Pour Some Sugar On Me

38. Eat sweet foods as you find them in nature.
49. Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
50. Avoid ingredients that lie to your body.


A lot can be inferred from these three tiny rules about our relationship to sweet things.  Artificial sweetners are out; nothing more accurately defines an ingredient that "lies to your body," than the chemical cocktail in a diet soda.  But it's also worthwhile to point out that, if you've been playing along, diet soda was nixed a long time ago for a lot of different reasons.  But Pollan goes through the trouble of condemning diet sodas and fat-free alternatives and the like, not simply because they're full of chemicals, but specifically because those chemicals lie to your body. 

Why?  It's simple.  That artificial sweetner in your tea, say, may have zero calories for your body to process, but your body is still processing it.  You put it in your body, now your body has to do something with it.  You don't have to be a biologist or a chemist to understand that - that's just logic.  But how is your body processing it?  I think it's safe to say we don't really know.  It may not be doing the same thing real sugar is doing, but it is doing something.  Multiple studies have proven a link between the consumption of diet sweeteners and obesity.  It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

But artifical sweeteners aren't the only thing on Pollan's bad list.   It turns out nature is actually pretty smart about understanding how much of a sugar rush our bodies can handle all at once.  That even goes for things like juice - as Pollan points out, fruit juice, once freed of all the pulpy, fibery goodness that surrounds it, is sugar that gets immediately absorbed by your system.  It's natural but it's not "as it's found in nature." 

And if juice is out, then regular old granulated sugar is definitely out.  Sugar is definitely processed.  It's highly processed.  So, what's left?  Honey, I guess?  Raw honey, to be specific? Maybe maple syrup?  I'm not totally sure how maple syrup comes out of the tree.  And I'm not totally sure if even those count.  I thinking the point that Pollan is trying to make is that nature makes sweet things sweet (like apples) and makes not-sweet things not sweet (like broccoli).   If God didn't sweeten it for you, don't freaking sweeten it!  That's right, no brown sugar in your broccoli stir-fry! 

I find this rule to be totally unfair, and flies in the face of thousands of years of culinary tradition.  So I get around this a little loophole: I'll use regular sugar in anything I cook myself.  I mean, Pollan said I could eat all the junk food I want, as long as I cook it myself.  Is he gonna take that back now?  Is it, "all the junk food I want as long as it's made with raw honey" now?  No.  I refuse.

But his point is well taken.  Don't use artificial sweeteners if you can use real sugar.  Actually, scratch that.  Don't use artificial sweeteners EVER.  Don't use sugar if you can use honey or maple syrup or fruit juice.  But don't just drink fruit juice, it's not as healthy as you think.  And don't sweeten with anything if you can get away with it.