom to let me use the
real
oven until she finally relented.

I made box cakes from the time I could reach the kitchen counter. I remember my shock the first time flour exploded high into the air because I turned the mixer on too high, too fast; my cavernous disappointment the first time I tried to make a recipe without a key ingredient (baking powder, perhaps? I mean, how important could that half a teaspoon
really
be?), and it came out like warmed-over mud.

Still, I would bake at the drop of a hat—for our family, for the neighbor, for the neighbor's dog, for anyone. Everyone always loved it when I baked, with the possible exception
of Mom, who patiently cleaned up after me. After all, who doesn't like dessert? Dessert to me was, and is, an ultimate expression of love—it is beyond a meal; it is beyond sustenance. It is something extra, something special that is made because someone simply wanted you to have it… More than being fed, they wanted you to be
happy
. I made the connection at an early age that sugar
is
the food equivalent of love.

I also learned that the withholding of sugar is a mighty punishment. Once, when we had a rather unobservant babysitter, I had the idea to bring a pocketful of the sparkly doodads from Mom's jewelry box to the playground and use them to decorate my sandbox creations. Of course, once I ran off distractedly to play elsewhere, the jewelry disappeared, and suddenly I found myself in big,
huge
,
ENORMOUS
trouble.

Abject, tear-stained, I waited like an inmate for my sentence. At last it came down from the powers that be: no dessert. For a
month
.

This may not sound like much to you, but believe me, it was the most effective punishment they could possibly have dreamed up. I was open-mouth
horrified
. A
month
? That was like,
forever
. I might
expire
first. Couldn't they just cane me instead?

But watching my family eat the occasional Entenmann's slice of yellow-sheet-cake-with-the-frosting-that-comes-right-off-in-one-piece wasn't the worst part. The
worst
part was that this,
this
was the month of a very special event: the Indian Princess Make-Your-Own-Sundae Party.

Oh. My. God.

I had never been to a Make-Your-Own-Ice-Cream-Sundae Party, but at that time, it only sounded to me like the Best Thing in the Whole World. I was more than horrified;
I was in shock. “Indian Princesses” was a YMCA-sponsored activity (and, obviously, a pre-politically correct era one at that). It was not unlike Brownies or Girl Scouts in that there were lots of craft projects and we marched together in local parades. But the main idea of Indian Princesses was that it was a father-daughter bonding activity, so I knew it was Dad who would be taking me. Would he break down? I wondered. Wouldn't he cave just a little at the sight of so much potential happiness just beyond his adorable little Indian Princess's reach?

The answer to that, actually, was no. Although my dad is known to be a bit of a softy, I'm guessing my mother prepped him in advance: no dessert means…No. Dessert. End of story. I sat and watched all my friends
and
their dads pile bowls high with what seemed to me at the time to be just about the most delicious combination of ingredients I had ever witnessed—not
just
ice cream and sprinkles, but M&M's, hot fudge and butterscotch, even
whipped cream from a can
! ARRRGGH!!!!!!! I was in Hell.

Let me just tell you, I
never
touched my mother's things
again
. Ever.

Since then, a lot of time has passed; over my teenage, college, and early adult years, I continued to bake and even became interested in actual meal cooking as well. No one I knew in college seemed quite as interested in these things as I was. Most everyone I knew was content to be spoon-fed whatever was trucked in to the myriad dining halls we had on campus. I insisted on going off the meal plan and doing my own food experimenting in the dorm mini-kitchen across the hall. While my floor-mates were discovering Jell-O shots or arguing over their Dungeons and Dragons powers,
I was making hummus in my room, buying bulk quinoa at the co-op downtown, and trying to figure out how to devein shrimp on top of my bedspread. When the apple pie I had baked from scratch for a friend's birthday was stolen from the communal fridge, I was beside myself. Stolen!! Pie tin and all—
gone
! Pinching money I could almost understand, but food?
Dessert?
A
birthday
dessert!?! Did these barbarians have no
humanity
?

Of course they didn't. We were talking about young adults whose idea of gourmet cuisine was mozzarella sticks from the Hot Truck. From an early age, I was long out of step with my peers when it came to my passion for food.

At the same time, I've been extremely lucky in life never to be in real need of losing weight, so food fads have come and gone without my feeling the need to pay much mind. The Low-Carb Diet, the Low-Fat Diet, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Blood Type Diet, the Eat All the Liver and Pistachios You Want Diet…I ignored them all. The only one that grabbed my attention in the late nineties was the popular Sugar Busters diet, which dictated that followers give up refined sugar and white flour.

“Why not just give up eating!?!” I would scoff to myself whenever an acquaintance would profess to have lost “a ton” of weight on Sugar Busters. I was annoyed. I was
offended
at the suggestion that cakes and pies—
my
cakes,
my
pies—made from scratch, with
love
, could be harmful. Harmful! “This is all going too far. What, are we never supposed to have
fun
anymore?”

