Year of No Sugar (13 page)

²⁸
It's kind of amazing how many things we
didn't
learn till after our Year of No Sugar was over. It was then that our local health food store began carrying actual jars of barley malt syrup (wait! we can
buy
it?!), which fast became a favorite ingredient of mine when a recipe called for a thick, viscous sweetener such as honey or molasses.

²⁹
In his book
Sweet Poison
, David Gillespie describes the abrupt about-face the American Diabetic Association did in 2002 when they realized recommending that diabetics sweeten with pure fructose was not only not good, but was in fact, dangerous, for this very reason. Gillespie,
Sweet Poison
, 60.

³⁰
The only good reason I've heard yet for favoring agave is that it can be easier to digest than some other sweeteners, for those who have digestion issues.

³¹
Still, I wondered—was there a form of agave which included the plant fiber, meaning one could have the sweetness along with the original fiber, like eating an apple? Turns out no, unless you consider razor strops or hand soap (two of the uses for the non-sap parts of the plant) edible. Too bad.

³²
At that time. After our Year of No Sugar was over, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” would surpass two million hits on YouTube—and the last time I checked it was beyond 3.5 million. Not bad for a medical lecture!

³³
Since the publication of Gillespie's
Sweet Poison
, he has gone on to become a tireless advocate of No Sugar in Australia, appearing regularly on television, radio, and in print, in addition to writing another book on the subject
The Sweet Poison Quit Plan
and maintaining an informative website and blog. It would not be an exaggeration to say he is the father of a burgeoning No-Sugar movement in Australia.

I don't mean to be indelicate, folks, but I think the time has come to talk about one of the
other
consequences of eating. As one of our children's books puts it: “just about every animal poops.”

Quite honestly, I never used to give poop a lot of thought. As a teenager, I attended a summer horse camp where we spent large portions of our day managing the unmentionable stuff, shoveling and carting it around, climbing small mountains of it in order to get to the designated wheelbarrow-dump-out spot, trying to get away with ditching it instead in the bushes or behind a stack of old moldy hay. But it wasn't until I first went to a local chiropractor for pregnant-lady back pain about ten years ago that I was given a reason to think about the issue of poop as a matter of
health
, rather than mere inconvenience, necessity, or proper horse care.

“About how often do you have a bowel movement?” Ray asked me. Ray Foster is not only a wonderful chiropractor, but also a neighbor and fellow parent. I was more than a little mortified to be asked such an unmentionable question, not to mention the fact that I really had no idea how to answer
it. I had to admit—I really didn't
know
. Certainly not every day,
maybe
every couple of days…heck, who knows? For all I knew, it could've been once every
month
. Are we really supposed to keep track of such things? I wondered. Had I missed that day in health class? Sure, I remember learning the four food groups (I had always enjoyed the fact that there was a fifth, “other” category for all the really interesting things like Pop Rocks and Crisco), but did we ever,
ever
talk about what happened to those foods after they entered the big melting pot of our digestive system? About the
other
side of eating?

Definitely not. I imagine the prospect of having to tackle yet another giggle-fest topic in high school health class was just too much for our beleaguered teachers. I wonder if I had had a greater sense of nutritional intelligence, would it have swayed me from following a path of uninformed vegetarianism for two decades? Now, I know this is a
gargantuan
tangent, but hang in there—I promise this all comes back around to poop.

Beginning at age fourteen, back when this was still a fairly unheard-of practice among my peers, I officially became Some Kind of Vegetarian. Part of a protracted and somewhat naïve attempt to express my love for animals, I evolved slowly over the years through a rainbow of vegetarian-y shades: no red meat, no poultry, no fish…I never made it all the way to vegan. (The idea of giving up my beloved cheese plainly horrified me—“What, no
nachos
?”)

The fact that my parents both thought it a passing teenage fancy surely made my commitment all the more steadfast. I was asserting my independence in the arena of food (this sounds familiar, somehow…), but there was one little problem. I was eating like
crap
.

