Sugar Blues

One of the many road trips I went on with my Grandpa was to northern Michigan to go fishing when I was a teenager. He probably took me fishing with him because I liked putting night crawlers on hooks and didn’t care if we sat out on the lake for hours without getting a bite. Besides thinking no car ride was too long, I was perfectly content laying across the front of a little aluminum boat rocking on the wake all day with a line in the water.

I don’t recall what we caught – maybe enough for a small lunch – then we stopped to visit his brother’s farm in Onaway. The farm was a wonderful place with acres of fruit trees and the original well hand pump that I loved playing with since I was a kid.

This part doesn’t have to do with food (except I was roasting marshmallows), but I’ll never forget that night around a campfire behind the farmhouse. My Grandpa and my great Uncle Alex lectured me with negative platitudes about rock and roll – of course they weren’t fans of the tight pants or long hair, but mostly they didn’t think you could understand any of the lyrics. They really gave it to Mick Jagger, who was one of my rock heartthrobs at the time, but I wasn’t saying a word; it was a losing battle. That night the three of us watched Lawrence Welk on TV. Remember those painful hours? I had quite a wide musical tolerance for a teenager – I liked classical and even the Hee Haw show. Lawrence Welk would have been OK if it had truly been big band music, but it was mostly “champagne” big band — more like live Musak. I was really glad when it was over and I could go to bed in the top bunk bed that was in the room with the lowest ceiling.

The funny thing was, the next day I was up in the loft over Uncle’s barn and found a box of record albums, and the first one I pulled out was Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” That psychedelic song took up a whole side of an album – it was basically early heavy metal. I sat in the loft for a good half hour debating whether to get a five-finger discount on that record, but decided it would be too embarrassing for everyone, after the previous night’s lecture, to get caught with it or even mention it.

Later, Grandpa and I were on the way home in his big old Chrysler with the fishing boat tied to the car top carriers and he said, “You should read this,” and handed me the book Sugar Blues by William Dufty. I gave him a weird look because I never saw him read a book before, and he said, “It’s really good, your Uncle John gave it to me.” That made sense because Uncle John is a dentist, but I couldn’t imagine my Grandpa giving up sweets. I turned the book over and on the back was a before and after picture of the author. It was amazing what quitting sugar did for this guy – he was a completely different man.

I read the book on the way home and Dufty made the argument that sugar is poison, a drug, and people are addicted. Research findings from last year support cravings for sugar and sweet rewards can be more attractive than addictive drugs like cocaine.^[1] Having a diet that’s high in processed foods leads to sugar overdoses that people don’t even realize because of the hidden sugars. Particularly foods labeled “low fat” often have an excess of sugars (along with salt and other chemicals) to make up for the flavor lost by processing out the fats.

The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends no more than 6-9 teaspoons of added sugar per day (“added” means besides the sugars naturally incurring in nutritious food like fruit), but Americans are taking in at least 22 additional teaspoons per day which exponentially increases their disease risk the more they consume.^[2] Most of the additional sugar is in drinks (soda, energy, and sports drinks) but certainly in processed foods. Increased sugar consumption leads to chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, liver cirrhosis, and dementia.^[3] When I was a kid, no one I knew drank soda or even juice daily; we had soda on a holiday or at a party. A lot of what were our special occasion drinks and desserts are now common for every day.

I don’t remember if Dufty quit sugar cold turkey, but that’s not necessary. We’re on the right path cutting sugar gradually. Besides decreasing it in cooking and cutting out white sugar entirely, eliminating processed foods is a giant step. We know now to read labels until we learn where some companies are sneaking sugar to us unnecessarily, for example in peanut butter. The peanut butter without sugar added is on the shelf at the store right next to the peanut butter with sugar.  And if you’d like to stop drinking sugar, you can replace those drinks with ice water (green tea, etc.) for three months and then it will be easy to kick the habit from there permanently.

Grandpa never decreased his sugar consumption, his dislike for rock music, or his love of fishing; he did leave us too early though.