The Tyee has published my new article on Spooky Sugar. Excerpt:
Shortly after I'd had a minor stroke, my doctor gave me more bad news: I was overweight and pre-diabetic, my cholesterol and blood pressure were high, and I needed to cut down on carbohydrates like sugar.
So I did. I bake bread and love it, but now eat it rarely. And I cut back sharply on sugary foods. OK, at Christmas I make pulla, a sweet Finnish coffee bread, but pulla comes but once a year.
I've managed to lose 30 pounds and keep them off for over three years. But in finding sugarless food, I soon realized my own supermarket is really a sugarmarket, largely devoted to peddling sucrose.
Whole aisles are devoted to selling sugar, whether as soft drinks or in cereal or ketchup or components of highly processed foods. Down those aisles go young parents with their tots (often pushing their own mini-shopping carts), buying sugar-rich goodies. I don't think my supermarket really wants to kill me, but it does really want to make a profit.