Of course, as a young adult this didn't bother me a bit—I loved animals and abhorred the thought of their mass slaughter in food factories. At the time terms like
free range
and
organic
had yet to make their way into the national consciousness, so eating animals—as far as any of us knew—by definition involved animal cruelty. I was way more interested in not being a nutritional hypocrite than in eating healthily—whatever
that
meant. After all, society kept changing its mind radically on what constituted “healthy eating” anyway…right? I just figured I would eat what was appealing and my body would sort everything out. I reveled in the idea that I was eating according to a higher moral ideal: what you don't kill makes you stronger. I mean, I was saving
animals
, for crying out loud!

The problem was, I was what they call a “French fry vegetarian.” Don't ever let anyone tell you that vegetarians are by definition healthier than meat eaters—this is a common misconception. Just because someone doesn't eat meat doesn't mean they subsist on sustainably harvested seaweed chips and free-trade kale. Let's just say, we might also label this extended period of my life the “Pizza and Grilled Cheese Era.” (You can see why I would've made a miserable vegan.)

During those years, I simply ate
around
the meat everywhere I went and enjoyed more than my share of all the non-meat items on the menu: cheese, bread, pasta, more cheese. To my mother's dismay, I thought nothing of regularly having a bagel with cream cheese for dinner. Once in a blue moon, I might eat a vegetable, just for the sheer novelty of it.

At that rate, it's a wonder I didn't just stop “emitting” altogether. (See? Poop!) I probably would've made it to my fiftieth birthday party and then, at the height of the festivities, exploded. But somehow the human body makes do—or
poo—with what it's given. Lucky for me, my husband convinced me eating meat might help my low-energy problem, from which I had suffered for years—and you know what? He was right. Gradually, over time, I found out that the more meat I ate, the better I felt. At long last, after twenty years, my “higher moral ideals” gave way to a rather novel idea:
feeling healthier
.

Which isn't to say that I was
healthy
. But I was health
ier
, which was a good place to start. I was happier, more energetic, and way less prone to sudden, debilitating attacks of I-feel-crappy.

After twenty years of vegi-something-ism and my subsequent foray back into the carnivorous universe, I felt pretty good. I still wished I had more energy, could find time for more sleep and regular exercise, and all those good things we all say we want but rarely get around to doing anything about. I cooked a lot, more than most folks I knew, so I figured that was as much as I could do in the health department. And then came Dr. Lustig and his darned extremely convincing argument. So the obvious question was going to be, after embarking on an adventure aimed at being healthier,
were
we healthier?

Everyone kept wanting to know. Every time we talked about the No-Sugar Project, even after only a few weeks, people wanted to know: Have you lost weight? Do you feel better? Do the kids seem happier/healthier/calmer? I wondered,
How
do
you quantify such an ambiguous thing as health?
About three months in to our year, I had not lost any weight, the kids didn't seem noticeably calmer, nor had my hair turned green or any other very obvious side effect. I did
think
I felt healthier, and I did
seem
to not get sick as often or for as long as I might otherwise—surely, there were all subjective issues
which could just as easily be due to coincidence or a placebo effect. If we were going to notice any significant changes, it wasn't going to be in the first few days or weeks—I even wondered if we'd notice in a matter of months.

That's the thing about sugar: you're talking a long, long timeline. Sugar isn't crack; it doesn't cause you to get in a car accident or have a seizure or jump off a rooftop or anything dramatic or interesting like that. As we've seen, sugar's deleterious effects are insidious and long term. Remember how many decades we all struggled as a society just to admit what everyone pretty much already knew about
cigarettes
, i.e., that they were
bad
for you? Well, an analogy between cigarettes and sugar is an apt one: the majority of the damage in each is accomplished not with one use, or a few uses, but with continued steady use over years, decades. That's one reason why proving their connection with disease is so difficult.

