Finding Sweetness in a Sugar Free Life, Chapter 1
Dec 31 '05 (Updated Feb 01 '06)
The Bottom Line Or, What I did on Summer Vacation...
(It's January already, you fool!)
Sorry, the dog ate my paper...
(You don't have a dog...)
Blame it on the library. I was browsing the video section when the title Supersize Me caught my eye. I figured the notorious anti-McD’s propaganda piece would be a good laugh. My husband agreed, so we popped it in once the kiddies were in bed.
We were totally unprepared for what we saw (and I don’t mean the staged vomit scene). Morgan Spurlock, the producer of MTV’s gross-out show “I Bet you Will”, passes not one, but 3 physicals with flying colors and undergoes a rigorous fitness screening before undertaking a 30 day McDonald’s-only diet. His life goes to Hell in a Handbasket, as if anything else could possibly happen in such a film. But what was particularly surprising to us (and the doctors who were monitoring him) was that in addition to gaining 24 pounds, he managed to nearly destroy his liver. Huh??? How did that happen? I mean, the doctors were begging this guy to quit for fear of irreversible damage.
It’s the sugar, stupid!!!
So what caused this guy’s problems? The fat? The calories? Here’s where the movie fails miserably. They are so stuck on their thesis that fast food is the root of all evil, they refuse to divulge what caused him to double his calories and send his triglycerides through the ceiling. They dance around the subject, casting a glance at soda, mentioning briefly that ketchup is mainly sugar. Of course, he fails to divulge that, in addition to drinking supersize sodas, he was gorging himself on shakes and sundaes outside the restaurant. Not about to trust an MTV darling with my nutritional salvation, I headed for the internet and started reading everything I could get my hands on. Again, I was surprised by what I found.
One of the single worst substances you can put in your mouth (and still attempt to call it food instead of poison) is sugar, followed closely by white flour, white rice, white potatoes, and generally anything else that’s been processed beyond recognition. But the question is, WHY?
I mean, come on, everybody in the world knows that sugar isn’t good for you. If you didn’t hear it from mom and dad, you heard it from someone, or you found out yourself, the hard way, after eating all your Halloween candy in one sitting. Wow, what a stomachache. Yet we eat it anyway, and it has made its way into almost everything we eat, from salad dressing to ketchup to spaghetti sauce. Heck, it’s even in so-called “health foods”. But who on earth actually knows WHY sugar is bad for you? Doctors certainly don’t seem to, or they’d be hounding us to death to leave off the stuff for Cripe’s sake.
Enter the book Sugar Blues by William Dufty. Now, here’s a book that was written around the time I was born, and if someone would have given me a copy 15 years ago, it could have saved me a lot of time, energy, pain and testing. Anyone out there suffering from “Irritable Bowel Syndrome” will find out why!
The main points I learned from the book:
When you eat sugar, it has already been chemically processed to the point of being essentially pre-digested, so it passes directly into your bloodstream. Your adrenals spring into action because the delicate balance of sugar and oxygen in your blood has been upset: you get an adrenaline rush.
Next, your pancreas boomerangs onto the scene with insulin, which binds to the sugars and socks them away in your cells as fast as they can in order to restore balance.
Unfortunately, it does a little bit too good of a job. Now your blood sugar is too low and you start to feel groggy or even sleepy. Your “sugar rush” has gone away. Your body sends a signal to your brain to eat something to get your blood sugar back up.
So, chances are, you reach for a Snickers, because they really satisfy you. Voila, the cycle starts over again.
So now what’s the fallout of this cycle? Well, one of the first places your body stores excess sugar is in your liver. Unfortunately, you can only store so much there before it gets overloaded. Then your body starts socking it away as, you guessed it, fat. Fat in your liver, fat in your butt, thighs, and eventually, your heart, kidneys, even your brain. Not to mention, your adrenals and your pancreas get worn out and in many cases, fail…hello, type II diabetes.
But here’s the worst part (for me, anyway, because I’m all about my kids): this whole process requires a boatload of vitamins and minerals, all of which, ironically enough, would have been present in a food such as sugar cane or sugar beets. Since it’s not there in the processed, refined sugar, your body has to take it all out of somewhere. So it takes it from your teeth, your bones, your muscles, your immune system.
And we wonder why we’re sick all the time?
So here I am thinking, great! I spend my time and money trying to feed my kids right, I give them vitamins, and I might as well flush all that down the toilet every time I give them a cookie?
And my husband, unbeknownst to me, was a borderline sugar-holic. I had no idea how much candy he ate when he wasn’t at home!
“You’ve gotta read this! This is fascinating!”
Sugar Blues is a book that is so full of information you would expect it to be the biggest, most horrible bore. But on the contrary, it’s so well written, I couldn’t put it down. It goes way beyond boring explanations of the chemical reactions that take place in your body. It’s a treatise on the history of sugar and its effect on the economies of the New World, all written in an engaging style that was purely irresistible. I couldn’t believe how well researched it was. And though I am as far from being a conspiracy theorist as you can get, his explanations of why these things are not common knowledge made perfect sense. (I just told you sugar is in EVERYTHING. Could you imagine what would happen if people suddenly stopped eating it???) But what I couldn’t understand was that if this information has been publicly available for this long, why hasn’t it had a major effect on our diet? After all, have you ever heard of this book???
I brought it with me on summer vacation, to read on the plane. As I was reading it, I kept telling my husband, “You’ve gotta read this! This is fascinating!” Finally, a day or two into the trip, he picked it up and started paging through it. He was hooked. He would bring it with him into restaurants and read it while we were waiting for our meal. (Talk about an interesting dinner partner!) He was inspired to start cutting the sugar, to see what would happen.
Everything the book told us we found to be dead on. When we avoided sweets and simple carbs (white rice, flour, bread, potatoes), we felt great. When we didn’t, the effect was pronounced, due to the sharp contrast with how well we felt when we were more careful. The clincher was a lunch at a Chinese restaurant that knocked my husband for a loop. Darn that Sweet & Sour Chicken—it took him hours to recover! He was tired, grouchy, had a headache and was generally awful to be around until almost dinnertime. This, even though we were supposed to be on vacation, enjoying ourselves.
And he made the decision that radically changed our lives: “We’ve got to just totally cut all the sugar from our diets!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! My husband, lover of all things sweet, breakfast cereal addict, candy bar fiend, had decided this with no pressure whatsoever from me. I stopped worrying about why the title Sugar Blues was nearly unknown—we were living proof that what it said was right.
It was a really great summer vacation.
Then we got home and it was time to put our new resolution into action.
I was faced with the challenge of finding sweetness in a sugar free life.
To be continued…
(For more on Supersize Me and the High Fructose Corn Syrup connection, see It's the Sugar, Stupid.)
To read a full review of the book Sugar Blues including a link to a large portion of the book online, see What's the Big Deal?
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