1594: Best Of, Eve Schaub Challenged Her Family To Give Up Sugar For A Year

  When pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig gave his now-infamous “Sugar: The Bitter Truth” lecture in July 2009 to a small group of mostly medical school students and laypeople at the University of California-San Francisco, little did he know that millions of people would be touched and inspired around the world by that talk through the power of the Internet. One of those people was a writer named Eve Schaub who watched Dr. Lustig’s video and immediately laid down a daunting challenge to her husband and two young daughters–let’s give up added sugar in our diet for a period of one year to see what would happen. Eve shares all about the incredible results of that experiment in a new book entitled Year of No Sugar: A Memoir. Listen in to hear Jimmy and Eve talk about: how Dr. Lustig’s talk “lit my brain on fire” about the problems with sugar, how she found Dr. Lustig’s video on a friend’s Facebook wall, all the strange places in our life that sugar shows up as an ingredient,  we vilified the wrong thing (dietary fat) and replaced it with the real problem in health (sugar), the anti-sugar message is starting to penetrate into the culture more, how David Gillespie and Dr. Lustig were invaluable resources to her during her year of no sugar in 2011, why she thinks Dr. Lustig’s 90-minute medical lecture has nearly 5 million views, how they went cold turkey giving up added sugar beginning on January 1, 2011, the logistics of finding foods to eat was the hardest part, how food manufacturers try to hide sugar by breaking it up into various ingredients, why the new “added sugars” on the nutrition label is a mixed bag, using the word “sugar” can get confusing very fast to people, for the purposes of their experiment they removed the added fructose in the food they consumed, they wanted to see how hard it would be and whether it could be possible to do this painlessly, because they still ate carbohydrates the effects of removing sugar were less dramatic, the once-a-month sugary food they allowed themselves, how they lost their desire for these sugary desserts within nine months, how her 6-year old and 11-year old daughters handled giving up added sugar for a year (they burst out into tears when they were told about it), how people are trying so hard to do the right things for their health, whether they continued to eat no sugar added foods once 2011 was over, the key to getting away from sugar is to start cooking more, the mistakes they made when they first started doing this, whether they added any artificial or even natural sweeteners to get sweetness, the tiny sesame seed cookies she tried to recreate at home that she had to throw out, how they were all pretty healthy when they began this, what should get people to start taking sugar more seriously, how Halloween went for the girls in 2011, why her girls are very happy eating less sugar because it “became normal,” the “nutritional advice disease” that people get frustrated with that leads them to do nothing, and more! ENJOY!