Seriously. What harm could possibly be done by enjoying
dessert
?

 

¹
Wait, what did we eat our slices with? 'Cause that was the crux of the story—I had no fork, right? Honestly, I have no idea. Maybe we used spoons? Our fingers? Chopsticks?

The morning I watched the YouTube video “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” my brain caught fire.

“Hey, Eve, come watch this! You're gonna want to see this!”

My husband was calling to me from upstairs. There was a video posted on Facebook with some doctor droning on about sugar and health.
Well, how compelling can this be?
I thought. But Steve had watched several minutes of it and was transfixed.

So we watched it together for about twenty minutes. My husband left to go to work while I stayed and watched it to the end, ninety minutes total. Ninety minutes, as it turned
out, that would change my life, and the life of our family, forever.

Dr. Robert Lustig is an unassuming-looking fellow with a medium build, gray hair, and a laser-like focus. He's good with PowerPoint and is comfortable throwing about phrases like “multivariate linear regression analysis.” As “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” opens, he stands at a lectern in an anonymous-looking hall, looking every bit like that professor whose chemistry lectures put you to sleep every time. You'd never suspect that a ninety-minute educational lecture from this man could generate some three and a half million hits, but that's just what happened.

“I'm going to tell you, tonight, a story,” Lustig begins. “By the end of the story, I hope I will have debunked the last thirty years of nutrition information in America.”

In the first seventeen minutes, Lustig calmly drops facts like precision bombs:

But it isn't until minute twenty that Lustig throws down the gauntlet:

“My charge before the end of tonight is to demonstrate that
fructose is a poison
.”

That's right—a
poison
. And fructose is in sugar—
all
kinds of sugar.

_______

I was hooked. I was astounded. High-fructose corn syrup is bad? Well, sure. We all suspected that anyway. Table sugar too? Um…
okay
. But
honey
? Maple syrup? Agave?
Fruit juice?
Yep. Yep. Yep.

What the hell was going on here? Why, with his charts and graphs and soda company conspiracy theories, was this guy seeming to make so much
sense
? And if it made so much sense, why hadn't we ever heard this information before? Fruit juice is
poison
? What happened to “fruit juice is
health food
”? And “honey is good for you because it's
natural
”? Why not just tell us everything we've ever been told about nutrition is fundamentally
wrong
? It reminded me of that part in the movie
Sleeper
when the guy who's been asleep for two hundred years starts requesting wheat germ and organic honey, and his doctors remark that thinking those things were healthy is “precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.” Could it be that our entire culture has become one great big Woody Allen joke?

Was it really true, as Lustig put it in one interview, that our culture was the modern-day equivalent of an opium den? Everywhere I looked, I realized, people were sick; they were overweight, they were obese, and they were unhappy. Everywhere I looked, I realized, there was sugar in all its
myriad guises. Could it be that we were really all just addicts sucking away at our soda-straw hookahs, never making the obvious connection between our “drug” of choice and our rapidly declining health? Most of all, the question I couldn't let go of was: in a society as awash in sugar as ours, how
do
you escape from the opium den? Is it even
possible
?

And then I got an idea. An awful idea. Right then, I got a wonderful, awful idea.

What would happen… I wondered.

If.

I thought about it. And thought about it. I couldn't stop thinking about it. It was as if someone had spilled seltzer on the keyboard of my brain: it was sizzling and spitting and making very strange humming noises that only I could hear. Forget a lightbulb above my head; this was an acetylene
torch
. I realized I had better talk to Steve.

If my husband thought I was completely out of my mind, he hid it well. Instead of being horrified or dismissive, he seemed intrigued if a bit apprehensive.

“
A whole year
without sugar?” he wondered aloud. “Hmm.”

Yes. This was my idea: the whole family—myself, my husband Steve,
and
our two daughters, ages six and eleven—we would not eat added sugar for a
whole year
. The more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. Why
not shun sugar
, specifically fructose? Find out how hard it really would be?

I was a writer, after all, and I had been looking for a new project to focus on. I had seen
Super Size Me
, and I had read
Animal Vegetable Miracle
and
Julie and Julia
—all projects by people who might not have been experts per se, but who had an overwhelming desire to do something unusual, something
out of the mainstream—and perhaps, in the process, come to some unforeseen conclusions about themselves and the culture we live in. They all involved food. They all involved a proscribed time period. That was key: I knew I'd never get everyone on board for this project unless the experiment had a definitive beginning and a definitive ending. A yearlong timeline was long enough to really
mean
something, to represent a true commitment and shift to a whole different way of doing things. Maybe even long enough to see some potential changes in ourselves develop. Would our temperaments change? Our waistlines? Our blood work? Our palates? And yet, still, it wasn't
forever
.