Sugar, sugar everywhere

If you aren't yet convinced that sugar is bad for you, check out Mark Bittman's column in the New York Times today.  He believes that the preponderance of scientific evidence today is not just that sugar makes you fat, but that it's actually toxic.  I'm inclined to believe him.

But even if you don't believe that sugar can kill you, you have to believe that sugar is found in too many places where it shouldn't be.  Here's my personal evidence to that effect.

My husband, the official salad maker in our household, was unhappy when one of his favorite vinegars disappeared from the grocery shelves last month.  He is always looking for ways to put a new twist on the salad, so he bought a new kind of vinegar to perk up our dinners.

Tonight as he was making the salad he decided to break out the new vinegar.  As he was adding it, he read the label, which proclaims it "a perfect complement to Asian, Latin or Island cuisines."  Does that go with pork chops, he wondered.  Oops, said I, that means it has a lot of sugar in it.

And sure enough, when we read the label carefully it revealed 4 grams of sugar in a tablespoon.  Heck, that's more than I will tolerate in a whole bowl of breakfast cereal!

So you might wonder why does vinegar need any added sugar at all? Especially if it already contains orange juice?

I recall my old boss's wife, whose mantra was "add a teaspoon of sugar" to your salad dressing and everybody will love it.  Boy, we have been brainwashed by Big Food.

I can't even tell you whether the new sweet vinegar tasted great.  The salad chef had already added some blue cheese, which totally overpowered the vinegar.  I've requested a salad with minimal ingredients so we can evaluate the vinegar on its own merits.  I'll let you know when that happens, and how the stuff actually tastes.  Meanwhile, I'm an unhappy camper.  If you can't even buy vinegar that's sour, what is this world coming to?

Kicking the sugar habit

I mentioned in a recent post that scientists now think sugar affects your brain a little like cocaine -- in other words, it's addictive.  I don't know anything about the chemistry of controlled substances, but I can testify from my own past how difficult it can be to break a sugar habit.

When I was a teenager I started to drink tea and coffee because it seemed like the grown-up thing to do, and didn't like either one very much so I added sugar.  After a couple of years I realized I didn't like coffee even with sugar, so I quit drinking that, but the tea became my favorite drink. 

After a decade or so I decided that it might be a good idea to cut back on the sugar.  I seem to recall doing it gradually, and that it took a long time to get down to zero, but I hung in there, and am glad I did.  Today tea is one of my most comforting pleasures, and it's great to be able to down cups and cups of it without worrying about calories.

Similarly, I decided decades ago that I wasn't going to put syrup on pancakes or waffles.  I had always done this reflexively, just because that seemed to be the way everybody ate them.  But as I was tied to the stove making pancakes while everybody else was at the table eating, I would frequently eat one straight from the pan (without benefit of syrup, because the syrup was on the table) and decided they tasted better that way.  This habit was easy to break because pancakes weren't an everyday occurrence.

But my lifelong relationship with soft drinks is another story.  I never drank diet sodas, just industrial-strength.

At several times during my work life, I got into the bad habit of a sugar fix in the middle of the afternoon -- every afternoon!  It was good to take a three-minute break, leave my desk, go get a Coke from the machine, and come back to the delicious fizz of the first mouthful. The sugar/caffeine lift was great.  But occasionally I would decide to stop -- probably more for economic than health reasons.  I was amazed and chagrined at how hard that would be. 

I really did have some kind of withdrawal symptoms, whether entirely from brain chemistry or partly from the simple difficulty of breaking any habit.  (Interestingly enough, I never had those symptoms at home on a Sunday afternoon, only at the office.)  The symptoms would pass, of course, and I would be daily-Coke-free for months or years. But I often relapsed and got back into the same bad habit.

A similar problem came up sometimes when a co-worker would keep candy available on his desk for all comers, or when I decided it would be a good idea to keep candy in my own bottom drawer.  It was so easy to get into the habit of that afternoon sugar, and so hard to break it.

In my experience, it was easier to give up sugar entirely in a particular context, such as sugar in my tea, than to cut back the chronic/scheduled sugar.  I don't think this was so much a physical addiction as a very strong habit.  I could drink the occasional Coke with lunch or as a snack, or eat candy now and then, without problems.  But the combination of sugar plus a regular time and place was stronger than I could deal with.

I think a lot of America's self-destructive love affair with sugar has this element of habit.  People probably think twice about having a piece of pie for dessert, but they will stop every morning at the coffee shop and always get a muffin, or always drink Coke at lunch.  They place their orders automatically, without considering whether they really want ten teaspoons of sugar.

Mainlining sugar

I once complimented my boss's wife at a dinner party on her delicious green salad.  "It's so simple," she confided, "just put a teaspoon of sugar in the dressing."

I don't know about other nations, but the U.S. is addicted to sugar, and you can tell by observing the overweight people all around us -- and maybe even those who are us.  And I don't use the term addiction in its purely metaphorical sense.  According to a recent story in the New York Times, "Researchers using brain imagining technology have ... found that foods high in sugar or fat activate the same reward system as cocaine and other drugs."

In addition to Alice's salad dressing, other recipes from my past include gratuitous sugar.  My mom used to put sugar in the spaghetti sauce; my mother-in-law used to put it in the chili.  I'm not counting the various baked goods that don't appear to be sweet -- bread? -- but still call for sugar.  And that's just the deliberate sugar added in the kitchen; how about all the sugar in processed foods that don't seem to need it? 

