You Must Read—Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat

There’s nothing wrong with being in the business of selling products that every human on the planet is hardwired to consume. The difference between sugar and tobacco is that the sugar industry has us all convinced it is our fault we’re fat, not theirs. [Page 192]

Sometimes you read a book and, while it is not particularly enjoyable, it leads you to another book that is truly profound. Recently, I struggled through Year of No Sugar: A Memoir by Eve Schaub. The concept was interesting, but the tone was liberal, privileged, and preachy. If you have ever watched an episode of The Goode Family you know exactly what I mean.

However, that tome led me to David Gillespie’s Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat. The author is an Australian lawyer, IT professional, consultant, and person who generally struggled with his weight following college like so many of us do. Working out and dieting did not work, so he set out to figure out what was structurally wrong with our food system.

Why is this a structural problem? If left to our own devices the human body will naturally tell us that we are full. However, we are very fat as a species and getting fatter. Why is such a beautifully engineered machine as the human body being subverted and making us fat? Sugar. More specifically, fructose. Our bodies, for some evolutionary reason, do not register calories consumed via fructose. Thus, we will continue to eat until we consume enough non-fructose calories.

Throughout most of human history this was not a problem because sugar was rare and expensive. The few pieces of ripe fruit, which also contain a lot of fiber, were not enough to upset the delicate balance our bodies orchestrate. Modern society has destroyed all of this by making fructose cheap and nearly ubiquitous.

Gillespie’s real triumph in this book is laying out the biochemical process in a clear, easy to understand way—trust me, biochemists and doctors are not known for writing accessible prose—that lays bare the fundamental failure of our modern food system.

You want to know how messed up the system is? We subsidize corn that is used to make high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that is essentially killing us. If you live in the corn belt—like me here in Iowa—envision about half of the fields of corn being used to make HFCS. That is the scale of the problem. This is why it is a structural problem.

Furthermore, the problem is structural because foods that are not normally considered sweet—bread, cereal, etc.—have become veritable minefields of sugar laden pseudo-foods. Take a moment and consider the cereals we consider acceptable for breakfast. How are Lucky Charms, Trix, Fruity Pebbles, or anything similar considered anything but an occasional dessert instead of a breakfast cereal? No wonder we are fat. If you start the day off with one of these fructose bombs you might as well just schedule your trip to the endocrinologist for a diabetes checkup. It does not stop at breakfast.

The solution seems simple: cut out the sugar. In fact, the solution is that simple. In practice, it will be much harder but unless we want to look like the humans in Wall-E there is no other choice. Put down the Big Gulp. Now!

Reimagining Tater Tot Casserole

Winter is a great time to dig into unassuming comfort foods like macaroni and cheese or chili slow cooked all day into sweet submission. If you have children like mine than you have run head first into the problem known as tater tot casserole.

Sometime during their formative years someone exposed them to this strange dish of tater tots, cheap ground beef, and cream of something soup. If you slavishly follow a recipe on the internet you will be left eating a 9×13 pan of sodium enhanced flavors brought to you by the giants of industrial agriculture.

The first thing to eliminate was any ground beef that might contain the joys of pink slime or be dosed with antibiotics or just be nasty. This was easy. On my weekly run to pick up a loaf of jalapeno cheddar bread at NewPi in Cedar Rapids I ordered up one and a half pounds of all-natural ground beef. I chose the fattier product because I intended to sauté some vegetables in the drippings.

The other major quibble I had with most tater tot casserole recipes is the use of canned cream of goop soup. Seriously, who thinks cream of mushroom or chicken or celery or onion tastes much better than a jar of processed cheese? The stuff is basically a gelatinous salt delivery mechanism. The easy answer was to replace a couple of cans of condensed soup with a rich béchamel sauce. This is one of my go to sauces when I want something creamy as a base. It comes together in a few minutes and I always have the ingredients around.

A major way I added flavor without resorting to the salt shaker was to use very flavorful white cheddar. A little bit of white cheddar goes a long way in adding a shot of flavor.

I really wanted to do something about the inclusion of Ore-Ida tater tots. Like, I really did not want to give my money to a monster industrial food conglomerate like H.J. Heinz, but Ore-Ida’s tots are the best option. I have tried every bag of overpriced, supposedly better for me, options and every time the result is the same: buck up and by the tots from Ore-Ida. Damn.

In the end, it tasted like ‘Murica!

Reimagined Tater Tot Casserole

Ingredients

• 1 32 ounce package tater tots of your choice
• 1 ½ pounds all-natural ground beef
• 1 decent sized onion diced
• 1 cup corn
• 1 cup peas
• 2 cups béchamel sauce
• Shredded white cheddar to personal preference
• Salt and pepper to personal preference

Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees
• Brown ground beef and break it up into small chunks; Try not to make it into chili sized chunks because you want a little bit of size
• While meat is browning, toss in diced onion and cook until softened
• Add corn and peas; Cook until warm
• Remove from heat and incorporate béchamel
• Pour into 9×13 pan
• Top evenly with tater tots; One 32 ounce bag should roughly cover an entire 9×13 pan with a few stragglers stacked on top
• Bake for 30 minutes or until tater tots are crispy
• Scatter shredded cheese on top and bake for an additional 5 minutes
• Enjoy

Total prep time, including making a béchamel sauce from scratch, is about thirty minutes with a thirty five minute cook time. So, you are in and out in under an hour.

Friday Linkage 8/29/2014

There are few good things to say about having your refrigerator stop working and losing a lot of food. If I look on the bright side I got to really clean the inside, disposed of some junk food that no one in my house needed to eat, and now have the opportunity to really think about what gets put back in. On second thought, maybe this should be a yearly thing.

On to the links…

As Americans Pig Out, Bacon sees Sizzling Price Hikes—Supply and demand baby! It’s good to see that people have let go of their fat phobia and are embracing the tasty meat. Granted, a lot of people go too far in their bacon love. It can be sort of disturbing.

Why Are We So Fat? The Multimillion-Dollar Scientific Quest to Find Out—This issue seems to boggle scientists and there is a lot of contradictory information that exists. All of it appears to have been conducted in the best interests of science, but it has confused the issue mightily.

Norway Whale Catch Reaches Highest Number since 1993—This was a total WTF moment for me when I read the article. Japan gets a whole boatload, pun sort of intended, regarding its whaling program but Norway is out there killing just as many whales. That’s right, Norway, which is usually thought of as being a fairly progressive and with it country. WTF.

Renewable Energy Capacity Grows at Fastest Ever Pace—The International Energy Agency estimates that 22% of the world’s power comes from renewables, including hydropower. Greater than $250 billion, yep that’s a billion, was invested worldwide in 2013. As good as this news seems this pace of introduction will not be enough to meet climate goals. Boo!

Renewable Energy Accounts for 100 Percent of New US Electrical Generating Capacity in July—Of all the new electrical generating capability brought on line in July all of it, let me repeat all of it, was generated via renewable sources.

Soon, Europe Might Not Need Any New Power Plants—At its core the economic argument for small scale generation will be feasible without government subsidies and have a payback of approximately 6 years, which means that demand destruction will take off to such a degree that large centralized power plants will be an endangered species. Dig it.

Hawaii’s Largest Utility Announces Plan To Triple Rooftop Solar By 2030—I am always a little hesitant to believe anything HECO says because they tend to seem to be incompetent when it comes to renewables. Here’s to hoping.

Lawmakers, Homeowners Fight Rules Saying Solar Is Too Ugly To Install—Homeowners Associations (HOAs) blow my mind. People will talk about freedom and property rights all day long, but willingly submit to the whims of neighbors with nothing better to do on a beautiful day save for figuring out who is in violation of some silly rules. I am sorry sir, but those plants are not on the approved list.

New Bill Could Make Residential Solar In California A Lot Cheaper—It used to be the panel costs that drove the price of a solar PV system. Now, as the price of solar panels continues its downward trend, the balance of systems costs are stubbornly high. Some lawmakers are trying to rectify this issue with streamlined permitting.

How A New Group Is Helping Nonprofits In West Virginia Get Solar Panels For Just $1—This is a great story about a community coming together and making solar happen.

Weed Blaster shows Promise as Alternative to Herbicides—When RoundUp finally fails in its ability to control superweeds like pigweed then it will be time for another solution. Here is something that does not depend on the chemical regime of the past to save us from weeds.

Moving Back Home Together: Rarest Native Animals Find Haven on Tribal Lands—Through neglect and downright abandonment, tribal lands have been saved from a lot of the ravages of modern development including the plow. Now, these lands are a bright spot in the effort to reintroduce species of animals long gone from the landscape.

Powerful Photos of the World Feeling the Impact of Climate Change—Global climate change as a result of human behavior is real and its effects are visible today. Climate deniers may line their pockets with Koch money to slow down effective mitigation, but it will not help when the waters rise.

