Gearing Up

So I finally got the chance to sit down and watch all of Sugar: The Bitter Truth, the lecture by Dr. Robert Lustig. Finding 90 minutes to myself is next to impossible with two young children, but I knew it was important so I squeezed it in. This is a medical lecture, with lots of biology and chemistry going on. I was a history major eons ago, but somehow Dr. Lustig makes it very easy to follow. He uses a power point presentation with lots of graphics and arrows, and while it was definitely above my chemistry level, I was able to get the gist of it. If you don't want to watch all 90 minutes, I'd say the last 10-12 minutes sum it up pretty nicely.  Of course, you're skipping the part where he proves it all, but if you're willing to take him at his word, ( he's the head of pediatric endocrinology at UCSF) then just watch the end. Now here's my first attempt at trying to put a YouTube video on the blog. If I majorly fail, I'll just link it.

 

Well, how about that. Blogger makes that exceptionally easy for the technology challenged like me.  

I now have Dr. Lustig's book, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Foods, Obesity  and Disease on my to be read list. Lucky for me, it's available at my local library. Unfortunately, they don't have the other book I desperately want to read, Sweet Poison,by David Gillespie. So I'll have to break down and order that one.  I also read Year of No Sugar by Eve Schaub. This was a fantastic read, and based off of her own blog while she subjected her family to the same experience. She references both Dr. Lustig and Mr. Gillespie repeatedly, so it seemed appropriate to go strait to the source material.  I'm also going to be searching out other blogs and online resources during our attempt.  

My end goal is to go at least a month, though I'd prefer three months, completely sugar free. That is, no food with added sugar of any kind. That includes sugar, cane sugar, honey, molasses, corn sugar, corn syrup, maple sugar, all sugar substitutes, and fruit juice. This I think, is what's going to kill my kids.  I've been operating on the idea that as long as I served them 100% fruit  juice, that it was healthy for them. I was wrong. It's going to be harder I think, in the long run, to give up Apple juice, then it's going to be to give up the hard core sweets like cookies and donuts and fruit snacks. 

Hopefully after an extended period of no sugar whatsoever, we can start to add small amounts back in, in the form of super special occasions and treats. For clarification, a special event is a birthday, or major holiday, not successfully getting out of the grocery store without a major meltdown. 

So, that's where we stand. We're spending the next few days reveling in our sugar, while we still can. Valentine's candy, ice cream, and apple pie. That's where it's at. And on Wednesday, we begin.