Consequently, “better health” for us was simply not going to be a readily observable condition—much less provable—after one lousy year of not eating sugar. We couldn't claim to have cured ourselves of diabetes or prevented an impending heart attack or nipped a case of obesity in the bud. A year may seem like an eternity to us, but in the grand scheme of an average American lifetime? One year doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It was too bad, but most of our “evidence” was going to be highly subjective and largely anecdotal.

However, one thing that is simply
not
subjective is poop (see? I told you to hang in there), and I was more than a little embarrassed to notice that—apparently—I was full of it. At first, I had tried to ignore the obvious change, but the facts were as inescapable as they were mystifying to me: on our No Sugar Plan, I didn't just “emit” like clockwork; I pooped
like a Swiss freaking watch. At
least
once a day. If not more. Compared to my vegetarian-ish days of God-knows-when-I-last-went, this new state of affairs was, well, hard to ignore.

What was going
on
here?
I wondered.
Was
it the lack of sugar per se? Or could it be the fact that we were eating many more fruits to supplement sweetness in our diet? Could it simply be the fact that we were making so many more things from scratch in order to avoid sugar, and in doing so were also avoiding a host of other food additives and preservatives?

I really didn't know. All I knew was, suddenly my body was, well,
working
better than it had perhaps ever before, which was really, uh, nice. And probably a good sign of improved health. Not to be gross about it or anything.

_______

Although the poop issue was evident almost immediately, as the year progressed, another, more subtle change became gradually but increasingly clear: our palates were changing.

As it turned out, our monthly sugar-containing dessert was good for another purpose besides staving off a family mutiny—it also served as a sort of de facto check-in point for our tongues. I suppose it speaks to my longtime love affair with sugar that it simply never
occurred
to me that, after abstaining from dessert for long stretches, when we finally got to have it,
we might not enjoy it.

You heard me. Or, at least, we might not enjoy it as much as we once did or as much as we expected to. But believe it or not, there were moments when eating our oh-so-rare sugar treat became downright
unpleasant
. There came a point when I stopped looking forward to our monthly dessert and started dreading that too-sweet disruption of our now-familiar routine.

For example, while we delighted in those first few, eagerly anticipated treats in January and February, by April, I began to notice that our monthly treat now gave me a headache and a racing pulse, not to mention a weird, syrupy taste in my mouth that made me want to go brush my teeth. Huh. In August we encountered the first monthly dessert that none of us would finish, and by September the elaborate concoction I created for Steve's birthday actually made me feel quite ill.

As I lay on the couch with a pounding headache and feeling awful, it occurred to me that perhaps I should be worried. I had wanted to do an experiment, sure, be healthier, yes, but had I intended to give my family a sweet-ectomy? Never.

I had read about this, in David Gillespie's book. He said it took time, but within a few weeks of avoiding sugar, one begins to lose the taste for it—it simply ceases to be appealing. He was right, of course, but what I was discovering was that for me it was a teeny bit more complicated than that. Whereas my
tongue
didn't want that piece of banana cream pie or cone of gelato, my
brain
still did.

What ensued was a sort of worst-case scenario in which I looked forward to our dessert night for weeks on end until finally, at long last, I'd have the opportunity to enjoy it and… it tasted
awful
. It reminded me of that phenomenon when I was pregnant and all chocolate turned to sawdust in my mouth—it was frustrating. Disappointing. Maddening. But it was fascinating too. Clearly we were on the right track—things were
happening
in our bodies, our senses were
changing
. It's just that if that particular track meant I'd never again enjoy a nice piece of rhubarb pie—
ever
—well, I just wasn't sure my brain would ever forgive me.

_______

The only other indicator I found which was somewhat measurable would come at the end of our year. It was then that it occurred to me to compare our kids' report cards, listing their absences for the trimester. After subtracting the days I knew had been missed for non-illness reasons, such as travel,
³⁴
what I came up with I found kind of fascinating. Look: