Year of No Sugar Read Free Page A

compelling can this be? I thought. But Steve had watched several minutes of it and was transfixed.
    So we watched it together for about twenty minutes. My husband left to go to work while I stayed and watched it to the end, ninety minutes total. Ninety minutes, as it turnedout, that would change my life, and the life of our family, forever.
    Dr. Robert Lustig is an unassuming-looking fellow with a medium build, gray hair, and a laser-like focus. He’s good with PowerPoint and is comfortable throwing about phrases like “multivariate linear regression analysis.” As “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” opens, he stands at a lectern in an anonymous-looking hall, looking every bit like that professor whose chemistry lectures put you to sleep every time. You’d never suspect that a ninety-minute educational lecture from this man could generate some three and a half million hits, but that’s just what happened.
    â€œI’m going to tell you, tonight, a story,” Lustig begins. “By the end of the story, I hope I will have debunked the last thirty years of nutrition information in America.”
    In the first seventeen minutes, Lustig calmly drops facts like precision bombs:
    â€¢Â Â Â As a society, we all weigh twenty-five pounds more than our counterparts did twenty-five years ago.
    â€¢Â Â Â The world is now experiencing an epidemic of obese six-month-olds .
    â€¢Â Â Â Even as our total fat consumption has gone down, our obesity has continued to accelerate.
    â€¢Â Â Â The combination of caffeine and salt in soda is purposefully designed by soda companies to make you drink more.
    â€¢Â Â Â Simply drinking one soda per day is worth fifteen and a half pounds of fat gain per year.
    â€¢Â Â Â Americans are currently consuming sixty-three pounds per person of high-fructose corn syrup per year.
    But it isn’t until minute twenty that Lustig throws down the gauntlet:
    â€œMy charge before the end of tonight is to demonstrate that fructose is a poison .”
    That’s right—a poison . And fructose is in sugar— all kinds of sugar.
    _______
    I was hooked. I was astounded. High-fructose corn syrup is bad? Well, sure. We all suspected that anyway. Table sugar too? Um… okay . But honey ? Maple syrup? Agave? Fruit juice? Yep. Yep. Yep.
    What the hell was going on here? Why, with his charts and graphs and soda company conspiracy theories, was this guy seeming to make so much sense ? And if it made so much sense, why hadn’t we ever heard this information before? Fruit juice is poison ? What happened to “fruit juice is health food ”? And “honey is good for you because it’s natural ”? Why not just tell us everything we’ve ever been told about nutrition is fundamentally wrong ? It reminded me of that part in the movie Sleeper when the guy who’s been asleep for two hundred years starts requesting wheat germ and organic honey, and his doctors remark that thinking those things were healthy is “precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.” Could it be that our entire culture has become one great big Woody Allen joke?
    Was it really true, as Lustig put it in one interview, that our culture was the modern-day equivalent of an opium den? Everywhere I looked, I realized, people were sick; they were overweight, they were obese, and they were unhappy. Everywhere I looked, I realized, there was sugar in all itsmyriad guises. Could it be that we were really all just addicts sucking away at our soda-straw hookahs, never making the obvious connection between our “drug” of choice and our rapidly declining health? Most of all, the question I couldn’t let go of was: in a society as awash in sugar as ours, how do you escape from the opium den? Is it even possible ?
    And then I got an idea. An awful idea. Right then, I got a wonderful, awful idea.
    What would happen… I wondered.
    If.
    I