April 1 I saw a segment on 60 Minutes highlighting data I'd already read (and chose to willfully ignore) in the New York Times last year—sugar is really pretty bad for our health and we eat way too much of it. I can't ignore it anymore and I thank dismissive friends and online commenters for showing me just how dearly we Americans—including me, until now—guard our sugar addiction and the role it plays in our culture and lifestyle. The first day of the month is a great time to turn over a new leaf, start fresh and try to do the right thing, which is, to cut waaaaaay down on sugar. It's unfortunate, though, that as soon as tomorrow our family has plans to go get our free Ben & Jerry's ice cream and that is not something my husband is going to let go of. I don't even like Ben & Jerry's ice cream, but he is a free stuff junkie and already talked it up to the kid. My solution will be to have my daughter and I share our scoop, then avoid treats as long as we can.
This should be a little easier this week, since my kid is on spring break from school. At school, it's always more difficult. Last week, for example, one child one day brought cookies for the class and later the same week, the same child brought brownies. (This is a lovely child with a very attractive and thin mom, just as a side note that I find interesting but is probably completely unrelated.) She was "star of the week" that week (a little thing they do at the school) but were two treats really necessary? We brought fruit and cheese kabobs when my child was star of the week!
Now I am totally guilty myself of giving too many treats at home, but I don't like to have them be a part of school. I like to administer them when I want to, at strategic and thoughtful times and only after nutritious and healthy food has first been consumed. I recognize, also, that I need to change (as opposed to being completely in denial). Even though our family eats arguably less junk with sugar than the average American family, too often I find myself making cupcakes to celebrate...a Tuesday? Or because I am in the mood for homemade chocolate chip cookies. It really has to stop. I have to save the treats for holidays, outings (like the Ben & Jerry's but no, not all outings) and such. That it is "hard" is a sign that it's a problem.When I spoke to the director of the preschool after the first week of school, having heard my child had 3 treats in that one week alone (I guess they were catching up on birthdays?), my request that they stop the practice of bringing birthday treats in was met with "No, I won't do that. Birthdays are special for the children, they like to celebrate and bring treats...blah blah blah..." Well, couldn't they do a once a month group birthday celebration? I think that many people just don't get the gravity of it and have no clue how much sugar is in things and what it does to the body. That, and it's just not something we want to focus on. We all want to be happy and have fun. It's a little sad and uncreative, though, that we need junk food to have fun, isn't it?
It was interesting to me last night that the reaction to "news" that sugar is bad for us and we eat too much was...a whole lot of defensiveness and denial (discussing on Facebook and reading comments on the 60 Minutes website). Some people were like, "this is news? of course sugar's bad for you, but not toxic and we don't eat that much, anyway..." They weren't paying attention at all to the latest data indicating that sugar is much worse for us than we think (leading to more overeating, poor memory formation, learning disorders, depression, as well as heart disease and obvious things like diabetes) and they certainly weren't facing the reality of how much excess we're consuming (156 pounds a year).
When I posted the link to the 60 Minutes story on Facebook, an average-girl-mom-friend countered that "kids DESERVE ice cream on a hot summer night...or just a 'family together time'" and how mad it made her that "what we did and ate as kids is now killing or bad for our kids...and I will not stop letting my kid be a kid..they need sunshine.....and sometimes that comes in the form of sugar..." a sciencey engineering friend (who drinks at least one Mt. Dew a day, but considers himself healthy) dismissed it as vilification of one ingredient saying " ...it does no one any good blaming individual ingredients" and saying that all things in moderation are OK.
I can buy the moderation point to some extent, but the thing is, the data shows we've lost all grasp of what moderation is. So many people seem offended by the suggestion that something we all do all the time, and that we did as kids, and our parents did is bad for us. They say, "but I ate all this and I am fine" in one post, while in another one complaining of all their ailments as they creep up toward age 40 and beyond. So, not fine, actually! This data is an attack on our culture to some extent, as well as a threat to our addiction. And we are totally addicted. Even I, who eat more healthfully than most Americans (I keep saying that because from everything I read Americans as a whole eat awful diets and at least I try—no soda, no red meat, lots of veggies...) fall into the trap. The science shows that the brain responds to sugar essentially the same way it does to cocaine (this is in the 60 Minutes segment).
In considering how much added sugar one should have, I remembered a figure I'd read a couple years ago when I had started a push to get in really great shape. Jackie Warner in her book, This is Why You're Fat (And How to Get Thin Forever), explains that the body doesn't register less than five grams of sugar, so we should eat things that have five grams of sugar or less per serving (and stick to one serving, natch) at a sitting. This is moderation for day-to-day. Most cupcakes, for example, have at least 20 grams of sugar. I can't imagine a life of never again eating a cupcake, but I now believe that the instances of these pleasures should be memorable, and therefore rare.
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2 comments:
You know I'm right there with you on this. For me it has been watching my dad (who at least for the moment is on a self-imposed low carb diet, woot!) struggle with diabetes for 30 years and then getting gestational diabetes that woke me up to this problem. The New York Times Magazine article scared the hell out of me. I can't say that I have stopped eating sugar, but I do see it as highly problematic. It's not vilification of "one ingredient" if that ingredient truly is different in how it affects the body. It is hard to deal with people's defensiveness about their sugar addiction and the way they push it on their kids. Awareness of the science is just beginning, but it may take YEARS before it starts to affect consumer behavior in any measurable way. In the meantime, I'm trying to police my kids' sugar consumption as best I can and make sure treats are just that.
Have to fess up. My kid and I each had our own Ben & Jerry's cone. They were small. Don't know what to say. I can't say I feel terrible about it because we do eat more healthfully than most and I feel like I am teaching her that it's special and a treat. (I said that over and over about it.) But we did enjoy sitting there having our cones together.
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