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Year of No Sugar
It's Dinnertime. Do you know where your sugar is coming from?
Most likely everywhere. Sure, it's in ice cream and cookies, but what scared Eve O. Schaub was the secret world of sugar--hidden in bacon, crackers, salad dressing, pasta sauce, chicken broth, and baby food.
With her eyes open by the work of obesity expert Dr. Robert Lustig and others, Eve challenged her husband and two school-age daughters to join her on a quest to eat no added sugar for an entire year.
Along the way, Eve uncovered the real costs of our sugar-heavy American diet--including diabetes, obesity, and increased incidences of health problems such as heart disease and cancer. The stories, tips, and recipes she shares throw fresh light on questionable nutritional advice we've been following for years and show that it is possible to eat at restaurants and go grocery shopping--with less and even no added sugar.
Year of No Sugar is what the conversation about "kicking the sugar addiction" looks like for a real American family--a roller coaster of unexpected discoveries and challenges.
Most likely everywhere. Sure, it's in ice cream and cookies, but what scared Eve O. Schaub was the secret world of sugar--hidden in bacon, crackers, salad dressing, pasta sauce, chicken broth, and baby food.
With her eyes open by the work of obesity expert Dr. Robert Lustig and others, Eve challenged her husband and two school-age daughters to join her on a quest to eat no added sugar for an entire year.
Along the way, Eve uncovered the real costs of our sugar-heavy American diet--including diabetes, obesity, and increased incidences of health problems such as heart disease and cancer. The stories, tips, and recipes she shares throw fresh light on questionable nutritional advice we've been following for years and show that it is possible to eat at restaurants and go grocery shopping--with less and even no added sugar.
Year of No Sugar is what the conversation about "kicking the sugar addiction" looks like for a real American family--a roller coaster of unexpected discoveries and challenges.
320 pages, Paperback
First published April 8, 2014
508 people are currently reading
11019 people want to read
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April 13, 2014
3 1/2 Stars
I'm a little mixed on this. I did enjoy it, very much actually, but the title is a little wrong. I don't want to be pedantic but it was not 'a year without sugar', it was an attempted year with no sugar; and there's a big difference. I know because Ive done it myself.
I had "no sugar in any shape or form, no substitutes and no cheating" for 18 months, several years ago. Yes, I had a health reason for doing so (and therefore more impetus) but I'm just saying it can be done. Diabetics do it all the time.
This was more of a "We're having no sugar for an entire year~ except dextrose, glucose syrup, rice syrup, mashed dates and of course one REAL cheat a month. What?? I know, I know, I'm a spoilsport, but sugar alternatives aside, ~I'm not going to touch that one~ I don't think there should have been monthly cheats. Period. Full stop. It's either "A Year without Sugar" or it isn't.
Anyway, you're probably wondering why I still gave it 3 1/2 stars.
The fact is, I enjoyed it. It's a fun read. It's honest and REAL and I think most people will relate to the "we're only human and its gelato for goodness sake" ideology.
I also felt pretty nostalgic while reading it since the authors background and my own was so similar. Even down to the ethical vegetarianism, growing up in Vermont,the 80s, affection for maple syrup, rhubarb and other things that make up "me".
So it's not a health book, like "Sugar Blues" which by the way is excellent if you're looking for a health book) its more of a memoir of trying to make healthier choices in one's own family, and how that panned out in reality.
CONTENT:
One thing that I wish was cleaned up a bit more was the language. There's several people I know who would like this book but I can't recommend it to them while it has both minor profanity (D's and H's and words like crap) and, more "moderately" (S, three times) and even the euphemism "motherfreakin" (that one kind of shocked me). I just know it would turn them off. And it really isn't necessary for the story telling. The "S" words especially were entirely unneeded, if you took them out no one would know where they 'went', they're that superfluous.
Just my opinion.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my free copy to review.
I'm a little mixed on this. I did enjoy it, very much actually, but the title is a little wrong. I don't want to be pedantic but it was not 'a year without sugar', it was an attempted year with no sugar; and there's a big difference. I know because Ive done it myself.
I had "no sugar in any shape or form, no substitutes and no cheating" for 18 months, several years ago. Yes, I had a health reason for doing so (and therefore more impetus) but I'm just saying it can be done. Diabetics do it all the time.
This was more of a "We're having no sugar for an entire year~ except dextrose, glucose syrup, rice syrup, mashed dates and of course one REAL cheat a month. What?? I know, I know, I'm a spoilsport, but sugar alternatives aside, ~I'm not going to touch that one~ I don't think there should have been monthly cheats. Period. Full stop. It's either "A Year without Sugar" or it isn't.
Anyway, you're probably wondering why I still gave it 3 1/2 stars.
The fact is, I enjoyed it. It's a fun read. It's honest and REAL and I think most people will relate to the "we're only human and its gelato for goodness sake" ideology.
I also felt pretty nostalgic while reading it since the authors background and my own was so similar. Even down to the ethical vegetarianism, growing up in Vermont,the 80s, affection for maple syrup, rhubarb and other things that make up "me".
So it's not a health book, like "Sugar Blues" which by the way is excellent if you're looking for a health book) its more of a memoir of trying to make healthier choices in one's own family, and how that panned out in reality.
CONTENT:
One thing that I wish was cleaned up a bit more was the language. There's several people I know who would like this book but I can't recommend it to them while it has both minor profanity (D's and H's and words like crap) and, more "moderately" (S, three times) and even the euphemism "motherfreakin" (that one kind of shocked me). I just know it would turn them off. And it really isn't necessary for the story telling. The "S" words especially were entirely unneeded, if you took them out no one would know where they 'went', they're that superfluous.
Just my opinion.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my free copy to review.
April 10, 2014
Title: Year of No Sugar
Author: Eve O. Schaub
Genre: Non-Fiction/Memoir
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Publication Date: April 8, 2014
Format: Egalley from Netgalley.com
Find this review and much more at Read, Run, Ramble
Thank you Sourcebooks via Netgalley for providing me with an early copy of this book!
I abandoned this book at 79%.
There were a few things I was expecting from a book that exclaims the author and her family went without sugar for a year:
1. That the family would actually go without added sugar for the year (or maybe most of the year or at least more of the year than not).
2. Symptoms and experiences for all members of the family would be shared.
3. Not to be barraged with unnecessary ill treatment of animals and right way to eat meat lectures.
4. Not to sit wondering, after one baffling chapter, why I was reading about the author’s trip to Tanzania where she didn't eat the local cuisine of goat.
By the time I gave up on the book none of those expectations had been met. The family did not indeed go without sugar. As a matter of fact between the vacation in Italy, the birthday clause, the individual cheat they each got (to eat whenever they chose), and the monthly dessert allowance, I’d be very interested to know how many days any of them actually went consecutively without sugar.
Additionally, the only symptoms or experiences I’d read were that the girls had missed less school due to illness and that sweets were much more sweet to Eve and made her feel bad after eating. There was no talk of how any of them felt after leaving the sugar behind or any other experiences or such provided. The girls and the husband were very rarely even mentioned.
Meat – you might be wondering how this ties to sugar, so was I. The author shares on several occasions that she used to be a vegetarian. Then shortly before I gave up on the book a majority of a chapter (if not the whole) focused on the ill-treatment of animals and what the author feels is the right way to eat meat. And then there was the portion of the chapter that detailed the author’s trip to Tanzania and how she decided not to eat goat. I don’t have any other details to share on that particular point, I was simply baffled on why I was reading about it in a book supposedly about a family who was attempting to eradicate sugar from their diet.
Those were the major things that stood out to me, but much of the memoir was hard for me to read. I feel like this book is a bait and switch. Readers think they’re getting a well-informed read about the effect of sugar on our diets and in our lives and maybe some insight as how to start removing it from our diets, but what you get is a memoir with small amounts of information about sugar, some stats about it as well, and very little evidence of what it did or did not affect in the Schaub’s lives. I think at the very least, the synopsis, the jacket blurb, and the marketing should be more honest about what the book is – that’s the biggest issue.
Author: Eve O. Schaub
Genre: Non-Fiction/Memoir
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Publication Date: April 8, 2014
Format: Egalley from Netgalley.com
Find this review and much more at Read, Run, Ramble
Thank you Sourcebooks via Netgalley for providing me with an early copy of this book!
I abandoned this book at 79%.
There were a few things I was expecting from a book that exclaims the author and her family went without sugar for a year:
1. That the family would actually go without added sugar for the year (or maybe most of the year or at least more of the year than not).
