Sugar Blues

By William Dufty, 1975

Chapter 13: Kicking

Kicking a sugar habit isn’t going to be easy, but it can be lots of fun. If you live alone, kicking cold turkey is probably the best way to go. Collect everything in your abode that has sugar in it; throw it in the garbage and start over. This way, if you yen to start bingeing, you haven’t made it easy for yourself. You can make one decision at the store instead of fighting temptation full-time at home. It may take a month or so to change the way you shop, cook, and entertain. The details of your daily struggle are not important but the general direction in which you’re headed is vital.

If you have a heavy ice cream habit, don’t try to cut out ice cream entirely. Great ice creams made with honey only are available almost everywhere. Shiloh Farms in the East makes a fine one entirely without sugar; natural emulsifiers and honey are used. They also distribute the Danish Haagen Das ice cream. But watch it. Haagen Das makes two kinds — one with honey and sugar, the other with honey only. Honey on the label means nothing unless it also says absolutely no sugar. Once you’ve weaned yourself onto honey ice cream, then cut that amount in half and taper off gradually. Save ice cream as a reward for special occasions; buy it pint by pint. Keeping records of what you eat and where you buy supplies can be a major part of the fun. Then when your friends want to know exactly what you did and how, your experiment is documented, day by day, chapter and verse.

If your coffee habit is heavy, with lots of sugar and cream, you may want to do as I did: Cut out the coffee altogether. I felt that if I couldn’t have my café au lait with two or three lumps of sugar, I didn’t want it at all. Fortunately, I preferred tea straight and plain — so I switched to tea. If you think you don’t like tea, maybe it’s because you have been trapped into the use of tea bags. Throw out the tea bags and invest in some fresh Japanese or Chinese tea. Japanese bancha tea — either leaf or twig, or combination of both — is miles from Lipton shavings in a bag. One roasts bancha tea lightly in a pan and then brews it in a Pyrex pot on the stove for fifteen or twenty minutes. Make a huge pot and reheat it when you want it. The tea can even be used twice or fresh tea added. It’s a whole new experience if you haven’t tried it — and worth the adventure.

If you work in an office or factory where the coffee break, the coffee cart, or the trek to the vending machine is a ritual of the day, do what I did: Invest in a chic thermos, and take your own tea. Nothing beats it as a conversation piece. Don’t be exclusive! Make a vow to share your sugarless bliss with someone every day. One day is plenty to each customer. After that, let them get their own thermos.

After you’ve gotten used to taking tea plain, then try black coffee, or coffee with a slice of lemon peel. Experiment with one of the great European coffee substitutes. Some are made with roasted grains; others with dandelion. After a long coffee famine, these brews can taste great I’ve enjoyed a German one, Pero; another, Bambu; a great one made in Canada, Dandylion. Use these just like instant coffee. Try them in your thermos with a slice of lemon peel. You’ll leam very quickly that everything changes, including tastes, yens, and habits you thought were yours for a lifetime. All your food tastes so much better once you eliminate refined sugar; at first you think it’s the food, then you realize it’s you, your body.

For years, many health food stores have sold light brown, dark brown, and so-called raw sugar along with the vitamins and the wheat germ. Cakes, pastries, cookies — even bread — sold in health food stores were made with partially refined sugar. The impression given was that it was somehow superior to the white stuff at the supermarket.

If one inquired, one was often led to believe that the sugars traditionally used by the health food industry had been snatched from the mechanical jaws of sugar refineries sometime before the ultimate processing turned them into refined white sugar.

Then, in the late 1960s, when young people were questioning everything they’d been sold and natural food stores and co-ops began springing up everywhere, a young pioneer of the natural food movement in northern California had his doubts about brown sugar.

Fred Rohe had been selling raw and brown sugars at his New Age Food Stores in north California. When he couldn’t get any straight answers about where the sugar came from and what had been done to it, he took the trouble to visit sugar refineries in Hawaii and California.