Here are some surprise sweeties from my cupboard, with details from the small print.

Peanut butter: 4 grams of sugar in 2 tablespoons; corn syrup solids are the second ingredient, after peanuts.

Beans:  3 grams of sugar in a half-cup; cane syrup is the third ingredient, after beans and water.

Hash:  1 gram of sugar in a cup ; the fourth ingredient, after beef, potatoes and water.

Black bean soup:  5 grams of sugar in a half-cup serving; the fourth ingredient, after water, beans and salt.

Minestrone:  3 grams of sugar in a half-cup serving; way at the bottom of the ingredient list as glucose syrup.

The presence of sugar in processed foods is one reason why U.S. sugar consumption has skyrocketed in recent decades.  As a lover of spreadsheets, I was fascinated at the information provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on sugar production and consumption. 

In 1966 Americans used 113 pounds of sugar per capita.  In 1999, the sweetest year in U.S. history, it was up to 151 pounds.  Since then, it's been slipping, down to 131 pounds in 2009. 

More striking is the dramatic rise of corn sugars as a player in this drama.  In 1966 only 14 pounds of the per capita sugar load came from corn -- just over 10 percent of the total.  By the mid-80s corn was providing more than half our total sugar, peaking in 1999 at 83 pounds, 55 percent of the total.  In 2009, the last year for which data is available, corn's share slipped a hairline below half.  Clearly the unfavorable publicity given to high-fructose corn syrup in the last decade is having an effect.

I find these figures alarming, and not just because they herald our growing obesity.  I'm also unhappy that my tax dollars are supporting this trend, because agricultural subsidies are integral to the corn industry.  Big Corn has been fighting back against the anti-corn-syrup movement with commercials in which they correctly point out that sugar is sugar no matter what form it comes in.  That's true nutritionally, but not economically; corn sugar is less expensive than beet and cane sugar.  And HFCS isn't the kind of stuff you buy on a supermarket shelf and use for grandma's cookie recipe; it's an industrial product used in highly processed foods.

So my inner paranoid shopper doesn't have to work too hard to infer that the presence of corn sweeteners on a label indicates a cheap (subsidized) thrill that's good for Big Food but bad for you and me.

As I've become more health-conscious I've stopped putting the sugar in my chili and spaghetti sauce, and can't say that we even notice the difference.  But I'm kind of annoyed that food processors are still doing it, and that I don't have an alternative except to make my own soup and hash and beans.  I'm not such a health nut that I'm willing to give up the convenience of canned and packaged goods entirely.  But I wish Big Food would reconsider that knee-jerk teaspoon of sugar.  I bet the hash would taste just as good without it.

Chili, the overachiever's version

So I was contemplating what could cook all day while I was away, and decided that chili would be a good choice.  And since the contemplation was occurring a full 38 hours before dinnertime, I decided to be an overachiever and for the first time in my life, make chili from dried kidney beans rather than canned.

Why did I have this brilliant idea?  Probably because I have been thinking about sodium, and how we get too much of it thanks to processed foods.  I can't tell you how many hundreds if not thousands of cans of beans I have opened and served in my lifetime, in chili or pasta or casseroles or whatever.  But since I started reading the nutrition labels more carefully, I have been appalled at how much sodium comes in those cans, even if you rinse the beans enthusiastically.

And since this pot of chili had to be started the day before anyway, and since it had to cook quietly by itself all day anyway, why not make it from dried beans?  It would even take less time to dump a bag of beans into a pot than to open four or five cans, rinse and drain them.  (You don't have to soak the beans first, no matter what it says on the back of the package; just put them in a pot of water and turn on the heat.)

The good news is that everything cooked beautifully while I was gone.  The bad news is that without the handy canned sodium, the chili was kind of blah, even though I had used more garlic and chili powder than I would have normally used. 

But we doctored it up at the table with sea salt and a little extra chili powder, and it tasted fine.  Will I use this method again?  Probably, when I think to start cooking the day before and if I have a bag of dried kidney beans on hand. 

By the way, in case you don't have a tried-and-true chili recipe, mine is highly improvisational but delicious.  It calls for a pound or so of ground beef, browned and broken up; two or three onions; and more beans than tomatoes.  Cook it all together for at least a couple of hours, the longer the better.  Of course the key ingredient is chili powder, and I order mine from Penzey's.  I like the regular blend rather than the hotter mixtures, because I think their heat tends to blot out the actual complex taste of the non-pepper ingredients.  I also add minced garlic, but you don't need that.  And in the last decade or so I have stopped using the spoonful of sugar that Ken's mother insisted was necessary.

PS -- Chili is always better with some cornbread on the side.  I use a small box of Jiffy mix and make it in a nine-inch-square pan, which gives you a cake no more than a half-inch thick.  I used to love it with honey but since I gave up sugar I eat it plain, and guess what -- it still tastes great. 

We would probably be surprised to discover that a lot of the discretionary calories in our diets that have become habit aren't all that necessary after all.  Ask yourself, as you're putting the honey on the table, or the sugar in the chili, or whatever fat or sugar trope you indulge in, whether you could go without tonight.  Or at least start eating the cornbread without the honey; you can get it out of the fridge later if you think you really need it.  I bet that half the time you won't.