Year of No Sugar

by Eve O. Schaub

When the low-fat craze of the 1980s hit, and food processors began coming out with low-fat versions of all their products, what carbohydrate did they use to replace the great taste of fat? Why, sugar, of course. So in addition to all the obvious sugar—the soda, the candy bars, the Hostess Fruit Pies—we also have an entire universe of hidden sugar, in things that aren’t even sweet and in places you’d never suspect—sugar in our gravy, salad dressings, sauces. Sugar in our tortellini and chicken broth and baby food.

Not coincidentally, a century ago, before sugar got cheap and our consumption went through the roof, a mere one in twenty-five people was clinically obese. Today in the U.S., one in three is.13 Not just fat, mind you; one third of the U.S. population is obese.

Simply put, cancerous cells consume more glucose than normal cells. Therefore, if you have a heightened blood-glucose level (due to all those lovely circulating fatty acids that interrupt the glucose from getting to your cells) you have a very cancer-cell-friendly environment on your hands.

Fructose is what makes sugar, sugar. And at the risk of beating this dead horse into dust particles: fructose is the bad guy; if our diet were a western film, fructose would be wearing the black hat and spitting chewing tobacco at children and small animals.

The day I go to a sit-down restaurant in Italy and my children can order chicken nuggets with fries is the day I stop going to Italy.