2. Symptoms and experiences for all members of the family would be shared.
3. Not to be barraged with unnecessary ill treatment of animals and right way to eat meat lectures.
4. Not to sit wondering, after one baffling chapter, why I was reading about the author’s trip to Tanzania where she didn't eat the local cuisine of goat.
By the time I gave up on the book none of those expectations had been met. The family did not indeed go without sugar. As a matter of fact between the vacation in Italy, the birthday clause, the individual cheat they each got (to eat whenever they chose), and the monthly dessert allowance, I’d be very interested to know how many days any of them actually went consecutively without sugar.
Additionally, the only symptoms or experiences I’d read were that the girls had missed less school due to illness and that sweets were much more sweet to Eve and made her feel bad after eating. There was no talk of how any of them felt after leaving the sugar behind or any other experiences or such provided. The girls and the husband were very rarely even mentioned.
Meat – you might be wondering how this ties to sugar, so was I. The author shares on several occasions that she used to be a vegetarian. Then shortly before I gave up on the book a majority of a chapter (if not the whole) focused on the ill-treatment of animals and what the author feels is the right way to eat meat. And then there was the portion of the chapter that detailed the author’s trip to Tanzania and how she decided not to eat goat. I don’t have any other details to share on that particular point, I was simply baffled on why I was reading about it in a book supposedly about a family who was attempting to eradicate sugar from their diet.
Those were the major things that stood out to me, but much of the memoir was hard for me to read. I feel like this book is a bait and switch. Readers think they’re getting a well-informed read about the effect of sugar on our diets and in our lives and maybe some insight as how to start removing it from our diets, but what you get is a memoir with small amounts of information about sugar, some stats about it as well, and very little evidence of what it did or did not affect in the Schaub’s lives. I think at the very least, the synopsis, the jacket blurb, and the marketing should be more honest about what the book is – that’s the biggest issue.
July 8, 2016
Make it stop, someone please make her stoppp.
Annoying American complaining about how hard life is without sugar? Ugh check your priviledge lady. And the writing, please don't get me started, who gave her a book deal? Its tedious, and quite frankly reads like a teenager wrote it. No, scratch that. It reads like I wrote it, and that isn't a compliment...
The issue I have with this book isn't the subject, it's the fact that it reads like one overtly long complaint. "We cant drink fruit juice!" "We cant eat breakfast, coffee and eggs without bacon ew. How will we survive?" She rarely depicts the aftermath or feelings of her family towards the absence of sugar, nope it's just jibber jabber about how she doesn't get biochem or a random fact about her marriage. So for that, I say please change the title of your book Schaub, it's grossly misleading.
Maybe this annoyed me most bc I don't drink sugar & rarely ever eat added sugar (exception: my fav cookies sometimes). Ive found it's a choice similar to wearing a tshirt that says "fuck the police". For some odd reason, people can't help but get offended. Why it concerns another person what you choose to digest beats me, they give you that look od contempt and mentally yell "How dare you not incessantly indulge in lifes greatest pleasure, how dare you?!" I mean sure, it means no fizzy drinks, juice, 98.5% of snacks, and everything else that ppl live by but here's a little secret... you won't die. No, your life will continue on as normally as it was before, or even better. And if you like sugar and cannot stand the thought of such an unnecessarily cruel punishment, well it's a free world my friends.
Hell, I'm now inspired to write a long complaint about the government and publish it bc if this got a book deal and people are reading it? We all have hope to be writers.
**1 star
Dnf @ 34%
Annoying American complaining about how hard life is without sugar? Ugh check your priviledge lady. And the writing, please don't get me started, who gave her a book deal? Its tedious, and quite frankly reads like a teenager wrote it. No, scratch that. It reads like I wrote it, and that isn't a compliment...
The issue I have with this book isn't the subject, it's the fact that it reads like one overtly long complaint. "We cant drink fruit juice!" "We cant eat breakfast, coffee and eggs without bacon ew. How will we survive?" She rarely depicts the aftermath or feelings of her family towards the absence of sugar, nope it's just jibber jabber about how she doesn't get biochem or a random fact about her marriage. So for that, I say please change the title of your book Schaub, it's grossly misleading.
Maybe this annoyed me most bc I don't drink sugar & rarely ever eat added sugar (exception: my fav cookies sometimes). Ive found it's a choice similar to wearing a tshirt that says "fuck the police". For some odd reason, people can't help but get offended. Why it concerns another person what you choose to digest beats me, they give you that look od contempt and mentally yell "How dare you not incessantly indulge in lifes greatest pleasure, how dare you?!" I mean sure, it means no fizzy drinks, juice, 98.5% of snacks, and everything else that ppl live by but here's a little secret... you won't die. No, your life will continue on as normally as it was before, or even better. And if you like sugar and cannot stand the thought of such an unnecessarily cruel punishment, well it's a free world my friends.
Hell, I'm now inspired to write a long complaint about the government and publish it bc if this got a book deal and people are reading it? We all have hope to be writers.
**1 star
Dnf @ 34%
June 25, 2014
Really fascinating. Also, there is sugar in absolutely everything. My phone probably has sugar in it (actually, I'm sure it does, since I'm always eating while I use it). I've included it as part of my 2014 Summer Reading Guide: http://www.everyday-reading.com/2014/...
April 29, 2014
I am actively interested and engaged in reading food/nutrition science and information. I also like a good memoir. Unfortunately, this book did little more than make me angry and worried that people will be getting the wrong message. There are so many wonderful, smart books about food and the industrial food industry that promote a message of eating whole foods, mostly plants (Michael Pollan, anyone?) that would be much better guides for the average reader.
One of my major issues was the author's regular disdain for vegetarians/vegans, particularly her insistence that vegetables on their own can't taste good. My other major issue is the fact that the author and her family make so many exceptions to their rule that are grand and sweeping but make terrible choices like potato chips over multigrain bread. I appreciate the desire to expose the ridiculous amount of sugar added to our food supply, but eschewing small amounts of sugar in favor of using strange ingredients like dextrose or eating other terrible foods isn't a sustainable lifestyle.
Please take this book with a grain of salt (or sugar) and do some research of your own!
One of my major issues was the author's regular disdain for vegetarians/vegans, particularly her insistence that vegetables on their own can't taste good. My other major issue is the fact that the author and her family make so many exceptions to their rule that are grand and sweeping but make terrible choices like potato chips over multigrain bread. I appreciate the desire to expose the ridiculous amount of sugar added to our food supply, but eschewing small amounts of sugar in favor of using strange ingredients like dextrose or eating other terrible foods isn't a sustainable lifestyle.
Please take this book with a grain of salt (or sugar) and do some research of your own!
March 8, 2017
I am surprised by how strongly I disliked this book. The author comes across as self-congratulatory and pompous, based on a decision to undertake a project that was, to me, questionable in matching its claim. I truly don't care if they had a dessert every month. That part doesn't bother me. I believe that reducing our sugar consumption is only a good thing, but they would make these tremendous desserts that admittedly lasted more than one day. I acknowledge that I don't eat very much sugar, but that seems like an extraordinary act of decadence.
Don't even get me started on all the weird sweeteners that she somehow decided were OK.
Her obvious need to justify consuming animal products made me cringe on her behalf. The ridiculous claim that since we cannot eliminate all harm in our existence, it's totally cool to eat animals? Absurd.
The one good thing about this book is that it made me recognize how well my family and I are currently eating. I don't feel the need to write a book about it, though.
Don't even get me started on all the weird sweeteners that she somehow decided were OK.
Her obvious need to justify consuming animal products made me cringe on her behalf. The ridiculous claim that since we cannot eliminate all harm in our existence, it's totally cool to eat animals? Absurd.
The one good thing about this book is that it made me recognize how well my family and I are currently eating. I don't feel the need to write a book about it, though.
May 4, 2014
Eve Straub, a food blogger, wife, and mother of two girls, decided in 2010 that her family would spend an entire year without consuming any fructose (except for the fructose that naturally occurs in fruits), and thus this book was born. They have a couple of exceptions to the "no fructose" rule, which was plenty onerous (no sugar, no honey, no maple syrup, no fruit juice, and so on): they were allowed to have one regular dessert per month as a family, and the girls were allowed to indulge in cake and ice cream at birthday parties. The book follows the trials and tribulations of the Straub family as they stumble their way through the year.
At first, the book interested me: I've been considering banning sugar from my own diet due to medical issues, so it gave me some food for thought on that account, and the writing was engaging and friendly. But it also annoyed the hell out of me. First of all, there's very little here in the way of science. She basically watched a YouTube video that said fructose is public enemy number one, and that was that. She ALLUDES to the science behind it all, and goes so far as to tell us that she visited her daughter's classroom to discuss why their family was undertaking this project, but she offers almost nothing in the way of scientific data. It really weakened her credibility, in my opinion.