You Must Read—Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

The ability of food manufacturers to find synergy in the interplay of their key ingredients is not limited to fat and sugar, of course. The true magic comes when they add in the third pillar of processed foods: salt. [Page 264]

I have often told the story about how I usually feel good about the food people are buying when I first walk into the grocery store. Fresh fruits and vegetables are arrayed in bountiful displays and people seem to buying. However, I round the corner and walk into a miasma of boxed dinners—usually Hamburger Helper—that occupy untold linear feet of shelving. These boxes are little more than carbohydrates, salt, and fat. And people have carts full of the stuff. This is the beginning of the fall of human civilization.

If you want to understand why these foods are so prevalent than you need to read Michael Moss’ Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Point by point he lays out the systematic way that processed foods have been designed and marketed to the primarily American consumer. The scary thread running throughout the book is that food executives understood the food they were selling was garbage, in terms of health, but that the almighty quarterly report demanded that they sell more crap. If you took out the references to common brand names like Oreos or Frosted Flakes you might have been fooled into thinking you were reading a book about the practices of tobacco companies.

Processed foods are vehicles for little more than salt, sugar, and fat—hence the title of the book. More insidious is that these foods are designed to engage our taste buds, pleasure centers, and memories in a biochemical dance that leaves us craving more and more. Really, try and eat one Oreo or a single Dorito. It’s an exercise in willpower that would make a heroin addict blush.

Moss does an excellent job of detailing how sugar and fat dovetail in ever higher quantities to create a bliss point that delivers a caloric time bomb into our guts. So much so that diabetes and other obesity related illnesses threaten to bankrupt what little national health care we have in the U.S.

Salt gets a little bit of short shrift here, but that is because salt is the universal lubricant of modern processed foods. Without copious quantities of this cheap ingredient—so cheap that it barely registers when it is indiscriminately dumped on food products—processed food would gum up the industrial works, taste like cardboard, and smell awful. Without salt you might as well be eating bad MREs.

What is most stunning is that this development was done consciously. As Moss succinctly writes toward the end of the book:

But there is nothing subtle about the products themselves. They are knowingly designed—engineered is the better word—to maximize their allure. Their packaging is tailored to excite our kids. Their advertising uses every psychological trick to overcome any logical arguments we might have for passing the product by. The taste is so powerful, we remember it from the last time we walked down the aisle and succumbed, snatching them up. And above all else, their formulas are calculated and perfected by scientists who know very well what they are doing. The most crucial point to know is that there is nothing accidental in the grocery store. All of this is done with a purpose. [Page 346-7]

Friday Linkage 10/11/2013

Do you ever have weeks go by where you stop. Look up, and wonder, “Where did the last month or so go?”  Yep, I am having one of those periods of time.

On to the links…

The Huge Chill: Why Are American Refrigerators So Big?—I found this exploration into the gargantuan size of American refrigerators fascinating.  Maybe our fascination with giant sized cooling boxes and Costco sized quantities is a bad thing?  Hmmm….

How America Cultivated a Generation of Obesity—The idea of a hamburger’s pickles being considered a vegetable in terms of a serving is just asinine.  But, someone figured out a way for a few parties to make money so it became law.  I do like how the anti-fat crusade of my childhood is getting some of the blame for our current dietary straits.  When I was a kid no one wanted to eat anything with fat.  If a package said “fat free” it was carte blanche to eat.  Too bad all those carbs made us fat.

Unease in Hawaii’s Cornfields—You do not think about Hawaii having corn or soybean fields, but such fields are very common on Kauai.  There is a growing sentiment on the islands that these fields of GMO crops are not welcome visitors from the mainland.

How to Build a Cider Press and Harvest Apple Juice—After reading this I spend my days walking around the area looking at the apple trees dropping fruit no one wants and daydreaming about making gallon upon gallon of fresh pressed cider.  I am also daydreaming about using my homebrew skills to make some homebrew apple hooch.

Just What is in a Chicken Nugget—I am glad that someone asked the question and did the science, but I am now even more disturbed.  Only 40% meat?  Fat, cartilage, and pieces of bone make up the rest?  Reminds me of the classic John Candy movie The Great Outdoors when the he is challenged to eat the Ol’ 96er.  At the end the cook says he needs to eat what’s left on the plate.  But it’s just fat and gristle.  Part of the weight.

All You Can’t Eat, Pigs Will—This is a great story from a while back about a hog farmer that takes the leftovers from Las Vegas buffets and feeds them to his animals.  I wonder if the animals also wake up in a few days sunburned and full of regret.

