The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [97]
I do have a question about Shulman’s title. According to the FDA’s regulations regarding packaged foods, “light” may be used on a label only when the food inside the package contains 50 percent less fat than the standard version. I think Reduced-Fat Provençal would be more accurate because this means 25 percent less fat than usual, a more fitting characterization of many of Shulman’s recipes. Or considering that she avoids the merest trace of red meat, traditionally used as an indispensable condiment in a host of essentially vegetarian Provençal dishes, Shulman should have called it The Pollo-Ovo-Lacto-Vegetarian Reduced-Fat Provençal Cookbook (Bantam Books). Anomalously, her nutritional analysis of each dish leaves out the percentage of calories devoted to fat. Could she have been motivated by the desire to sneak in what looks like a magnificent recipe for Rich Fish Soup, perhaps the crowning glory of the Provençal cooking of the Mediterranean coast, which in Shulman’s low-fat version is a whopping 60.4 percent fat, more than you find in French fries? I can’t wait to try it.
April 1995
Murder, My Sweet
According to recent surveys, more American consumers are worried about sugar than about anything else in their diets except cholesterol.
Our national fear of refined white sugar reached a febrile peak in 1979 and has remained on a plateau ever since. That was the year that Dan White, on trial for shooting and killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, was convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder after his lawyer raised the Twinkie Defense, the claim that Dan White’s brain had been so deranged by Hostess Twinkies and other sugary junk foods that he should not be held fully responsible for his actions. Twinkies, the argument went, made him do it.
White sugar has also been blamed for heart disease, obesity, diabetes, anemia, and hyperactivity in children. These claims have always made me suspicious. Humans are born with only one innate taste preference—an attraction to sweetness, to sugar. The idea that nature designed us to be powerfully drawn to what harms us most strikes me as perverse and godless and extremely unlikely. So I recently tracked down the medical facts about sugar and happily discovered that nearly every accusation is groundless.
Simple sugars are the building blocks of all complex carbohydrates, and all complex carbohydrates are broken down into simple sugars in our digestive tract before being absorbed into our bloodstream. In this sense, one carbohydrate is more or less nutritionally equivalent to any other because they must all be converted to glucose, the simplest sugar of all, before we can use them. Glucose is blood sugar, the principal source of energy in the body; without it our muscles and brain have no use for pasta or candy or fruit or milk, for starch or sucrose or fructose or lactose. If it isn’t glucose, it isn’t food.
Every authority in nutrition, from the National Research Council to the American Heart Association, recommends that we increase our intake of carbohydrates to 55 percent of total calories—especially complex carbohydrates like starch. These are favored over simple sugars because they are usually found in foods rich in fiber, vitamins, or minerals, such as pasta, potatoes, beans, and bread. White sugar delivers nothing but calories and acute pleasure. But to consider it dangerous is another thing entirely.
The odd thing about the claim that eating sugar makes people hyperactive or even violent is that eating any carbohydrate will reliably do just the opposite. Carbohydrates raise the level of the amino acid tryptophan in the bloodstream, which the brain uses to synthesize serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with sleep, analgesia, calm, and even the lifting of depression. This is the best-documented (and perhaps the only)