Second, don't expect this book to offer you a model for banning sugar from your own household. Eve and her family have the time and resources for her to spend most of her day making food for her family (not to mention the money to jaunt off on a two week holiday to Italy), and that just isn't going to happen for the vast majority of families out there in America. Who has the time to spend 6 hours making meatballs from scratch? Also, Eve is crazy. I mean it. She's totally obsessive about keeping even the tiniest bit of sugar away from her family, right down to the teaspoon of sugar that often gets thrown into a loaf of bread. When you're badgering the waitstaff, bringing your own food to family gatherings, and telling your children "nope" to gelato while you're visiting Europe - well, maybe you're taking things a bit too far. Also, she DOES allow the family to eat dextrose (she actually starts buying it in bulk), glucose syrup, and brown rice syrup, which I found a little bizarre but which she explains away by pointing out that these sweeteners don't have fructose in them.
Third, this book isn't just about sugar. About 2/3 of the way through - incidentally, right as I started to get bored - she segues into talking about why she believes people should eat meat (huh?) and tells us all about her friends who kill 52 chickens a year so they can feed their family, and how she was allowed to watch (and help) one time. In other words, she was running out of stuff to say about the no-sugar experiment And then she tried to get all philosophical at the end, and the attempt, I don't mind telling you, is not a successful one. She basically says that she's now a sugar avoider and that she continues to make most of their meals from scratch.
Finally, she ends the book with recipes. What does she include? Some of her unsweetened dessert concoctions, such as her famous Dirt Cookies...and then her favorite sugared up desserts! Am I the only one who sees the irony here?
Overall, I would not recommend you buy this book. Check it out at the library, maybe, and skim through it if you have a few hours to spare. Maybe check out her blog (disclaimer: I have not read her blog) instead. And be glad that your mama probably isn't , or wasn't, as insane as this one is.
At first, the book interested me: I've been considering banning sugar from my own diet due to medical issues, so it gave me some food for thought on that account, and the writing was engaging and friendly. But it also annoyed the hell out of me. First of all, there's very little here in the way of science. She basically watched a YouTube video that said fructose is public enemy number one, and that was that. She ALLUDES to the science behind it all, and goes so far as to tell us that she visited her daughter's classroom to discuss why their family was undertaking this project, but she offers almost nothing in the way of scientific data. It really weakened her credibility, in my opinion.
Second, don't expect this book to offer you a model for banning sugar from your own household. Eve and her family have the time and resources for her to spend most of her day making food for her family (not to mention the money to jaunt off on a two week holiday to Italy), and that just isn't going to happen for the vast majority of families out there in America. Who has the time to spend 6 hours making meatballs from scratch? Also, Eve is crazy. I mean it. She's totally obsessive about keeping even the tiniest bit of sugar away from her family, right down to the teaspoon of sugar that often gets thrown into a loaf of bread. When you're badgering the waitstaff, bringing your own food to family gatherings, and telling your children "nope" to gelato while you're visiting Europe - well, maybe you're taking things a bit too far. Also, she DOES allow the family to eat dextrose (she actually starts buying it in bulk), glucose syrup, and brown rice syrup, which I found a little bizarre but which she explains away by pointing out that these sweeteners don't have fructose in them.
Third, this book isn't just about sugar. About 2/3 of the way through - incidentally, right as I started to get bored - she segues into talking about why she believes people should eat meat (huh?) and tells us all about her friends who kill 52 chickens a year so they can feed their family, and how she was allowed to watch (and help) one time. In other words, she was running out of stuff to say about the no-sugar experiment And then she tried to get all philosophical at the end, and the attempt, I don't mind telling you, is not a successful one. She basically says that she's now a sugar avoider and that she continues to make most of their meals from scratch.
Finally, she ends the book with recipes. What does she include? Some of her unsweetened dessert concoctions, such as her famous Dirt Cookies...and then her favorite sugared up desserts! Am I the only one who sees the irony here?
Overall, I would not recommend you buy this book. Check it out at the library, maybe, and skim through it if you have a few hours to spare. Maybe check out her blog (disclaimer: I have not read her blog) instead. And be glad that your mama probably isn't , or wasn't, as insane as this one is.
April 27, 2014
First things first: This is a memoir, not a diet book. If you're looking for a diet book, you'll wind up 2-starring this in the end. Relax and take it for what it is, though, and you'll be fine. It's just one Vermont mom's rage, rage against the ubiquitous sweet toxin, is all, told with a sense of humor. In fact, the writing is fairly laid back and informal, so it's a breezy read, start to finish.
What Eve, her husband, and two daughters did is to try and abandon ADDED sugar in their foods for an entire year. Here come the asterisks, though. She made exceptions for birthdays. And allowed each family member one cheat a month. So yes, if you want to get technical, the title is a misnomer. It really should be called Year of Less Sugar.
Using the science of Robt. Lustig (YouTube video) and David Gillespie (howmuchsugar.com), Eve renders the technical aspects of "fructose = poison" in layman's terms. It serves as the foundation of her experiment and is compelling stuff.
Only I was confused because she allowed herself and her family to eat all the fruit they wanted because it was sugar in a natural state. Of course, I'm saying to myself, your body does not distinguish fructose in an apple from fructose in a Ring Ding. Nosirree, Bob. It processes it in the liver all the same. Bad, bad, bad. So Eve oddly upends her own logic throughout, avoiding breads with tiny amounts of added sugar while happily scarfing raisins with 24 grams of fructose in 1/4 cup.
So I got over that and just enjoyed the story. And yes, it's educational. You just might want to draw your own conclusions, is all.
And oh, yeah. Bet you wind up buying bags of dextrose from amazon, too, to see if it actually flies as a sugar substitute for baking. Forget bad fats and good fats. Welcome to bad sugars and good sugars....
What Eve, her husband, and two daughters did is to try and abandon ADDED sugar in their foods for an entire year. Here come the asterisks, though. She made exceptions for birthdays. And allowed each family member one cheat a month. So yes, if you want to get technical, the title is a misnomer. It really should be called Year of Less Sugar.
Using the science of Robt. Lustig (YouTube video) and David Gillespie (howmuchsugar.com), Eve renders the technical aspects of "fructose = poison" in layman's terms. It serves as the foundation of her experiment and is compelling stuff.
Only I was confused because she allowed herself and her family to eat all the fruit they wanted because it was sugar in a natural state. Of course, I'm saying to myself, your body does not distinguish fructose in an apple from fructose in a Ring Ding. Nosirree, Bob. It processes it in the liver all the same. Bad, bad, bad. So Eve oddly upends her own logic throughout, avoiding breads with tiny amounts of added sugar while happily scarfing raisins with 24 grams of fructose in 1/4 cup.
So I got over that and just enjoyed the story. And yes, it's educational. You just might want to draw your own conclusions, is all.
And oh, yeah. Bet you wind up buying bags of dextrose from amazon, too, to see if it actually flies as a sugar substitute for baking. Forget bad fats and good fats. Welcome to bad sugars and good sugars....
April 18, 2015
I'm sorry to say I had a love-hate relationship with this novel when I finished it. The information on how much hidden sugar is found in American's diets was amazing and horrifying at the same time, and by the fourth chapter of the book i had started carefully checking all the foods in my cupboard and I found some truly shocking things. The powdered onion soup mix I like to use, contains sugar, why? I feel much more aware of "hidden" sugar in the food I eat and I have this book to thank.
So what was my problem, well it was the Author herself. She comes off as pompous and spoiled. And the thing is she admits she is blessed and has no right to complain, but in spite of that at some point in every chapter I just wanted to slap her in the mouth and scream at her 'Now how about dealing with a real life problem, Bitch!" I guess I knew this book was a fail after she spent the chapters about spending the entire day shopping, and how she spent hours making gnocchi and sauce, and especially trying to eat no sugar while vacationing in Italy!
I'm afraid that your average American who is already balancing kids and a 2 job family or a single parent household may find Mrs. Schaub just a tad elitist. Lets call it the "Gwyneth Paltrow effect." And that is a shame because an important message is going to be lost in a poor presentation.
So what was my problem, well it was the Author herself. She comes off as pompous and spoiled. And the thing is she admits she is blessed and has no right to complain, but in spite of that at some point in every chapter I just wanted to slap her in the mouth and scream at her 'Now how about dealing with a real life problem, Bitch!" I guess I knew this book was a fail after she spent the chapters about spending the entire day shopping, and how she spent hours making gnocchi and sauce, and especially trying to eat no sugar while vacationing in Italy!
