View from the North 40: I'm definitely not sugar-coating this one

Sugar is evil, the article said. Give up the nectar of Satan, the research told me. Feel like you have an alert, newly minted brain, the health food zealots said. What fresh level of hell is this, my body is asking.

I’m old enough to be born in the day when no advertising bragged that a product contained all-natural sugar because everything had sugar, or you added sugar. Sugar advertisements targeted children, moms wanted to have those toothsome, smiling, singing children for their own.

Of course, doctors were still prescribing moms valium and cigarettes to get through the day back then, so who didn’t want happy, smiling children. No one knew that kids were getting hyper-active on the stuff and then crashing from the low because we were all sent out in the street to play, burn off the sugar, and if we got mopey or sleepy in the low we were sent to our bedrooms for a nap.

Now, scientists are all like, sugar is bad. Sugar is going to kill us. Now that we’re addicted to it. Great timing.

Sure, it’s not like it’s cocaine or something, y’know, expensive. And it’s not meth either. That meth is much harder on your teeth, plus you lose weight on meth. It’s more like opioids, scientists are saying now, except it’s easier to get.

I’ve been on a no-energy downer for a while now, so I decided to try a couple weeks without sweets. I’m not giving up fruit and carbs or anything radical because there’s no 12-step program to work me through that life-changing move — plus a ridiculous diet change such as that just sounds like something one does as resident of the 10th level of hell.

It’s going OK. Thanks for asking.

Granted, I’m probably still on a high from that last-day-for-this binge last weekend, but it helps that I get to torture my husband along with myself. He wanders into the kitchen looking for a sweet snack, or a chunk off one of the many big blocks of chocolate bars we usually have around, then snags a few chocolate chips with just a hint of disappointment.

I know that sounds a little pitiful, but to be fair, we always keep chocolate chips handy as a backup treat — often found in a dish on the counter intermingled with unsalted almonds because the almonds make it a healthy snack. Yes, they do.

You want to know pitiful, it’s me sitting here at the first level of hell only snacking on the almonds, singing the C&H Pure Cane Sugar jingle from my youth as the only form of sweet snack I get — it’s “from Hawaii, growin” in the sun. I’d probably beat up one of those little commercial-actor kids that had to gnaw on a section of sugar cane like it was a footlong hotdog rather than of a plant stalk that probably tasted like rutabaga sprinkled with sweetener.

My struggle is real.

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I’m not ready to kill anyone for a candy bar, yet, but please watch your step at [email protected].