The Sugar Conspiracy

You eat a lot of sugar. That is, if you live in the United States and eat "normal" food the way any "regular" person does, you eat a lot of sugar. A lot. Per capita, more than anyone else in the world. By a lot. It's kind of staggering how much, actually.

And you don't even know it.

Sure, sure, people say it (like I just did), so you have some vague intellectual knowledge that you eat a lot of sugar, but you don't know it. Not in any kind of experiential way. It's not like you're pouring sugar on your Sugar Frosted Flakes the way my friend used to do when I was a kid. Because that's just what you need on your sugar cereal, right? I'm sure you feel perfectly comfortable with your sugar intake because you're not actively participating in how much you consume.

And, you know, so what, right? So food has sugar in it; what's the big deal? It's not like it's hurting you, right? You can't even tell that it's there.

Which, actually, is the problem. You can't tell that it's there. Also, you can't tell any of the flavors of the food are there, either.

Once upon a time, I was just like "you," you being the "average" person in the US. I ate all of the packaged food and drank all of the sugarbomb drinks. And boy did I! All I drank was soda. And I didn't think there was a problem. Everything just tasted "normal."

Without getting into it, there came a time when we cut sugar out of our diet. [I'm sure I've got old posts about that, if you want to go look for them. Or maybe I don't. I don't remember.] It wasn't until after the sugar was gone that I realized how much flavor food has. No, seriously, actual flavor textures and complexities. And some things were sweet that I had no idea about. Like carrots! But when you eat sugar all the time (and you do), by comparison, a carrot is not sweet. In fact, it's just kind of crunchy and flavorless.

Bell pepper was my big surprise. It's not a food that I had ever really liked, because, compared to sugar, it's an even more crunchy, flavorless, even kind of bitter food than carrots. But that's totally wrong! And bell pepper has different flavors depending upon what color it is, which amazed me. AMAZED! Red is my favorite, followed by yellow. Orange is okay, and I tend to stay away from green. It's not that it's bad, but it's nowhere near as good as the other three.

It's not until after you quit eating all of the processed crap full of sugar that you can taste all the flavors in real food and realize that the processed stuff is basically flavorless other than a vague flavor of sweetness. Sometimes with salt. It's more than slightly disturbing. I can't drink soda anymore. It's so sweet as to be disgusting. And kettle corn (because they always have that at the fair or any other kind of crowded live event thing)? The smell of it (just the smell of it alone!) is so sweet that it makes me sick to my stomach. But that's only because I don't consume sugar all the time, because I used to think it smelled good.

It goes without saying, not even talking about the health implications, that I think "you" should probably cut sugar out of your regular diet. Not only will food taste better, but you'll actually be able to appreciate the things you eat that have a need to contain sugar (like homemade cookies). [Yes, chemically speaking, some things need to contain sugar.]

Of course, I'm not talking about sugar at all but about the trashy media you put in your brain that works the same way as sugar. (Not that I don't mean what I said about the sugar, too, but I think that's a better way to illustrate the problem than trying to talk about what you entertain your brain with.)

Not that the Left is completely blameless, but the adding of "sugar" to what you watch is something the Right has kind of turned into an art form. Starting with Fox news way back in the early 90s, they have constantly and consistently been covering the flavor (truth and facts) of what they present with sugar (falsehoods and propaganda). It skews your view of reality when you can no longer tell what is fact from what is not.

When I quit eating sugar, I almost immediately lost a lot of weight. "Effortlessly," as it were. I didn't have to go out an exercise or try or anything. Other than whatever "trying" went into not eating sugar, which wasn't as difficult as it sounds. BUT!
People asked me frequently how I lost all the weight, and I would say, "I quit eating sugar," and, without fail, they would respond, "Oh, I could never do that."

Fuck that shit! I grew up drinking nothing but soda, nothing!, and I quit. And it wasn't really all that hard. Ahead of time, I thought it was going to be hard, but, upon doing it, it was really pretty easy.

TV and media is kind of the same way, mostly in that you have to find something to fill all of that time with that you currently spend immersed in your sugarcoated media world designed exactly to keep you consuming it. And to keep you from thinking about how much of it you're consuming or, really, thinking at all.  Like sugar, see.
"Don't bother thinking for yourself; we'll tell you all the thoughts you need to have."
It's more than a little disturbing.