I'm afraid that your average American who is already balancing kids and a 2 job family or a single parent household may find Mrs. Schaub just a tad elitist. Lets call it the "Gwyneth Paltrow effect." And that is a shame because an important message is going to be lost in a poor presentation.
July 26, 2016
Got me a jumbo-size bag of Jelly Bellys to eat while I read this.
This book served as excellent motivator for me to stay on track and remind me to be vigilant about limiting sugar intake. However, it is a memoir, and thus does not provide much scientific information for those who are new to the topic. Use it as a supplement for meatier books on health and nutrition and the evils of refined sugar in its various forms.
If you think you know what causes heart disease and other modern lifestyle epidemics, start with this video for a new perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniu...
3.49 stars
This book served as excellent motivator for me to stay on track and remind me to be vigilant about limiting sugar intake. However, it is a memoir, and thus does not provide much scientific information for those who are new to the topic. Use it as a supplement for meatier books on health and nutrition and the evils of refined sugar in its various forms.
If you think you know what causes heart disease and other modern lifestyle epidemics, start with this video for a new perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniu...
3.49 stars
October 16, 2014
How can someone entitle a book "Year of No Sugar", and then proceed to do nothing but eat sugar all year? This book purports to be about a family who stops eating sugar for a year, but that's not really what they do. At best, they attempt to stop eating processed food that contains added fructose. But, they constantly make exceptions. Once a month, they choose a dessert and eat that, things like chocolate cake with frosting, banana cream pie,. The children, daughters aged 6 and 11, are also allowed to eat anything they want at school, and it seems they are offered sugary treats on a daily basis. And they each get an "exception" food--wine for mom, Dr. Pepper for dad, and jam for the girls. Okay.... and then, Ms. Schaub decides she must find a way to make baked goods and uses massive quantities of mashed banana and dates to sweeten her recipes. Uh, does she not know there is fructose in those items? A lot of frucotose. Then she discovers dextrose, which is....ta da, sugar! Ok, glucose, not fructose, but it is still a sugar. So, she proceeds to make all their favorite desserts substituting dextrose for regular sugar, seemingly several times a week, because, oh dear, the girls might be made fun of if they don't have cookies in their lunch boxes. All this while at the same time she won't allow the use of Helmann's mayonnaise because of the infinitesimal amount of added sugar (amount per serving is listed as 0 grams even though sugar is on the ingredient list which means there is very LITTLE sugar in this product.) And, the person who inspired and advised Ms. Schaub, David Gillespie, has zero credentials as a nutrition expert. He's an attorney, not a doctor, not a nutritionist and his main goal seems to be to sell his books. He's the brilliant source of her "scientific" information regarding fructose, glucose, and dextrose. This book should be called, "Year of LOTS of Sugar While Telling Everyone we are not Eating Sugar!" If you want to read a book about a family who actually changes their eating habits I recommend Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.
March 12, 2017
This is more like 3.5 review
I started with a wrong idea (a diet/scientific kind of book) and after few chapters I realized I did not paid attention to the title
Its a memoir.
I found it fun to read. It has a blend of health information and tips, how hear family dealt during a year on a project restricting the consumption of sugar and all the mundane details of it.
It was worth it. It left me with tips and reference for further reading/research
I started with a wrong idea (a diet/scientific kind of book) and after few chapters I realized I did not paid attention to the title
Its a memoir.
I found it fun to read. It has a blend of health information and tips, how hear family dealt during a year on a project restricting the consumption of sugar and all the mundane details of it.
It was worth it. It left me with tips and reference for further reading/research
June 25, 2014
(Nearly 3.5) An engaging account of the author’s family project to cut out all added sugar for the year of 2011. It reminded me most of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (from the multiple family narrators down to the poultry processing and a trip to Italy) and Gretchen Rubin’s happiness books. Like Julie and Julia, this book originated as a one-year foodie blog, and Schaub shares some of Julie Powell’s conversational wit. I think this is an important book, but possibly limited in its reach: for some it will be preaching to the choir; for others, cutting out sugar will seem like an impossible goal, and therefore not even worth attempting.
Obesity is undeniably an international epidemic, especially notable in the U.S. It is one of the main symptoms of metabolic syndrome (along with one or more of the following: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease). And the culprit, Schaub believes, is sugar. Specifically fructose, for which the body has no use and therefore no receptors – apart from in the liver, where it makes fatty acids and uric acid (a chief cause of hypertension). It just sits around, contributing to body fat and manifesting itself as metabolic syndrome. So it’s not only rotting teeth that you need to worry about when it comes to sugar.
I was aware of many of the statistics Schaub references here, but it still shocked me to learn that Americans consume 63 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup a year, and just drinking a soda a day can add on 15.5 pounds of extra fat annually. Schaub’s two gurus are Dr. Robert Lustig, a YouTube sensation with his presentation “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” and David Gillespie, Australian author of Sweet Poison. Essentially, these two argue that sugar is a toxin, one we’ve been pumping into our bodies in increasing quantities for decades now. Schaub’s writing can sometimes feel a bit too much like hero worship; she seems to believe that Lustig and Gillespie bear the most important message since Jesus.
I might have preferred it if her no-sugar quest had been based on her own research, or even just a hunch, rather than slavish devotion to two self-proclaimed diet experts (okay, make that one – Lustig is actually a pediatric endocrinologist, but Gillespie is self-taught, with a law and IT background; he banks on his personal story of losing 90 pounds by giving up sugar). [Besides, in this age of dietary fads, after sugar it will just be something else that everyone tells us to avoid: salt (also in processed foods), nitrates (in smoked meats), red meat (associated with bowel cancer), and so on. Instead of becoming fanatical about one thing, seek balance and moderation in all things. Michael Pollan’s books give a great model of how to do this. For instance, he suggests you avoid Snacks, Seconds and Sweets – except on days beginning with S. In other words, keep the weekends special by linking them with pleasurable food events.]
Schaub and family chiefly cut out sugar by avoiding most processed supermarket foods. Finding sugar-free ketchup, mayonnaise, bread, salad dressing, and chicken broth was nigh on impossible, so she either made her own or they did without. Eating out was hardly worth it; they had to (most apologetically) give every waitperson the third degree before ordering. Vacations and holidays often posed the biggest challenge. Reflecting after a somewhat indulgent trip to Italy, she asks herself, “Had we been good? Or not so good? Both, I imagine. In fact, I suppose the answer was that we were human.”
Halloween and Christmas were predictably harrowing. “Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t seem to remember much about how you celebrate things without buying a bunch of unnecessary stuff and without consuming a bunch of unnecessary sugar.” (Have a think about how often you proffer sugary treats as a sign of love.) Apart from one pre-agreed dessert per month, usually to celebrate a birthday or holiday, the family’s sweet snacks were moderately appetizing combinations of bananas, dates, apricots and coconut – “My tummy was crying out for something satisfying that didn’t taste like it was plucked from Carmen Miranda’s hat.” That is, until Schaub discovered powdered dextrose. Substituted for sugar in any dessert recipe, it produced mildly sweet and pretty darn tasty results.
But can any ordinary person really be expected to go online and order vats of the stuff, as Schaub did? I’d rather drastically reduce my reliance on cane sugar, which at least feels like a natural substance, than replace it with something made in a lab. Dextrose costs about three times as much as regular sugar, too. The truth is that eating this way might be an ideal, but it takes a lot of both time and money; that might be okay for Schaub in her Vermont idyll, but is this really practical for everyone? Shouldn’t we be putting pressure on the food industry to do the work of cutting added sugar for us? (But how?!)
Now, my husband and I do much better than most when it comes to healthy eating. We are almost exclusively vegetarian (many of our meals are incidentally vegan), and we buy very few processed foods. My husband bakes pretty much all our own bread and snacks. But there’s the rub: we both have quite a sweet tooth. On days when we don’t have a home-baked treat, we’ll at least have chocolate. I can’t really imagine a day without a sugary snack to accompany my tea. So I did find this book convicting, but I’m not sure I can see it actually changing my behavior. Maybe I needed some more concrete examples of how to actually live without sweets (besides having hummus for an afternoon snack), rather than excuses for the Schaub family’s various accidents, cheats, and substitutions.
It’s impressive that Schaub got her whole family, especially her kids, to go along with the no-sugar project. And for the most part they didn’t complain too much; like kids do, they simply adjusted to their new normal. I would have liked to hear more from her husband, Steve, who only gets two short entries at the beginning and end of the book; on the other hand, I didn’t really find her precocious 11-year-old’s diary entries particularly enlightening.