He soon had the answer. Light brown, dark brown, and raw sugar are all made the same way: Molasses is added to refined sugar. Brown sugar is nothing more than white sugar wearing a mask, he concluded. For Kleenraw 5 percent molasses is added; for light brown, 12 percent molasses; and for dark brown, 13 percent. The raw-like illusion is a result of a specially designed crystallization process which produces this aesthetic effect. Fred Rohe threw all the colored sugars out of his store; he helped found an organization of natural food stores owners called Organic Merchants. One of the basic tenets of the organization was to refuse shelf room to all kinds of sugar or any product containing sugar. He wrote a devastating two-page pamphlet, The Sugar Story, to educate his customers.

Our intention is not to take the pleasure out of anyone’s life, said The Sugar Story, but to play a part in upgrading the quality of American food. If enough of us stop buying junk — even the better junk — the food manufacturers will listen.

Organic merchants sell honey and recommend substituting half the amount for the sugar called for in recipes. Some sell carob molasses, carob syrup, unrefined sugar cane syrup, sorghum molasses, and date sugar. Erewhon now sells a natural glucose syrup made from rice and barley. Natural food stores today have become educational institutions — teaching by example. Man-refined sucrose — white or colored — is one place where they draw the line.

In kicking sugar, the most helpful extra hint I can give you is the one that worked for me. Kick red meat at the same time. It’s easier now that meat has been priced out of sight You’ll discover very soon what the Orientals have known since time immemorial. Meat (which is masculine yang) sets up a powerful yen in your system to be balanced with its opposite — something very sweet and feminine and yin, like fruit or sugar.

Just switching from red meat to fish or fowl reduces your desire for a sweet concoction at the end of the meal — makes it easier to settle for natural fruit or for no dessert at all. The more vegetable protein used in place of animal protein, the easier it becomes to forget about sugar, pastries, and such. I learned, from a savvy young lady, a trick that brings people together. When invited out for dinner, she would order maybe the appetizer, sometimes the soup, then the entree. Then, instead of saying Wouldn’t you like to come home for a drink? she would invite her companion to drop by for a homemade, sugar-free dessert and tea, or ersatz coffee. If you don’t live alone, kicking a sugar habit can be quite a production. Doing it together can be delightful. If you’re a mama or a papa, the same theory applies. If mama and papa can agree to give it a try, especially when young kids are involved, it can be a ball. Young children can be the greatest little guinea pigs you ever saw. The results with children are often so dramatic that it supplies motivation and example for their elders. Remember, no medical authority on this planet will stand up and say that sugar is necessary for anybody. No medical authority on this planet will even claim that sugar is good for children. And no medical authority on this planet will say that a sugar-free diet is at all dangerous. All the medical authorities dare to say is that sugar tastes good and has calories. If you have a child at home between, say, two and five, kicking sugar together can be a fantastic adventure.

Few places exist in society where an experiment in nutrition can actually be controlled. The first place, obviously, is prison. Another is an army unit under isolated conditions. Even a hospital is not a place where total control can be exercised unless rooms are isolated and guarded. But if you have a child in a crib, or one young enough so that you can control the diet, the opportunity is unique.

If your child is used to a certain level of sugar (i.e., that already in baby food, soft drinks, desserts, or treats), don’t do anything drastic at first. When you throw out the sugar intended for the adults, leave the baby’s food alone. Record carefully the infant’s behavior. Is your baby cranky when awakening? Happy at play? Watch activity, moods, and spells. Watch the baby like a warden for three or five days while the diet is sugared — and that means sugar in the baby food, cereal, vegetables, soft drinks, juices, desserts, and ice cream. Then reverse your field completely. Cut out all the sweets. Eliminate everything with sugar in it. Offer apples, pears, nuts, raisins, and juice that is labeled unsweetened.

Watch the child’s behavior for at least ten days. The difference will amaze you. It may be all the scientific proof you need to continue the experiment with yourself and the rest of the family. I have seen sugar-free babies in Europe and America. It is incredible. They seem to be a different breed altogether from average, sugar-glutted children. The wonderful thing is, if raised completely without sugar, when children are exposed to the multiple temptations of a sugared culture, they have already developed natural immunity. Given sugar candy or sweetened soft drinks, they reject them. The younger your children are, the easier it can be to eliminate sugar from their diet.

