Year of No Sugar By Eve Schaub Book Summary
When it comes to how your diet affects your health, everything you’ve learned is probably wrong. It’s not the fat making you fat, and it’s not the salt making you unhealthy: It’s sugar. Sugar is in almost everything, it’s causing us to become obese and terminally ill, and it’s one of the best-kept secrets in the food industry. In this Snapshot, you’ll find out where your unnecessary sugars are coming from, how they’re slowly killing you, and what to do about it.
Year of No Sugar Book Summary:
- Can’t seem to lose weight no matter what diet you try
- Care that you’re unknowingly consuming sugar in almost everything you eat
- Are looking for simple ways to eat healthy
Introduction
Sugar is a poison linked to all sorts of serious long-term health problems, such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, and even heart disease. And even if you don’t eat sweets and never indulge in a can of soda, you’re constantly ingesting sugar. You might not realize it, but sugar is in much of the food you consume.
To kick sugar out of your life, or at least down to reasonable levels, keep the following five principles in mind:
- Read the labels. Many of the processed foods at the grocery store contain added sugar — and not always in small amounts.
- Order simply when eating out. Condiments and sauces usually contain sugar, so be wary when you see these on the menu.
- Cut out the usual suspects. Soda and prepackaged desserts are the worst offenders when it comes to sugar, but watch out for fruit juices with added sugar as well.
- If you can’t find it, make your own. If you don’t have access to sauces, condiments, and breads without added sugar, they’re easy (and cheap!) to make at home.
- Get creative when it comes to your children. Encourage them to think of sugar as a genuinely special treat instead of an everyday food they take for granted.
A Sweet Poison
Experts recommend cutting fat out of your diet to lose weight. But how has that been working for you? Although many diets recommend cutting fat, the rate of obesity continues to rise. In fact, on average, Americans weigh 25 pounds more today than they did 25 years ago. Even children as young as 6 months old are experiencing unprecedented rates of obesity. That’s because it’s not the amount of fat you eat, or even the amount of food you eat, that causes obesity but rather the amount of sugar in your diet.
There are the obvious culprits, of course. Drinking just one soda per day can cause a weight gain of more than 15 pounds in a single year. And soda also contains caffeine and salt, which are added to encourage you to drink more. But even those who don’t regularly consume soda, candy, and obviously sugary foods are unknowingly ingesting a significant amount of sugar. On average, each American consumes 63 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup — a common sweetener — every year.
But it gets worse. Sugar doesn’t just make you fat. The fructose in sugar doesn’t satisfy hunger, which means you eat much more than you should. And processing fructose in your liver creates uric acid, which can cause gout and hypertension, and fatty acids, which can lead to insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, enhanced growth of cancer cells, and obesity. One in five Americans now suffers from metabolic syndrome, which is the clustering of two or more of these conditions; metabolic syndrome was rare just a few decades ago. And heart disease is the leading cause of death, both in the US and globally.
Not only does the body not need fructose, but it can cause serious, negative long-term effects. Essentially, fructose is a poison.
All this information led Eve Schaub to embark, along with her family, on a quest to cut sugar out of their lives for one year. They followed some ground rules:
- As a family, they would eat one dessert per month.
- Each person got to choose an exception food, provided it had only a small amount of sugar. Schaub chose wine, her husband chose Diet Dr Pepper, and their daughters chose jam.
- The girls got to choose whether to consume sugar at events such as birthday parties and school celebrations.
Avoiding added sugar turned out to be much harder than Schaub and her family envisioned.
Sugar, Sugar Everywhere
Supermarkets offer a staggering array of options, which might make you think you have a lot of choices when it comes to what you put in your body. But once you begin reading the labels, you face the hard truth: high-fructose corn syrup is everywhere. Almost all the prepackaged and processed foods readily available contain ingredients that make us sick.
Sugar is found in savory items as well. Salad dressings, pasta sauces, condiments, chicken broth, and even bread, bacon, and baby food all contain added sugars. Schaub’s quick trips to the grocery store soon turned into hours-long quests to find foods that didn’t include added sugars. Restaurants are often no better. Condiments, sauces, breads, and soups all contain sugars.