The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that when you cut out sugar your palate actually changes. Desserts now seem over-sweet to Schaub: one or two bites is nice, but any more than that and her tongue feels coated and she gets an instant headache. This to me is a hopeful sign that cutting down on sugar could gradually become easier, and eventually would be a permanent lifestyle change.
Obesity is undeniably an international epidemic, especially notable in the U.S. It is one of the main symptoms of metabolic syndrome (along with one or more of the following: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or nonalcoholic fatty liver disease). And the culprit, Schaub believes, is sugar. Specifically fructose, for which the body has no use and therefore no receptors – apart from in the liver, where it makes fatty acids and uric acid (a chief cause of hypertension). It just sits around, contributing to body fat and manifesting itself as metabolic syndrome. So it’s not only rotting teeth that you need to worry about when it comes to sugar.
I was aware of many of the statistics Schaub references here, but it still shocked me to learn that Americans consume 63 pounds of high-fructose corn syrup a year, and just drinking a soda a day can add on 15.5 pounds of extra fat annually. Schaub’s two gurus are Dr. Robert Lustig, a YouTube sensation with his presentation “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” and David Gillespie, Australian author of Sweet Poison. Essentially, these two argue that sugar is a toxin, one we’ve been pumping into our bodies in increasing quantities for decades now. Schaub’s writing can sometimes feel a bit too much like hero worship; she seems to believe that Lustig and Gillespie bear the most important message since Jesus.
I might have preferred it if her no-sugar quest had been based on her own research, or even just a hunch, rather than slavish devotion to two self-proclaimed diet experts (okay, make that one – Lustig is actually a pediatric endocrinologist, but Gillespie is self-taught, with a law and IT background; he banks on his personal story of losing 90 pounds by giving up sugar). [Besides, in this age of dietary fads, after sugar it will just be something else that everyone tells us to avoid: salt (also in processed foods), nitrates (in smoked meats), red meat (associated with bowel cancer), and so on. Instead of becoming fanatical about one thing, seek balance and moderation in all things. Michael Pollan’s books give a great model of how to do this. For instance, he suggests you avoid Snacks, Seconds and Sweets – except on days beginning with S. In other words, keep the weekends special by linking them with pleasurable food events.]
Schaub and family chiefly cut out sugar by avoiding most processed supermarket foods. Finding sugar-free ketchup, mayonnaise, bread, salad dressing, and chicken broth was nigh on impossible, so she either made her own or they did without. Eating out was hardly worth it; they had to (most apologetically) give every waitperson the third degree before ordering. Vacations and holidays often posed the biggest challenge. Reflecting after a somewhat indulgent trip to Italy, she asks herself, “Had we been good? Or not so good? Both, I imagine. In fact, I suppose the answer was that we were human.”
Halloween and Christmas were predictably harrowing. “Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t seem to remember much about how you celebrate things without buying a bunch of unnecessary stuff and without consuming a bunch of unnecessary sugar.” (Have a think about how often you proffer sugary treats as a sign of love.) Apart from one pre-agreed dessert per month, usually to celebrate a birthday or holiday, the family’s sweet snacks were moderately appetizing combinations of bananas, dates, apricots and coconut – “My tummy was crying out for something satisfying that didn’t taste like it was plucked from Carmen Miranda’s hat.” That is, until Schaub discovered powdered dextrose. Substituted for sugar in any dessert recipe, it produced mildly sweet and pretty darn tasty results.
But can any ordinary person really be expected to go online and order vats of the stuff, as Schaub did? I’d rather drastically reduce my reliance on cane sugar, which at least feels like a natural substance, than replace it with something made in a lab. Dextrose costs about three times as much as regular sugar, too. The truth is that eating this way might be an ideal, but it takes a lot of both time and money; that might be okay for Schaub in her Vermont idyll, but is this really practical for everyone? Shouldn’t we be putting pressure on the food industry to do the work of cutting added sugar for us? (But how?!)
Now, my husband and I do much better than most when it comes to healthy eating. We are almost exclusively vegetarian (many of our meals are incidentally vegan), and we buy very few processed foods. My husband bakes pretty much all our own bread and snacks. But there’s the rub: we both have quite a sweet tooth. On days when we don’t have a home-baked treat, we’ll at least have chocolate. I can’t really imagine a day without a sugary snack to accompany my tea. So I did find this book convicting, but I’m not sure I can see it actually changing my behavior. Maybe I needed some more concrete examples of how to actually live without sweets (besides having hummus for an afternoon snack), rather than excuses for the Schaub family’s various accidents, cheats, and substitutions.
It’s impressive that Schaub got her whole family, especially her kids, to go along with the no-sugar project. And for the most part they didn’t complain too much; like kids do, they simply adjusted to their new normal. I would have liked to hear more from her husband, Steve, who only gets two short entries at the beginning and end of the book; on the other hand, I didn’t really find her precocious 11-year-old’s diary entries particularly enlightening.
The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that when you cut out sugar your palate actually changes. Desserts now seem over-sweet to Schaub: one or two bites is nice, but any more than that and her tongue feels coated and she gets an instant headache. This to me is a hopeful sign that cutting down on sugar could gradually become easier, and eventually would be a permanent lifestyle change.
May 27, 2014
I was sent a copy of the book for review through Net Galley, as always, all opinions are my own.
Much like the author I’m concerned about how much sugar I consume and the lengths manufacturers go to hide it in an ingredient list, which is why I thought I would like this book. Unfortunately rather than truly going a whole year without sugar time and time again the author found reasons to deviate from the experiment and even went so far as to replace fructose with dextrose which is still a type of sugar. I think that was about the point I completely lost interest in the book and quit reading. This book certainly doesn’t live up to the title of A Year of No Sugar.
Much like the author I’m concerned about how much sugar I consume and the lengths manufacturers go to hide it in an ingredient list, which is why I thought I would like this book. Unfortunately rather than truly going a whole year without sugar time and time again the author found reasons to deviate from the experiment and even went so far as to replace fructose with dextrose which is still a type of sugar. I think that was about the point I completely lost interest in the book and quit reading. This book certainly doesn’t live up to the title of A Year of No Sugar.
August 6, 2014
I did something with this book that I almost never do--I checked out a few of the reviews other goodreads members had posted. It cracks me up that so many people got bent out of shape over the title of the book, saying that it's misleading because the author's family still indulged in some sugar. It's called marketing, people! "Year of Mostly No Sugar" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Rational people will understand the reasons for the sugar exception rules.
Schaub did not take on the "no sugar" task due to severe illness related to sugar consumption, she just wanted to try to cut out sugar, after having realized how truly bad it is for us and how it is in EVERYTHING.
Getting her husband and two young children on board would mostly likely have been impossible had they not allowed for exceptions: Everyone got to choose one item containing sugar that they would still consume. Once a month, the family would indulge in a dessert containing sugar, but they would all agree on what that dessert would be (unless a family member's birthday fell in that month, then they would choose the dessert). And lastly, if one of the girls were at a birthday party or some such event where everyone is indulging in sugary desserts, the girl would choose for herself whether or not she had the sugary dessert, and she was then to tell the family about which decision she made and why (not wanting the girls to feel they had to hide sugar).
Nothing Schaub says in this book was news to me, but the way she presented it was terrifying. I had never thought of sugar as poison before, but now that's how I see it, and I've very quickly stopped craving candy and ice cream (easy to do if you honestly view it as being poisoned).
All in all, I enjoyed this book and am now trying to be sugar-free. We shall see how this goes. Even if I do not go completely sugar-free, I can work to avoid sugar in processed foods.
Schaub did not take on the "no sugar" task due to severe illness related to sugar consumption, she just wanted to try to cut out sugar, after having realized how truly bad it is for us and how it is in EVERYTHING.
Getting her husband and two young children on board would mostly likely have been impossible had they not allowed for exceptions: Everyone got to choose one item containing sugar that they would still consume. Once a month, the family would indulge in a dessert containing sugar, but they would all agree on what that dessert would be (unless a family member's birthday fell in that month, then they would choose the dessert). And lastly, if one of the girls were at a birthday party or some such event where everyone is indulging in sugary desserts, the girl would choose for herself whether or not she had the sugary dessert, and she was then to tell the family about which decision she made and why (not wanting the girls to feel they had to hide sugar).
Nothing Schaub says in this book was news to me, but the way she presented it was terrifying. I had never thought of sugar as poison before, but now that's how I see it, and I've very quickly stopped craving candy and ice cream (easy to do if you honestly view it as being poisoned).
All in all, I enjoyed this book and am now trying to be sugar-free. We shall see how this goes. Even if I do not go completely sugar-free, I can work to avoid sugar in processed foods.
