Sweet!: A Month Without Sweeteners

How about that for a change of pace?

OK, I admit it.  I’ve been gone a while.  I have received, what I guess you couldn’t really describe as ‘hate mail’ but neither was it ‘fan mail’, messages to the effect that I suck for disappearing.  I apologize.

However, it has been an interesting month… I’ve dragged this book idea around… writing and deleting hundreds of pages (seriously)… quitting… restarting… even losing a hard-drive in the midst of all that… and coming to the conclusion that I’d just cast too wide a net.  The good news is that I now have the beginnings of at least three separate books.  The bad news is that I have the end of none.

Let us pause for a moment of silence for my garden, the biggest victim in all this.  While it hasn’t quite reverted to the state in which I found it, it is a mess.  I’m sorry garden.  You were good to me, and I ignored you.  I promise to clean you up, plant cover crops, and give you the love you deserve next spring.

OK, so, what does all this have to do with sweeteners?  I’ll give you a hint: the average American eats 160 lbs. of sugar by most accounts.  About 100 years ago (keeping in mind that they just released evidence of the oldest human remains from 4+ MILLION years ago), we ate 5 lbs. each.  I would guess that it wasn’t too many centuries before that that we ate no added sugar.  There probably wasn’t any aside from the occasional (and precious) honey, which I hesitate to add to the list because of the complexity of the stuff.

We have enslaved people and stolen entire countries (mahalo!) to feed our sweet tooth.  Of course, today we’re all pointing our fingers at poor Earl “Rusty” Butz and blaming him (arguably the single man responsible for setting off the corn avalanche that led to our swimming in high-fructose corn syrup) for our children’s 30% chance of developing type-2 diabetes in their lives, but is that fair?

Sure, he was a jerk.  A big, racist, agribusiness toady, right-wing jerk.  Still, is it Rusty’s fault that we’re fat?  I don’t think so.  We (I know a PhD in political philosophy who will twitch reading this) elected Nixon precisely, in part, because Rusty made food cheap, and we haven’t done much to correct the situation since.  We buy a whole lot of Double Gulps (7-11′s 64 ounce bucket of soda).  All the while, we exercise less… and less… and eat more… and more…

I’m sorry, but I think we need to look past this supply side economics of high-fructose corn syrup.  The question to me is why can’t we stop shoving sweet into our pieholes. What’s with the insatiable demand?

The answer, I think, is that we’re programmed to do it.  Back in the day, say 1000 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 years ago, you took the good calories when you could get them, and the stuff with the most calories was either fat or sweet.  Given your daily sabre tooth tiger fleeing and mammoth hunting (an archaeologist, I am not), you’d want to shovel in as many calories as you could when you found them.

You couldn’t afford to say “Hey!  Celery patch!  Chow down before that tiger catches up!”  You’d need to know that what you were eating was calorie dense- your figs, your berries, your Big Gulp.  The only thing better than sugar would be greasy sugar  (Mmmm… pemmican).  The vitamins, minerals, protein, and fiber were OK, but the real goodies were the fats and sugars.

We eat a lot of fat, but research indicates that Keerok the Caveman ate a lot more– at least in proportion to proteins in meats.  There’s plenty of debate going on in the world about fat.  No one I know likes “trans” but all the others– from omega-6 to saturated– have their fans and enemies.

Sugar, on the other hand, was scarce until quite recently.  Keerok may have raided the occasional beehive and slurped down a bucket of honey as compensation for getting stung silly, but that had to have been a relatively rare event.  The rest of the sweet stuff came in nutritious fruit wrappers, for the most part.  So, you were doomed to get a whole dose of vitamins and fiber with your fructose.  What’s worse, the fig season isn’t that long, so you had to load up while the getting was good.

Today, though, we’ve managed to eliminate both the scarcity and any nutritious impediments to our sugar.  You can just sit down with a bowl of sucrose (table sugar) and a spoon and go at it.  Of course, we don’t do that (holding aside, for the moment, your Pixie Sticks and Lick-M-Aids).  Instead we put sweeteners in everything.  My Whole Grain Wheat Thins’ first three ingredients, in order of quantity: grain products, fat, sugar.

OK, I’m ranting again.

My point is this: I’m not going to eat sweeteners for a month starting… about two hours ago when the idea occurred to me.

The rules:

1) I can’t inconvenience my family.  What’s that mean?  I’m not sure, really, but I used to be a vegetarian, and it came up. “Oh, we can’t eat there, they put MEAT in everything!” I guess I’m just saying that if my wife makes dinner, and she uses a little bit of sauce with some added sugar in it, I’m not going to make a big deal out of it, although I may make myself something else if I know about it, and it’s not going to cause a big flap.  Call it a cop-out if you like.  Judgmental bastard.

2) No added sweeteners.  No sugar, HFCS, honey, maple syrup… anything with -ose in it.  No artificial sweeteners, either.

3) No eating anything that HAS added sweeteners.  That means the aforementioned Whole Grain Wheat Thins are out.  So is… good heavens… most everything in my pantry.

4) Fruit is OK.  Fruit juice is not.  OK, that one’s a little arbitrary, but fruit’s a food.  Fruit juice is mostly sugar water.  Besides, it’s my experiment, and I get to make the rules.  I’m not trying to starve myself.  I just want to see what happens if I can’t eat ADDED sugar.  I should actually be able to drink fruit juice, but given the processing that goes into it, it’s halfway to being processed sugar itself.

5) I have to get stoned at least once and experience the munchies this way.  I, of course, am not REALLY going to get stoned because that would be illegal.  I’m going to *imagine* what it would be like.  Super realistically.

6) I have to blog about everything related to the experiment every day.  Every. Single. Day.
Unless I don’t feel like it.
Just kidding.

7) I get to change the rules as I go.  See rule #1.

OK, if anyone’s still reading this, thanks for your patience as I flop around like a fish on the beach of life.  Hopefully, we’ll all learn something from this, and I’ll still be able to eat pie at Thanksgiving.  I hope there are no other holidays in the next month that involve sweets.

D’oh!