It's amazing, though, how much easier it is to see the lies when you're not ingesting them all the time. Of course, church doesn't help with any of this, because church sort of pre-programs people to believe fantasies, fables, and mythology as fact and truth. But that's a story for another time...

Changing Life (Change: part 3)

Weight:
Some number of years ago (no, I don't remember when, but I'm sure my wife could tell you), my wife and I dropped sugar from our diets. This was a significant change, especially for me. I grew up drinking soda and, when I say that, I mean I grew up drinking only soda. From a very young age, actually. I moved from apple juice to Coca~Cola, and soda was pretty much the only thing I drank for the next 30-odd years. Cutting sugar meant cutting the soda, which was one of the hugest changes I've made in my life. Ever.

The immediate result of that change was that I lost weight. A lot of weight. About 100 pounds in less than a year. At the time, I dropped to under 200 pounds for the first time since I was in high school. I kept all of it off for a while but, over time... well, you have to really stay focused, I suppose. At any rate, at my physical last year (during January or February), it finally hit me that I had let myself creep back up to about 245.

Well, that was enough of that.

So I started exercising again, something I'd let slide for a couple of years. [Seriously, why does exercising have to take up so much time?] And I started monitoring my portion sizes. When you don't eat sugar, it can make you feel justified with eating more. Well, me, anyway.

The short of all of that is that I am, now, under 200 pounds again, for only the second time since high school.

Coffee:
I think I have probably come off as a coffee drinker on here for years. I mean, with posts like this, I totally sound like a coffee drinker, right? But I was only barely a coffee drinker as I would only drink coffee if it was in chocolate. It took my wife a while to work me up even to that, because I grew up sans coffee. See above with the soda thing.

Basically, we could go to the cafe together because I could get a mocha, but my wife insisted that that wasn't the same thing. I... really didn't understand.

What we couldn't do, though, was sit around having coffee together when we went out for breakfast. My wife would have coffee, but I would just have water. (And, then, go to the cafe after for a mocha. heh) Again, I didn't get the big deal, but she assured me it wasn't the same as us sitting and having coffee together.

Well, she was right.

Long story short, I finally agreed to to try having coffee (just plain, old coffee) with my wife when we were out for breakfast one Sunday morning. No, I don't drink it black, but, I did buy her an espresso machine, something she has always wanted but didn't feel like it was worth it if she was going to be the only one using it. Now, we have coffee together every morning.

Beer:
As with coffee, I also grew up not drinking alcohol. Of any kind. My wife spent some number of years converting me to drinking wine (it was a slow process), but I still stayed away from beer. No, not on any kind of principle or anything; mostly, I just didn't like the way it smells. And not that my wife wants or likes to go hang out in bars but, every once in a while, she likes the option of going to share a beer in a bar. Except you can't do that when one of the people won't help share it. But, you know, I've been open to trying and tasting things over the years but, really, nothing ever really did it for me. Well, there was this one time years ago we got some blackberry beer at a local brewery, and I liked that, but they never had it again, and you can't buy it at the store or anything.

All of that changed this year. We were at an open mic night (probably the one where we first saw Parcivillian), and my wife got a beer... with the understanding that I was going to taste it. She got something called a Bitch Creek (because she liked the name). Well, we both loved it. Yeah, it was the first beer I ever really just liked. Or liked at all, but I liked it from the first taste. What we've discovered is that I like dark beers, especially stouts, which Bitch Creek was. That was not ever a thing we'd ever tried before. As it turns out, my wife tends toward darker beers, too, so that has really worked out, although she does have a broader palette than I do when it comes to beers and ales.

At any rate, we can now share a beer over dinner or grab a beer to share when we're out or whatever, so that has been a whole new thing for us, too, sort of like with the coffee.

Also, I have a new appreciation of the fact that some of the best breweries in the country are right here where I live.

Catfish Tastes

I grew up on catfish... Wait, no, that makes it sound like it was the only thing I ever ate. Let me try that again:

When I was a kid, to say that we were having fish meant that we were having catfish. It was the only kind of fish we ever had (other than the rare trip to Long John Silver's). But we didn't buy it (and, now, I'm wondering why anyone would ever buy catfish), because to say that we were having fish meant that we were going fishing. And I don't mean a few of us, either.