January 18, 2019
Q: what's harder than a year of no sugar ?
A: the week after a year of no sugar.
when i watched the videos about this expirement, I respected the idea & liked it & loooved reading the full book for more information and alternative recipes with fruits .. dates or honey etc...
BUT the book was a shoc for me.. nothing is important .. most of bla bla and repetition .. the alternative was the salty recipes in parties like haloween & birthdays ..
If you are interested about this family , I recommend you to watch two videos on Youtube
1-year of no sugar- Opera winfrey
2- khawateer بلاش مهلبية
A: the week after a year of no sugar.
when i watched the videos about this expirement, I respected the idea & liked it & loooved reading the full book for more information and alternative recipes with fruits .. dates or honey etc...
BUT the book was a shoc for me.. nothing is important .. most of bla bla and repetition .. the alternative was the salty recipes in parties like haloween & birthdays ..
If you are interested about this family , I recommend you to watch two videos on Youtube
1-year of no sugar- Opera winfrey
2- khawateer بلاش مهلبية
June 11, 2014
Overall, I liked this book. However, especially having recently read numerous critiques of both Dr Lustig's laser focus on fructose and the similar tack taken by the new film Fed Up!, it was hard to get past the idea that cutting all sugar at the expense of other key elements of good diet is a useful exercise. As a journalistic experiment/experience, it makes a bit more sense, and she does touch on some of that in her summary chapters.
Still, I found it hard to take dietary advice from a self described former "junk food vegetarian," who returned to an omnivorous diet because immediately felt better after eating meat, rather than try to improve upon her vegetarian diet. Unless it simply wasn't mentioned, it seemed as though they subsisted primarily on meat, condiments and desserts, and had to figure out how to adjust when much of the former and pretty much all of the latter was taken away. I kept wanting to ask, why not eat more fruits and vegetables?(This of course, being a direct result of my own dietary choices.) She really came across as though she felt very guilty about being a former-vegetarian and felt the need to constantly justify her meat eating.
That said, Schaub put a further spotlight on the ubiquitous nature of sugar in nearly all processed food. I never noticed the sugar in my vanilla extract or realized why balsamic vinegar was so sweet prior to reading this book, and I do read labels and try to be educated about what I eat. The book is best read as a fairly enjoyable memoir, a light expose of the ubiquity of sugar in the American diet and culture, and another strike against processed food. Michael Moss' Salt, Sugar, Fat is much more complete and compelling, but it is also a completely different kind of book.
Still, I found it hard to take dietary advice from a self described former "junk food vegetarian," who returned to an omnivorous diet because immediately felt better after eating meat, rather than try to improve upon her vegetarian diet. Unless it simply wasn't mentioned, it seemed as though they subsisted primarily on meat, condiments and desserts, and had to figure out how to adjust when much of the former and pretty much all of the latter was taken away. I kept wanting to ask, why not eat more fruits and vegetables?(This of course, being a direct result of my own dietary choices.) She really came across as though she felt very guilty about being a former-vegetarian and felt the need to constantly justify her meat eating.
That said, Schaub put a further spotlight on the ubiquitous nature of sugar in nearly all processed food. I never noticed the sugar in my vanilla extract or realized why balsamic vinegar was so sweet prior to reading this book, and I do read labels and try to be educated about what I eat. The book is best read as a fairly enjoyable memoir, a light expose of the ubiquity of sugar in the American diet and culture, and another strike against processed food. Michael Moss' Salt, Sugar, Fat is much more complete and compelling, but it is also a completely different kind of book.
December 14, 2022
To my delicate sensibilities, USA food culture seems like a dystopian novel so I think this book gave me a clear appreciation for my parents cooking and respect for the way my grandparents grow chicken and pigs for us to eat. It also explains why I find most processed sweets too sweet (except ice-cream).
October 25, 2022
DNF at 30%. I don't often DNF a book, but this one was too much to bear. The author tries to live a year off added sugar with her family. I loved the idea, but the execution makes no sense. There are "cheat items", the whole thing seems unprepared, some things just don't make sense. The writing style is annoying and jumpy. Things are eaten and researched afterwards and then she finds out they have sugar. This is not a big problem, and it's a realistic way of actual living, but then don't write a book about it promoting the project? Take some actual time to plan this out? And then the intro by David Gillespie annoyed me to no end, and his quote on the front page about overcoming a national obsession. Well, there's no overcoming any obsession in this book. Even during their project they eat more sugar than I do, and I don't even think about it as much. Not recommended.
February 5, 2024
Did not love her writing style. I have definitely thought a lot about added sugar in food since reading this book though, so it was impactful in that way.
August 22, 2018
I'm not sure I get the point of the book. Spoiler alert - they did NOT indeed go a year of no sugar.
& what the book is telling us is basically, its IMPOSSIBLE to do. So there's that.
I did find some things interesting in the book - but most of the things I found interesting were facts she shared from other writers on the subject.
She never really mentioned anything about how it effected her family, except little snippets of her daughters journal, who basically felt tortured & hated every minute of it, but nothing about health & energy. I think she mentioned one time about the fact that they didnt loose any weight - that was the extent of her documenting their health. Oh, & that her kids missed less days at school by a few days. M'kay.
& then she COMPLETELY 100000% lost me when she talked about an anniversary trip to Tanzania where they slit a goats throat & how she wished she could go back & do it again - because then, she was a pescetarian & now, she's a carnivore - & even drinking the blood mixed with milk (A local tradition) sounds interesting to her. EXCUSE ME? She also goes on to talk about why eating meat is a good thing & even goes as far as visiting a friend's farm to watch chickens being "processed" & even slits a chicken's neck herself. Needless to say, for me - after this chapter, I really didnt even care what else she had to say. This was a book on sugar, not about a switch from vegetarian to a carnivorous life style.
In the end - I'd tell everyone to skip it. You'll not really learn anything & you'll be very sick of hearing the word "Dextrose"
& what the book is telling us is basically, its IMPOSSIBLE to do. So there's that.
I did find some things interesting in the book - but most of the things I found interesting were facts she shared from other writers on the subject.
She never really mentioned anything about how it effected her family, except little snippets of her daughters journal, who basically felt tortured & hated every minute of it, but nothing about health & energy. I think she mentioned one time about the fact that they didnt loose any weight - that was the extent of her documenting their health. Oh, & that her kids missed less days at school by a few days. M'kay.
& then she COMPLETELY 100000% lost me when she talked about an anniversary trip to Tanzania where they slit a goats throat & how she wished she could go back & do it again - because then, she was a pescetarian & now, she's a carnivore - & even drinking the blood mixed with milk (A local tradition) sounds interesting to her. EXCUSE ME? She also goes on to talk about why eating meat is a good thing & even goes as far as visiting a friend's farm to watch chickens being "processed" & even slits a chicken's neck herself. Needless to say, for me - after this chapter, I really didnt even care what else she had to say. This was a book on sugar, not about a switch from vegetarian to a carnivorous life style.
In the end - I'd tell everyone to skip it. You'll not really learn anything & you'll be very sick of hearing the word "Dextrose"
July 22, 2014
while there are a couple funny parts to this book it is basically the 'twilight' of dietary references. also lets clarify she doesnt avoid sugar for an entire year- she only avoids added fructose- not other types of sugar, and certainly no restricting carbs (which hello turn into sugar in your body). she does repeatedly say that fructose is a 'poison' and gives a variety of reasons but when pressed for something scientific she basically says 'oh science is hard' or 'i may be paraphrasing this wrong...' umm you claim to be a journalist. how ab you research some data.
hardly any mention of vegetables and no mention of exercise. (at one point she says at a family gathering -11 months into the experiment!- there was nothing her family could eat except macaroni and cheese!) its like she couldnt cook something to fit within the parameters or god forbid eat a salad. interestingly enough no mention of weightloss- except at the end of the year when her husband decides to go on atkins to lose weight.
i can understand wanting to eat more local/minimally processsed/ real foods.so while the idea for this book may have been good it was not executed well. want to truly eat no sugar? Go Paleo.
hardly any mention of vegetables and no mention of exercise. (at one point she says at a family gathering -11 months into the experiment!- there was nothing her family could eat except macaroni and cheese!) its like she couldnt cook something to fit within the parameters or god forbid eat a salad. interestingly enough no mention of weightloss- except at the end of the year when her husband decides to go on atkins to lose weight.
i can understand wanting to eat more local/minimally processsed/ real foods.so while the idea for this book may have been good it was not executed well. want to truly eat no sugar? Go Paleo.
