Year of No Sugar

by Eve O. Schaub

I made the connection at an early age that sugar is the food equivalent of love.

studies have shown that a teenager who drinks a soda before a meal will eat more at that meal,4 not less—and in our culture, of course, that likely means you will eat more sugar. Talk about a vicious cycle.

when consumption of sugar has gone down, for example due to the wartime shortages of the 1940s, the rates of prostate cancer also drops—sixty years later.

Then, when sugar became plentiful again? Prostate cancers went up again—sixty years later.

In the beginning of the 1900s, we consumed about five ounces of fructose per week, or approximately sixteen pounds per person, per year. Today we consume about 140 pounds of sugar, or 70.5 pounds of fructose per person, per year—an increase of 341 percent.

Still, could it be a case of circumstantial evidence? Even if it was, it was still pretty compelling circumstantial evidence, along the lines of finding the missing cat’s collar in the backseat of the dog’s car—it may not assure guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but it su-u-u-u-u-re didn’t look good.

I realized sugar wasn’t the only thing I felt starved of—it was also the very concept of being able to provide a treat as a sign of affection.

Agave syrup may be “natural” and “raw,” but, you know, so is arsenic.

Most of all, I worried about the same thing all mothers of preteen girls worry about: budding eating disorders. The last, last, LAST thing I wanted to do in the course of discussing important topics like the national epidemic of obesity was to inadvertently encourage some fifth-grade girl not to eat.

Do we really give this little of a shit about what we’re putting into our bodies, our kids’ bodies?

Likewise, I want to be able to enjoy a bit of fructose—potentially addictive poison anyone?—in the occasional dessert. For me, that’s part of the joy of life.