If your children are older, weaning may be a problem. In many cases, sugar has to be removed slowly and carefully. Offer unsweetened apple juice instead of cola or soft drinks. If tantrums are thrown, let it go. Bake them honeyed cookies and offer plenty of homemade desserts — which they will claim to detest. Buy honey ice cream instead of the heavily sugared kind. Bring children into the act by letting the girls worry about their complexion or their menstrual cramps enough to try the results from sugar-free cookies or pies which they can help bake. Sometimes, boys also are concerned enough about their complexion or other problems (unnecessary bosoms, perhaps) to interest themselves in the family experiments. If your kids are seventeen or over, the shoe may be completely on the other foot. Many teenagers today are more interested in natural food and know a lot more on the subject than their parents.

A family is a group of people having the same blood. A mother feeds her child with her own blood and milk for the first months of its life. From then on, a person’s blood is created anew daily when the family eats together. Eating the same food together every day helps make the family a group of the same blood. In earlier times, the kitchen and the dining area were sacred places in the home. The mother kept the family together with the food she cooked. No other earthly ceremony surpassed it in importance.

It is no wonder most American families are fragmented today. In the twentieth century, family could be characterized as a group having the same address and telephone number. During the first days of life, the infant feeds via a hospital assembly line. Then sugared meals come out of supermarket jars. As soon as the child is able to crawl, sugared delights are rewards; punishments mean the cola is taken away. For good behavior, the child may select sugared cereal in an individual box containing a plastic prize. Drinks are the milk of cows never seen, the frozen juice of fruit never touched. The Good Humor Man is in the street with iced sugar delights. What used to be birthday party food — pizza, sugar cake, cookies, ice cream, and cola — have become frozen proxies for the daily bread. Before children have de veloped judgment other than at the tip of their tongues’ brother and sister feed themselves with toasted waffles out of a box, pancakes out of a jug. The words treat and snack are drained of meaning; the children treat themselves when the impulse moves them: At the refrigerator the freezer, the candy store, the school cafeteria, the vending machine. If grace was said before eating, praying would be intermittent, all day long.

Mother takes her weight watchers’ concoctions out of a box; downtown. Daddy has a two-martini, credit-card lunch. The kids at school are fed at the pleasure of almighty government or they squander their allowance at the candy store. After school, the never-ending birthday party bingeing is taken up again. Kids spoil their suppers with supermarket snacks and sugared drinks. If frozen TV dinners on individual trays are too much for mother, if she deserves a break today, the family rattles off to the nearest drive-in, where it’s each to his own.

I’ve been conducting a survey.

Every young female sugar addict I know has confessed the same thing: They don’t know now — and never have known — what it was to have a normal menstrual period, without pain, cramps, or extreme discomfort. No wonder the TV commercials show mother introducing their teenage daughters to the wonders of pain-killing drugs for those very special days of feminine discomfort.

I got turned onto this subject when I met a young actress. When the day came for her big scene, she started acting as temperamental as Marilyn Monroe. When I guessed what was ailing her, she let it all out. I showed her how to kick sugar. She was willing and ready to do anything to relieve the three-day torture that had occurred monthly since she had reached puberty — Her next period was noticeably better, and within two months, she had completely forgotten her menstrual period was due, because she had been accustomed to having 24 hours of warning pain before the onset of menstruation.

After this experience, I began to feel like Dr. Kildare. My beautiful patient spread the message through fitting rooms and dressing rooms from New York to California Subsequently, I’ve discovered that many doctors — especially in France — have been wise for decades to the lethal effects of sugar on feminine metabolic balance.

In the magazine La Vie Claire, Dr. Victor Lorenc wrote:

With women, sugar causes pains during menstruation. Here is the case of Sophie Z … she used to take a daily consumption of approximately 100 grams of industrial sugar. At the age of thirty, her menstruation became extremely painful. This discomfort disappeared completely with the suppression in 1911 of this murderous food.

Since that time we have been able to observe many analogous cases. This fact ought to be known and spread abroad by workers with women. Sugar abstinence rids women of what is known as a natural weakness, that is to say, of nervousness and incapacity to work, which are often the result of difficult menstruation.