December 8, 2014
I had high expectations for this book and it came up short. First, the title is catchy but misleading. The author didn't give up sugar for a year and instead had monthly desserts and substituted sugar with dextrose (which is often made from GMO corn starches) and brown rice syrup. I thought this would be more about eating more whole foods and less about trying to find ways to eat desserts without sugar. The author also mentioned several instances where she had little to no choices (especially breakfasts) avoiding sugar. Given that she never mentioned any nut allergies, I have no idea why she couldn't have always had a stash of nuts and fruit handy (natural sugars weren't off limits). So simple! I did appreciate the accurate fructose information (it's terrible for your body) and could relate to her struggles with her children's constant exposure to sugar thanks to society's acceptance of the stuff.
February 6, 2017
Eliminating as much sugar from my diet as I can in 2017 (without being tedious and self-righteous and boring about it) is my New Year's resolution, so I picked this book up on New Year's Eve and dove in. While I liked the "reality" of it (the author and her family didn't give it up entirely, just mostly, a moderate approach I can appreciate) and the science was interesting and alarming, the writing and repetition of information got irritating after a while. The italics especially: she just couldn't go even a page without italicizing something. I also think making your family go along with your own little project, instead of just leading by example, is a little harsh. So the upshot is that I'm still looking for a role model in this area, someone moderate enough to not drive me away with extremism and practical enough to provide recipes that don't require me to send away for weird forms of alternative sweetener in order to make them.
June 3, 2017
4.0 Stars
As someone who personally loves reading these "do something for the year" memoirs, I found this one to be both entertaining and informative. I do believe the health research that suggests that sugar is a dangerous substance that should be consumed in moderation. (Although I still need to decide how to put this into practice in my own life.) A lot of readers have criticized the fact that this family's "year of no sugar" involved so many exceptions. However, I feel that is actually a strength of this book. This is the story of a (relatively) average family who made an honest and imperfect attempt to improve their health through sugar avoidance.
As someone who personally loves reading these "do something for the year" memoirs, I found this one to be both entertaining and informative. I do believe the health research that suggests that sugar is a dangerous substance that should be consumed in moderation. (Although I still need to decide how to put this into practice in my own life.) A lot of readers have criticized the fact that this family's "year of no sugar" involved so many exceptions. However, I feel that is actually a strength of this book. This is the story of a (relatively) average family who made an honest and imperfect attempt to improve their health through sugar avoidance.
July 9, 2017
The author writes about her frustrations with the unquestioning blindness of American society to their sugar consumption. Yet I feel that same frustration with her agonizing over their exemptions and rule bending (though at least she recognizes she is awfully privileged to have that ability). Those of us with dietary restrictions for religious, ethical, allergy, lactose intolerance, or health reasons don't get that luxury to splurge or the luxury to not feel "cut off from the community" or frustrated with the inconveniences. We have to do it. And sometimes it sucks. Yet we do it anyway because it's important. I'm always glad to see people see through the Looking Glass, so to speak, but it's frustrating when those people don't recognize they're only halfway through the Glass and then start acting the martyr.
I felt that frustration in particular in her bizarre writings about being a former sorta-vegetarian. She is so credulous about these speculations and studies on sugar (some of which she admits is speculation based on a lack of long-term evidence, which is not unreasonable), yet she has apparently written off the already-proven harms in meat, processed meats, dairy, and eggs that she knows from MacDougall and The China Study, which she mentions by name. She says she felt better when she began eating meat again, right after describing how she apparently survived on bagels and cream cheese as a "French fry vegetarian." OF COURSE you felt like crap when you ate crap, which is her conclusion after this year. This uberwillingness to confront sugar yet not anything else science has proven to be harmful was annoying and really harmed her arguments for me. And Gd help us that we should mention the Atkins diet for weight loss despite all the studies that show how it damages the body even immediately. Eat a plant-based diet (or a mostly plant-based diet), and you'll also end up avoiding most added sugars.
Along those lines, she focuses heavily on the worrisomeness of the exponential growth of sugar consumption over the last several generations as a sign that it MUST be bad. You know what else has had unprecedented exponential growth in the American diet? Animal products. Every meal described in the book had dairy or meat, and most had both. That would not be the case for the proverbial great-grandmother she keeps referring to as an arbitrary decider of what "real food" should be. The majority of the world's population STILL doesn't have animal products more than a couple of times a week, if at all. Heck, the majority of the world is lactose intolerant! Yet from her description, it seems they follow the American pattern of having multiple animal products at every meal and snack each day. She spent so much time lamenting other people's failures to confront their food, yet she fails to confront these things she already knows something about. But they're inconvenient. (Let's not even get in to her attempted defense of resuming a carnivorous diet as a recognition that everyone kills all the time... you can certainly kill more or less, so why would you choose to kill more?? Or the attempt to call her meat product choices humane, respectful, and environmentally friendly! She doth protest too much. And those damn inconvenient facts about the animal industry, even at the local hippie farm level, can be ignored.)
Another frustration? Fruit is dessert. Cookies made with dextrose is dessert. It doesn't have to have 7 cups of sugar to be dessert. No wonder we make people feel deprived when we define "treats" so narrowly! You can make dessert recipes with half the sugar most of the time, and less sweet recipes are available all over the place now. This is not some black and white question. They get one "dessert" a month, yet it sounds like they have dessert after nearly every dinner.
I felt that frustration in particular in her bizarre writings about being a former sorta-vegetarian. She is so credulous about these speculations and studies on sugar (some of which she admits is speculation based on a lack of long-term evidence, which is not unreasonable), yet she has apparently written off the already-proven harms in meat, processed meats, dairy, and eggs that she knows from MacDougall and The China Study, which she mentions by name. She says she felt better when she began eating meat again, right after describing how she apparently survived on bagels and cream cheese as a "French fry vegetarian." OF COURSE you felt like crap when you ate crap, which is her conclusion after this year. This uberwillingness to confront sugar yet not anything else science has proven to be harmful was annoying and really harmed her arguments for me. And Gd help us that we should mention the Atkins diet for weight loss despite all the studies that show how it damages the body even immediately. Eat a plant-based diet (or a mostly plant-based diet), and you'll also end up avoiding most added sugars.
Along those lines, she focuses heavily on the worrisomeness of the exponential growth of sugar consumption over the last several generations as a sign that it MUST be bad. You know what else has had unprecedented exponential growth in the American diet? Animal products. Every meal described in the book had dairy or meat, and most had both. That would not be the case for the proverbial great-grandmother she keeps referring to as an arbitrary decider of what "real food" should be. The majority of the world's population STILL doesn't have animal products more than a couple of times a week, if at all. Heck, the majority of the world is lactose intolerant! Yet from her description, it seems they follow the American pattern of having multiple animal products at every meal and snack each day. She spent so much time lamenting other people's failures to confront their food, yet she fails to confront these things she already knows something about. But they're inconvenient. (Let's not even get in to her attempted defense of resuming a carnivorous diet as a recognition that everyone kills all the time... you can certainly kill more or less, so why would you choose to kill more?? Or the attempt to call her meat product choices humane, respectful, and environmentally friendly! She doth protest too much. And those damn inconvenient facts about the animal industry, even at the local hippie farm level, can be ignored.)
Another frustration? Fruit is dessert. Cookies made with dextrose is dessert. It doesn't have to have 7 cups of sugar to be dessert. No wonder we make people feel deprived when we define "treats" so narrowly! You can make dessert recipes with half the sugar most of the time, and less sweet recipes are available all over the place now. This is not some black and white question. They get one "dessert" a month, yet it sounds like they have dessert after nearly every dinner.
January 7, 2024
Read for book club. Interesting memoir that makes me more aware and conscious of how much sugar surrounds us. It literally permeates so much of our food and culture. And I’m not a huge sugar eater to begin with. I already void soda, junk treats, and cheap candy, but this made me realize how much sugar is in other things, such as condiments, breads, pastas, and so much of the store-bought food.
I want to read more on the science of what sugar does to the body. I don’t think anyone should be scared of food. Food is essential. But what do we consume and what does it do to our bodies over time is a more interesting and important thing to tackle.
I want to read more on the science of what sugar does to the body. I don’t think anyone should be scared of food. Food is essential. But what do we consume and what does it do to our bodies over time is a more interesting and important thing to tackle.
May 17, 2015
Like the other reviews say, this isn't a science book about why to avoid sugar and the metabolic processing of it in our digestive system. Those books have been written by many and will continue to be written, as long as there is an obesity epidemic and people try to figure out why and how to combat it. This is a memoir about a family that heard that science (specifically, the YouTube lecture of dr. Liustig called sugar: The Bitter Truth, which should be required viewing) and decided to avoid all sugar for an entire year.