No, when we went fishing, it was everyone. Everyone includes my parents and brother, my grandparents, several uncles and aunts of various sorts, and at least a cousin or two. It was a family event. And, really, you had to have a lot of people, because all of those people were going to be there to eat the fish no matter how many people went fishing, so the only way to make sure there was enough fish was for everyone to go fishing. However, in actuality, the women mostly didn't fish. I suppose they went along because it was an event. That and they made sandwiches and stuff for everyone.

Often, these trips were "caused" by me and, possibly, a cousin or two asking my grandfather to take us fishing. We loved it when he took us fishing, because, no matter how many people were along on the trip, it was my grandfather taking us fishing. The rest of the people were... superfluous. (Except for that time I caught this huge fish and one of my uncles knocked it back into the water. You can't be merely superfluous when you cause someone to lose such a big fish.)

After the fishing trips, we'd bring the fish back to the farm and the men would sit around and clean the fish. It was always catfish except for the very occasional perch, which we called sunfish, because no one liked cleaning them except my Uncle Fred (scaling a fish is much different than skinning a fish), so those got thrown back unless he was with us.

It was my grandfather that taught me how to fish. How to bait a hook (and where to find said bait). How to hook a fish (turn a nibble into a caught fish). How to take the fish off of the hook (which is not an easy task with a catfish (for those of you who have never done it)). How to clean a fish, both catfish and scaled fish (but, yeah, I know why no one liked doing it, because you get scales all over you). He taught me how to do all of it up to the cooking part. I had the eating part all worked out on my own, and I figured out the cooking part later.

When I got to be a teenager and we no longer did those huge fishing trips and it was just my nuclear family that would go fishing (basically, whenever my mom would decide that she felt like having fish), I was the one that had to do all the maintenance stuff, meaning that I was the hook baiter and fish remover. Yeah, I hated those trips, because I never actually got to do any fishing. I got plenty of bites, but they were all from mosquitoes, and, when all you get from a fishing trip is mosquito bites, it's just not any fun. Why was I the hook baiter and fish remover? Because no one in my family would do those things. I mean, one time when I was doing something else and my dad caught a fish, I turned around to find him stepping on the fish (so that he wouldn't have to touch it) while trying to get the hook out of its mouth with a pair of pliers. I started finding other things to do rather than go fishing, so the catfish eating dwindled away.

But, see, I grew up liking, even loving, catfish. And I didn't have to give you all of that background, but I wanted you to have the context of my relationship with catfish. In my mind, it's associated, mostly, with these great family fishing trips with my grandfather and him teaching me how to do all the stuff. He gave me my first fillet knife and skinners one year when I was probably around 9 or 10, and I thought that was one of the greatest presents ever.

But we don't do the whole catfish thing out here in CA. It's just not a thing here the way it is in the south. Out here it's salmon and, well, I don't really know, because I lost any inclination I had for fishing when my grandfather died, so it's not a thing we do. I mean, not a thing my family does. I know plenty of people that take off to fish for salmon or do ocean fishing. I don't know anyone that does catfishing.

On Friday nights, we do special family dinner night. Special dinners are things that take more time or are more elaborate than we can do on a night when people have to get up early the following morning. Every so often, I'll do a fried fish night, but those are more rare than even the normal special dinner nights, because it takes a lot of time to prep and fry everything. Like the onion rings. Because, according to everyone that's had them, I make the best onion rings ever. And fried mushrooms, too. But I digress. So... fried fish, which is generally cod.

Last week I was out buying fish because were going to have our first fried fish night in... I don't know, months, at least. So I was picking up the cod, and there in the display case with the fish was catfish. Catfish. Oh, man, I hadn't had catfish in so long. I mean, I've lived in California for a long time, and I think I'd only had it once before since I moved out here. I love catfish. My kids should try it, right? My kids that don't actually like fish that much to begin with, and I was thinking they should try catfish of all things, but I'm not really to that part yet. I bought some of the catfish. I love catfish.

Friday night came. I mixed up the batter. I sliced up a couple of onions. I chopped the mushrooms down to appropriate sizes (because they hadn't had anything of an appropriate size at the store). I started frying those up. Everyone was eating onions rings voraciously. My wife and I were eating the mushrooms. I got out the fish, the cod, and sliced it up and started frying that up. People started eating the cod. I pulled out the catfish...