Do you have freckles? If you do, chances are you have a big sugar habit. After you have kicked sugar for a year or so, you begin to notice big changes in the way your skin takes to the sun. Sitting in the hot sun covered with chemical sauce to get a beautiful tan is looking for trouble — especially for women. After you’ve kicked sugar, you will discover that sunbathing without any protective lotion is usually possible with little or no risk of burning or peeling. Should your skin turn red, one usually doesn’t burn. I never peel. As a child, I used to have painful sunburn on the first exposure to the sun. After ten y.ears of being sugar-free, I am able to losl in the desert for an hour, pick up an instant tan, and never have any redness, itching, pain, or any of the old sunburn symptoms. Try it and see. Remember, take it easy with sun experiments. It’s not that it’s not nice to feel mother nature, it’s impossible. Some people are better off avoiding the sun, sugar-free diet or not.

You’re having a picnic at the beach or in the park; the typical American family arrives. The kids explode out of the station wagon before Dad has turned off the ignition. Mother starts unloading the car and informing Papa where to put the blanket. Before the soft drink cooler is sprung open, Mother attacks the air, sand, and greenery with lethal insecticide spray. Massive retaliation against the insect world that had beleaguered them on the last country jaunt. Mother has forgotten, if she ever knew, that just as spilled sugar in our kitchens attracts ants and insects, so does sugar in our bloodstreams attract mosquitos, microbes, and parasites.

One of the great joys of being sugar-free is to be able to lie on the beach or loll in the mountains without being bothered by mosquitos or other creatures. Once off sugar for a year or so, try it and see if it isn’t true for you too. If you take along a guest who’s still addicted to sugar, lie side by side. See who the mosquitos go for and who is left alone.

After all, it’s no accident that the first cases of mosquito-borne yellow fever — in the Western Hemisphere — occurred in the sugar island of Barbados in 1647. In the beginning it was called nova pestis. Yellow fever spread from one sugar center to another: Guadalupe, St. Kitts, Jamaica, Brazil, British Guinea, Spain, Portugal, New Orleans, and, finally, Cuba, where the U.S. Army mounted a massive campaign at the turn of the twentieth century to make our sugar colony of Cuba safe from the mosquito.

Sugar addiction is a worldwide phenomenon today. World production in 1975 will exceed 150 billion pounds. Prices have zoomed but per capita consumption ranges from over a hundred pounds per person per year in rich countries like the U.S. to less than ten pounds per capita in underdeveloped lands.

Sugar pushers have their eyes on Asia and Africa. If just a few million there can be hooked on coke, a per capita increase of a few pounds a year in these giant markets would amount to a boom. If that happens, the current food crisis can turn into catastrophe.

The mark of slavery still sticks to cane cutting in many tropical lands. Many militant blacks want no part of raising cane in the hot tropical sun. To newly independent nations hungering to join The Haves, sugar is a symbol of La Dolce Vita. It’s tough to ask anybody to give up something they’ve never had. White people have had their sugar for centuries without sweating in the hot sun.

The Chinese have gone from the ox cart to the jet, skipping many stages between. But adaptation to technology is one thing. Adaptation of the human body to a sugar-ridden environment is something else. Today, people who never tasted sugar in their lives can move — like suburban children fooling around with drugs — from innocence to dependency overnight. When that happens — whether in suburbia or Siberia — the result is the same: Documented disaster.

While hordes of scientists whoring for the sugar industry work in their expensive laboratories looking for shreds of pseudoscientific solace for the sugar pushers, a trio of British scientists have again blown the whole game wide open by studying mankind as a whole, making the entire planet their globalaboratory, as Dr. Price did in the 1930s.

The sun never sets on the Coca-Cola sign today, so the British doctors have taken that as their cue: their book ranges over the lands of the one-time British empire and beyond. They see man as a part of an environment with a history (as physician-botanist Rauwolf did centuries ago in the 1500s), not symptoms on a chart, data from a computer. Their work is Darwinian in scope and produces a synthesis of Eastern experience with Western knowledge. Their findings support the warnings our friends from the Orient have journeyed to the West to share with us. Their exploratory range covers the Zulu in his tribal lands contrasted with his suddenly urbanized cousins; U.S. blacks, contrasted with other Africans; Indians in India compared with Indians in South Africa; Cherokee Indians compared with East Pakistanis; Eskimos stacked against Icelanders; Yemenites in their own lands compared with Yemenites who have jetted to a new life in Israel. Sugar consumption is related to physical degeneration on a global scale.