Kind of.
They actually avoided all added fructose, to be nit-picky, which is what Lustig calls the evil part of sugar (and I wholeheartedly agree, but that is another reason to watch his video). They did eat some fruit and a special dessert every month, which I'm not snarking on. I'd have done the same. I have a voracious sweet tooth, so I can relate to a lot of this story.
In fact, I feel like I have lived it, albeit a much more moderate version, spanning many years, and going back and forth between the extremes of no sugar EVER and all the sugar ALLTHETIME. I settled in the same place that eve ( who was the brainchild of the project and the one who had to convince her family to go along with it) eventually did at the end of their year. That is, a place of moderation.
Moderation sounds like such a cop out, because 1) who knows what that even means?!? And 2) what's moderate to one isn't to another. I guess that is the bonus of abstaining completely, if even for a short amount of time; you learn what your moderate means, and how to recognize quickly when you've passed it. I sure know for myself.
There are other aspects that eve touches on besides just sugar, including the culture of food, the "family/celebration factor", and the food industry. Again, these are tangential topics, but can't be separated from sugar itself. In the end, the choice is personal, but of course, isn't. You (and by you, I mean I) will be judged for abstaining,mid even a little, because people will see that as you judging them. It is a circular thing, a bit of a catch-22, and for me personally, it used to really get to me. I'm over it now though, and I never judge others. I'm still probably judged, as eve was and probably still was (she also talked about this internal struggle) but I don't even think about it anymore.
Food is personal. And also communal. That's not complicated at all, right?
PS sugar free jam is totally possible. It's called instant clear jel and you can ask my friends - they ha no idea they eat sugar free jam from my house!
Kind of.
They actually avoided all added fructose, to be nit-picky, which is what Lustig calls the evil part of sugar (and I wholeheartedly agree, but that is another reason to watch his video). They did eat some fruit and a special dessert every month, which I'm not snarking on. I'd have done the same. I have a voracious sweet tooth, so I can relate to a lot of this story.
In fact, I feel like I have lived it, albeit a much more moderate version, spanning many years, and going back and forth between the extremes of no sugar EVER and all the sugar ALLTHETIME. I settled in the same place that eve ( who was the brainchild of the project and the one who had to convince her family to go along with it) eventually did at the end of their year. That is, a place of moderation.
Moderation sounds like such a cop out, because 1) who knows what that even means?!? And 2) what's moderate to one isn't to another. I guess that is the bonus of abstaining completely, if even for a short amount of time; you learn what your moderate means, and how to recognize quickly when you've passed it. I sure know for myself.
There are other aspects that eve touches on besides just sugar, including the culture of food, the "family/celebration factor", and the food industry. Again, these are tangential topics, but can't be separated from sugar itself. In the end, the choice is personal, but of course, isn't. You (and by you, I mean I) will be judged for abstaining,mid even a little, because people will see that as you judging them. It is a circular thing, a bit of a catch-22, and for me personally, it used to really get to me. I'm over it now though, and I never judge others. I'm still probably judged, as eve was and probably still was (she also talked about this internal struggle) but I don't even think about it anymore.
Food is personal. And also communal. That's not complicated at all, right?
PS sugar free jam is totally possible. It's called instant clear jel and you can ask my friends - they ha no idea they eat sugar free jam from my house!
February 17, 2016
When when I learn to stop reading all these stupid "a year of _____" books? (Apparently, the answer is "never.")
As with most, this book was okay to start with. By the middle, it got pretty repetitive and by the 3/4 mark, I was skimming a lot.
As with most, this book was okay to start with. By the middle, it got pretty repetitive and by the 3/4 mark, I was skimming a lot.
March 6, 2017
The good: Schaub explains the alleged evils of fructose in a way you can actually understand. Her stories about the challenges and emotional pitfalls of drastically changing your diet are honest and real. This book is definitely an entertaining, easy read, not a pile of confusion nutritional diagrams.
The bad: Ego and unchecked privilege is oozing out of every chapter. Schaub has to keep telling us how her taste in food has been a lifelong source of specialness: she decorated cakes as a child before Martha Stewart made it cool; she refused to live on dorm food alone; despite years as a "french fry vegetarian" she's never had a weight problem; her kids have never been to Subway, let alone McDonalds; her daughter missed the week on fractions because they were off learning how to cook rabbit in Tuscany. The subtext is that a Year of No Sugar wasn't just a health experiment or the way to a book deal; it was a way to get another fix of dietary superiority.
An oh, there's so much superiority to be had. Any public outing is a chance to judge other's food. Other Vermont moms skeptical of her homemade food are ignorant and lazy. Parents who order pancakes and juice are basically giving their kids "heroin." A community bake sale fund raiser is a symbol of emotional dysfunction around sugar. Most noxious of all, Schaub watches people in a Mayo Clinic waiting room drink vending machine Pepsi and wonders if sugary beverages are the reason for their obesity and deadly illnesses.
Schaub writes like someone with the luxury of never knowing real health problems. She fails to recognize that she is not the first person in the history of Vermont who has had to avoid popular food ingredients. For millions of Americans with allergies, food intolerance, or diseases like diabetes, this is a daily reality from which they can't take cheat days or choose one "exception" indulgence.
Many of Schaub's stories rang true with my own food restriction experiences - constant ingredient checking, time-consuming scratch cooking, embarrassment about questioning restaurant menus, few options in hotel breakfast bars, and the worst, a deep sense of social isolation at celebratory events. But that is my ENTIRE FRACKING LIFE. It's not a stunt with a time limit. I've spent a gluten-intolerant decade being left out of birthday cake, office treats, and pizza parties. There are kids who could DIE if they don't check the nut content of proffered treats. Cry me a river of maple syrup, lady.
Early on, Schaub complains about navigating all her friends' varying food restrictions, including her gluten-intolerant friends "for whom I forget to leave pasta out of soup." This is thoughtless, selfish, immature behavior. I would hope that her year of no sugar would teach her some empathy for other folks' dietary restrictions, but her conclusion doesn't suggest that. Instead, she eases back into a half-ass low sugar life, eating the "poison" and "heroin" she railed against months before. Tellingly, her husband goes low carb to lose some extra pounds - perhaps no sugar wasn't that magic bullet after all.
The bad: Ego and unchecked privilege is oozing out of every chapter. Schaub has to keep telling us how her taste in food has been a lifelong source of specialness: she decorated cakes as a child before Martha Stewart made it cool; she refused to live on dorm food alone; despite years as a "french fry vegetarian" she's never had a weight problem; her kids have never been to Subway, let alone McDonalds; her daughter missed the week on fractions because they were off learning how to cook rabbit in Tuscany. The subtext is that a Year of No Sugar wasn't just a health experiment or the way to a book deal; it was a way to get another fix of dietary superiority.
An oh, there's so much superiority to be had. Any public outing is a chance to judge other's food. Other Vermont moms skeptical of her homemade food are ignorant and lazy. Parents who order pancakes and juice are basically giving their kids "heroin." A community bake sale fund raiser is a symbol of emotional dysfunction around sugar. Most noxious of all, Schaub watches people in a Mayo Clinic waiting room drink vending machine Pepsi and wonders if sugary beverages are the reason for their obesity and deadly illnesses.
Schaub writes like someone with the luxury of never knowing real health problems. She fails to recognize that she is not the first person in the history of Vermont who has had to avoid popular food ingredients. For millions of Americans with allergies, food intolerance, or diseases like diabetes, this is a daily reality from which they can't take cheat days or choose one "exception" indulgence.
Many of Schaub's stories rang true with my own food restriction experiences - constant ingredient checking, time-consuming scratch cooking, embarrassment about questioning restaurant menus, few options in hotel breakfast bars, and the worst, a deep sense of social isolation at celebratory events. But that is my ENTIRE FRACKING LIFE. It's not a stunt with a time limit. I've spent a gluten-intolerant decade being left out of birthday cake, office treats, and pizza parties. There are kids who could DIE if they don't check the nut content of proffered treats. Cry me a river of maple syrup, lady.
Early on, Schaub complains about navigating all her friends' varying food restrictions, including her gluten-intolerant friends "for whom I forget to leave pasta out of soup." This is thoughtless, selfish, immature behavior. I would hope that her year of no sugar would teach her some empathy for other folks' dietary restrictions, but her conclusion doesn't suggest that. Instead, she eases back into a half-ass low sugar life, eating the "poison" and "heroin" she railed against months before. Tellingly, her husband goes low carb to lose some extra pounds - perhaps no sugar wasn't that magic bullet after all.
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