The Largest Coal-Fired Power Plant In New England Is Shutting Down—It’s not the dirtiest coal plant in New England, but the Brayton Point Power Station is the largest of six coal fired plants in New England and it will be retired in 2017.  Good riddance!

Illustrating How the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline Fails President’s Climate Test—This article is just filled with data and charts that show just how awful the Keystone XL pipeline would be for the environment.  As if most people with half a brain who follow the news did not already know that.  There are three or four such people out there.

New Arizona Solar Plant Uses Salt To Keep Producing Electricity When The Sun Goes Down—It’s electricity derived from solar energy after the sun goes down.  It’s not from a traditional battery, per se, but rather a bank of molten salt that stores heat to create steam to drive turbines later.  Freakin’ cool.

Is Solar Power Facing a Dim Future?—Too often the story about solar power focuses on the panel makers and the trouble that these providers are having.  Panels, however, are turning into a commodity and that business is defined by the race to the bottom in terms of price.  Solar is here to stay!

Could Mexico be at the Start of a Solar Boom—Mexico has some pretty audacious goals.  It wants to generate 35% of its power from renewable sources by 2026, which would be up from ~15% today.  Solar is part of that equation because like the American Southwest a large swath of the country is bathed in excellent solar resources.

How Apps are Helping Us Drive Less—The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG)—an acronym that is almost as convoluted sounding as SHIELD—released a report that finds our mobile technology is helping drive the trend toward less driving.  Anything that gets us out from behind the wheel is a good thing.

Industry Ahead of Schedule on Mileage Goals—According to an official at the EPA, the auto industry is ahead of pace to meet the new mileage goals instituted recently.  It’s amazing how these new targets were going to be catastrophic according to the pundits on the right, but now industry is ahead of the game.  Oh, and how is the auto industry doing right now?  Pretty dang well.

Plastic Waste is Hazardous for Sub-Alpine Lakes as Well—Is there anywhere that our plastic pollution will not soil?  Just asking.

Engine Exhaust May Be Contributing to Bee Colony Collapse—Is there anything that we humans do anymore that is good?  It seems like every action we take has a dark side that harms the environment.  It’s enough to get someone down in the dumps.

Fall of USSR Locked Up World’s Largest Carbon Sink—Apparently, when the USSR fell into disunion millions of acres of farmland went fallow.  Over the years those millions of acres have sucked up carbon to become one of the biggest carbon sinks in the world.

The Scary Truth About Antibiotic Overprescription—Most of the press on this issue relates to the insane amount of antibiotics that we feed farm animals in feedlot operations.  However, humans are over prescribed antibiotics as well.  Great.

Dirtball’s ‘Green’ Jeans Are Made In U.S. From Recycled Water Bottles—It was not the recycled content of the jeans that really caught my eye, but the infographic showing where all of the components were sourced from.  Too often we think of “Made in the USA” to mean assembled here from foreign parts, but the supply chain is critical to creating sustainable industries.

What Can I Put in the Compost Bin?

The weather is starting to warm up—finally!—and that means my thoughts are turning every more so toward the outdoors.  All winter long, I dutifully trudge out to the side yard and dump used coffee grounds, vegetable scraps, paper towels, etc. into the compost bin.

Come spring I will spend time turning the contents of the bin and incorporating some additional “brown” or carbon rich material—usually shredded newspaper—to maintain the proper balance between carbon rich and nitrogen rich materials.  However, spring is also the first time I really look at what is in my bin and wonder if I am putting in the right stuff.

I do not get too worked up about oils and fats being included in my bins because I never have anything like a stick of butter or a bottle of olive oil to compost.  It’s usually some oil on a towel or something like that.

Other people will tell you not to include bread or other baked goods.  Again, it’s not like I am disposing of a loaf of bread or a dozen donuts in the compost bin.  However, I know that hard crusts my daughter does not eat or the last few bites of a cookie have found their way into the steaming pile.

Heck, there are people I know who compost the entrails from slaughtering chickens on their small farmsteads with absolutely no problems.  Granted, the remains are not thrown on giant open piles but it shows how far you can take the premise of composting.  If you were so inclined you could even go the whole humanure route.  I am not there yet.

Regardless of what you compost or what rules you are following the important fact is that you are composting.  Compost happens, man.

It’s the Sugar

We’re fat.  No, really, we’re fat.  Why?  According to Robert Lustig, author of Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar Processed Food Obesity and Disease, points the finger primarily at sugar.  His interview on NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday is enlightening.