This prophetic and devastating work is the work of Surgeon-Captain T. L. Cleave (retired from the Royal Navy); Dr. G. D. Campbell, of the Diabetic Clinic of King Edward VIII Hospital in Durban, South Africa; and Professor N. S. Painter of London’s Royal College of Surgeons.

The second edition of Diabetes, Coronary Thrombosis, and the Saccharine Disease, published by John Wright and Sons, Ltd., in England, came out in 1969. Here are some of their conclusions:

The different symptoms of arsenic poisoning, syphilis, or other diseases (due to a single cause) are not normally treated as separate diseases, so why should the multiple symptoms caused by sugar be so treated? Of all foods processed by man, refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour are altered the most: 90 percent of the cane or beet is removed, 30 percent of the wheat. Changes produced by cooking food are trifling in comparison.

This perversion of natural food is so recent in the total history of man that it dates only to yesterday. Mann fully able to live on plants — millions of whole rice eaters in the Orient have done so for centuries. Where men live on whole foods, sugar diseases are strikingly absent. Refinement of carbohydrates like white sugar and white flour affects the human body in three main ways:

1. Man-refined sugar is eight times as concentrated as flour, and eight times as unnatural — perhaps eight times as dangerous. It is the unnaturalness that deceives the tongue and appetite, leading to overconsumption. Who would eat 216 pounds of sugar beets a day? Yet the equivalent in refined sugar is a mere 5 ounces. Over-consumption produces diabetes, obesity, and coronary thrombosis among other things.

2. Removal of natural vegetable fiber produces decay diseases of the gums, stomach trouble, varicose veins hemorrhoids, and diverticular disease.

3. Removal of proteins causes peptic ulcers.

It would be extraordinary if sugar and white flour, known to wreak havoc on the teeth, did not also have profound repercussions elsewhere in the body.

Coronary disease has heretofore been regarded as a complication of diabetes. Both coronary disease and diabetes have a common cause: White sugar and white flour.

Indians in Natal, South Africa, consume nine times the amount of sugar that Indians in India consume, and the former have suffered a veritable explosion of diabetes — it is believed to be the highest anywhere in the world. If the masses in India ever have that much sugar available, the consequences within a decade or two are too frightening to contemplate.

Emphasis of public health programs should shift from detection of sugar disease to preventive nutrition — principally, the substitution of natural carbohydrates for refined ones.

Preventive nutrition may also have to include, temporarily, the theoretically incorrect use of artificial sweeteners which the authors of Diabetes, Coronary Thrombosis, and the Saccharine Disease compare to the use of the contraceptive pill as undesirable but often unavoidable.

Heroin was first introduced as a harmless nonaddictive substitute for morphine. More recently, methadone was introduced as a harmless nonaddictive substitute for heroin. It was only a matter of time until the synthetics were discovered to be as perilous as the old-fashioned narcotics.

So it is with the synthetic sweeteners touted and marketed as harmless substitutes for sugar. Saccharin and the cyclamates have many defenders in the medical profession. When compared with sugar, a scientific case can always be made for them as the lesser of two evils. Scientists are working frantically to come up with new formulae for new synthetic sweeteners. Other scientists are at work, often with the help of the sugar industry, to prove that the new synthetics are potentially hazardous.

The trouble with all synthetic sweeteners, aside from their potential danger to our health, is that the longer we depend on them, the more difficult it becomes to appreciate the natural sweetness of natural food. Dependence on synthetic sweeteners, like dependence on sugar, deadens our sense of taste to the point where it almost disappears.

The best advice I’ve found on the subject of artificial sweeteners comes from Dr. A. Kawahata, a leading Japanese nutritionist from Kyoto University, who quotes an early Buddhist axiom:

If you look for sweetness
Your search will be endless
You will never be satisfied
But if you seek the true taste
You will find what you are looking for.