Oh, the Things You Will Eat
Schaub soon realized that to prevent starvation, she was going to have to make a lot of foods at home.
She got creative when adding sweeteners to her foods. Artificial sweeteners like aspartame and stevia were out because of their suspected side effects (studies show that these sweeteners can cause headaches, strokes, and cancer), so she looked into natural sweeteners like agave and brown rice syrup.
Agave can contain as much as 90 percent fructose, so that was out. Brown rice syrup doesn’t taste as good, but it does not contain fructose, so Schaub used it in recipes that called for molasses, honey, or maple syrup. (Glucose syrup worked similarly well.) She learned that you can replace sugar with powdered dextrose, which contains no fructose and is almost a dead ringer for normal sugar. This meant the family could have dessert without ingesting fructose.
In addition to feeling healthier, she felt more connected to the food she was making. For example, because store-bought bread contains added sugars, Schaub bought bread from a local baker who didn’t add sugar or she made the bread her self. She also made her own sauces and condiments.
She soon noticed just how acceptable it is to peddle mass amounts of sugar to young children for every occasion, such as holidays and birthdays. In fact, she sat down with the breakfast menu for the school her daughters attended, which was relatively progressive, and found that more than half of the items had added sugar.
When the family took a long-planned trip to Italy, she saw how much cleaner and simpler the food was. Instead of buying everything you needed in mass-produced, added-sugar form at the supermarket, you went from the fruit stall to the pasta maker to the butcher, picking up what you needed from the experts, who took the time to ensure that what they offered was wholesome and natural.
Back at home, she began ordering meat from a small local slaughterhouse and even went on a personal field trip to slaughter her own chicken. This meat also hormone-free and cage-free. It led to a much stronger appreciation for where the family’s food was coming from.
A New Type of Gratification
When they finally did have their once-a-month fructose desserts — some of them simple and relatively low in sugar (pumpkin pie) and some of them decadent and high in fructose (banana cream pie) — Schaub found that they didn’t enjoy it as much as they thought they would. Even though they craved sugar, the minute the spoons hit their mouths, they changed their minds. No one really wanted to polish off the whole dessert, and eating it came with unpleasant sensations: headaches, racing heartbeats, and a gross aftertaste that lingered until they brushed their teeth. They still got that sugar high, but it wasn’t really worth the disagreeable physical side effects.
Conclusion
Eating healthy is a choice you have to make every day. It requires educating your self on what you’re consuming and exercising moderation when it comes to ingesting questionable ingredients. This is the opposite of how we’re taught to eat sugar as Americans: mindlessly, unquestioningly, and in great quantities. If we saved sweet treats for actual special occasions, they would be much more special — and we would be much, much healthier.
It’s easy to ignore the effects of sugar on the body because they’re hard to see. Sugar doesn’t have obvious short-term effects, and the risks of the long-term ones are easy to ignore. Schaub compares sugar to a drug. It’s not like a hard drug that might make you do something life-threatening or cause you to overdose. Rather, eating sugar is like smoking cigarettes — the negative effects are cumulative, long term, and inescapable.
If you want to cut sugar from your life, there are ways to do it. Making your own foods and finding healthier alternatives to sweeteners is one way. And remember to follow the five main methods for cutting sugar consumption:
- Read the labels. Many of the processed foods at the grocery store contain added sugar — and not always in small amounts.
- Order simply when eating out. Condiments and sauces usually contain sugar, so be wary when you see these on the menu.
- Cut out the usual suspects. Soda and prepackaged desserts are the worst offenders when it comes to sugar, but watch out for fruit juices with added sugar as well.
- If you can’t find it, make your own. If you don’t have access to sauces, condiments, and breads without added sugar, they’re easy (and cheap!) to make at home.
- Get creative when it comes to your children. Encourage them to think of sugar as a genuinely special treat instead of an everyday food they take for granted.
About the Author
Eve Schaub is a wife and mother of two who lives in Vermont. Voted “the funniest person Steve Martin has never met” by her high school class, she enjoys bringing her expansive sense of humor to her experiments and the books she writes about them. She is also the author of Year of No Clutter and co-author of The Figital Revolution.