It’s not just sugar that is the problem, but foods that have been processed in such a way that even “whole grain” products might as well be a funnel of corn syrup hitting your stomach.  It will come as no surprise to anyone who cares about their health and the food they eat that we need to eat whole foods not just constituent parts.

Take orange juice.  An orange is a wonderful thing.  The fruit contains a lot of vitamins and minerals along with fiber.  Put that same orange through the juicer and you are left with an entirely different product even though it has undergone a single industrial process.  The fiber of the orange is left behind and even though the resultant juice has healthy properties it contains a lot of sugar.  How much?  Compare twelve ounces of orange juice to twelve ounces of Coca-Cola:

Ouch.  Think about that the next time you grab that bottle of orange juice at the continental breakfast.

You want to know why our kids our fat?  Because we pump them full of sugar.  How?  Just look at apple juice:

Think about that the next time you pick up an eight pack of juice boxes at the grocery store.  By the way, this is for the unsweetened stuff.  Lurking right next to the unsweetened juices are a whole host of juices that, for some reason, feel the need to add more sugar than what is already present.  It’s a small miracle that our children’s teeth do not collectively rot out en masse.

Lustig does a better job than I could hope of explaining the biomechanical components of why industrialized food is bad for us vis a vis the sugar issue.  Take a moment to listen to the interview and start thinking about how to reduce the amount of added sugar, industrialized food, and general crap that is put on the plate or glass on an average day.

198

I got done with my lunch ride today—not a good idea when it is 98 degrees, humid, no appreciable wind, and full sun—and stepped on the scale.  The number staring back at me was 198.0 pounds.

I almost fell off the scale, but took a step back and reset the scale.  It read 198.0 the second time so I took it as fact.  It is the first time in over a decade that a 1 has been the first number in my weight.

About a year ago I weight a little over 223 pounds and a picture of me with my daughter made me get serious about losing weight.  I did not want to be a middle aged fat dad watching my daughter and son run around.

I also did not want to lose the weight cheaply with fad diets or starvation or pills.  I chose to modify my eating and concentrate on working out.  A lot of working out.  Between the treadmill, rowing machine, and bike I am working out an average of six days per week with those workouts averaging slightly more than an hour per session.

It feels like a real victory.  I know weight should not be the determining factor in one’s fitness program and it is not for me anymore, but I like breaking through barriers.

We are So Fat

America is fat.  Not just fat, but obese according to many studies.  How do I know?  It’s not because of some government study or think tank white paper or Michael Pollan.  It’s because I saw this at the store this weekend:

Yep, it’s now a salient point that a chair is 20% wider for our collectively fat rear ends.  There is nothing like addressing the symptom of a problem as opposed to addressing the problem.

I think about obesity a lot because I have children and I have struggled with my own weight for decades.  I want to see my children grow up healthy and I want to be healthy with them as well.  I do not want to spend my later years in the titanic struggle with diabetes or other lifestyle illnesses.  But as a country America is quickly becoming a lost cause.  How bad is it?

According to a study published by Cornell University 21 percent of health care spending is tied to treating obesity related conditions.  Think about that for a moment.  America already spends more per capita on health care than any other country in the world and over one fifth of that amount is spent to treat illness associated with being fat.  Now consider that by 2020 it is estimated that upwards of 75 percent of the U.S. population will be obese, which is an increase from approximately 35 percent at the beginning of the decade.

What does our fat future look like?  Here’s one take:

As I posited in an earlier post, social justice, the food movement, and the environmental movement are intertwined.  Getting people better food, healthier food, more sustainable food will lead to better social outcomes because conditions like obesity can be reduced.  Why are we so fat?  Because it is so easy to consume bad calories.  It is so cheap to consume bad calories.  I can walk into almost any McDonald’s in the U.S.—prices higher in Alaska and Hawaii—and walk out with a McDouble for $1.  So, for one dollar I can walk away with a prepared bomb of questionable origin meat and sugared up bread.  I cannot buy a head of cauliflower or broccoli for a dollar.

How is that possible?  How can McDonald’s assemble all of the ingredients, pay someone to assemble the ingredients, and run a storefront selling a burger for a dollar when I cannot get a head of cauliflower for less than two dollars?  How has our food system become so warped that this is a common occurrence.

On a lighter note, the Economist—that final bastion of imperial Britain—has noticed an increase in the size of pants while the stated size has not increased.  This “panflation” means that a size 10 is now really a size 14.  Uh oh!

But these mac & cheese muffins looks so tasty…