I pulled out the catfish and fried up a few pieces, nuggets, because I was eager to pop one into my mouth. Long time since catfish. I love catfish. I was... actually excited, I think. I toss the first couple of pieces onto the plate to cool. Before it was quite cool enough, I popped one into my mouth...

And, man, it was like eating a mud ball. And, yeah, I know what dirt tastes like. I was a kid that played in a lot of dirt. Not that I ever actually on purpose ate any, but, you know, it gets in your mouth. And that piece of catfish was the equivalent of a handful of dirt down at the farm when I was a kid.

It must have been a mistake. Just a bad piece, right? Right...
So I got another piece and... dirt! OH MY GOSH! Catfish tastes like dirt! Then I thought back to the previous time I'd had catfish, the last time, years before, when I thought "I love catfish; I should get some for everyone to try," and it had tasted like dirt, too, and no one else liked it or would eat any of it. Just like this time. And I realized: I had grown up liking the taste of... dirt. [And, see, when I was growing up, I'd heard people say they didn't like catfish for that very reason, but I'd always dismissed them as not knowing what they were talking about.]

But that's what growing up is for. I also grew up drinking only soda, but I can't stand the stuff, now, after being off of it for the last five years or so. The sweet of it is just too much for me. And I grew up liking some shows (mostly cartoons) that I look back now and wonder what I was thinking when I was 15 and watching G. I. Joe every day after school. And there have been books and/or authors that have been that way for me, too. All of it dirt.

There are a few things, I suppose, that you could come away with from this, some of which I've talked about before (like, just, outgrowing things), but it would take too much time, at this point, to talk about all of those things. Instead, I will just mention this one thing:

Sometimes, you have to get away from something long enough to realize that it was dirt all along. Some things that we think are good are only good because we've never experienced anything else. But, when we go on to new things, hopefully better things, we can later recognize that that thing we used to love was really just dirt and we'd only loved that thing because it was the only thing we'd ever had. Which is why we need to always be broadening our experiences. Trying new things. Reading new books.

And, on the book note, I suppose that's why it bothers me when I see people saying things like, "I only read YA" like it's a good thing and, worse, like that makes them better than people who read a variety of types of books. What I want to say to that is that you're eating catfish. [Which is not to say that all YA is dirt.] Or, maybe, baby food. I get that you grew up reading YA and you love YA, but, really, you're 30 now; branch out a little bit. Seriously. You might discover that some of that YA you always thought was so yummy is really just a mud pie.

Popcorn Reading

I love popcorn. Especially, I love movie theater popcorn. It's horrible. I can't go to a movie without wanting it. I'm sure that's what the theater wants, too, and that smell is sooo... intoxicating. I used to not be able to go to the movies without buying popcorn. Of course, movies were cheaper then. The popcorn was cheaper, too.

It wasn't really the money that made me quit buying popcorn all the time, though; it was my kids. Okay, it was the money, too, but, really, it was my kids. I mean, it's one thing for me to make the decision to put all that crap into my own body, but, back when we used to actually do (almost) a weekly movie during the summers, I didn't think I needed to put all that crap into my kids bodies, too. Even if they did enjoy it and want it.

Still enjoy it and want it.

The thing with popcorn is that it's so easy to just keep eating and eating it. Handfuls at a time. Don't give me a large bag of popcorn to hold at the theater and expect to get some. I will eat it all. You'll reach over to get some, and it will be gone. All of it. Well, there'll probably be a few loose kernels in the bottom of the bag. I won't have meant to have eaten it all, it will have just happened. The same goes for the lesser microwave popcorn at home. I will eat it. I might not even feel bad afterward.

Sugar is the same way. Things with sugar in them, anyway. It's so easy to sit down with a bag of, say, peanut butter cups and eat the whole thing without realizing it. And it makes you want more and more of it.

Eating junk makes you want to eat more junk. That's the way it's designed. Even when we know it's bad for us, we want to eat it anyway. I mean, it's been... well, it's been years since I've had a soda, but, sometimes, I still want one. And I think one can't be that bad, right? It's been years since I had one, so what could it hurt? But that will just make me want more and more. Once I re-acclimate myself to it, that is. Because, actually, having been off of sugar for so long means that anything that has any sugar in it at all is usually way too sweet for me.

The thing is, though, if you give people the option between something that's good for them and something that's bad for them, they'll usually pick the thing that's bad for them. Well, assuming it tastes good. I was certainly that way when I was a kid, which is why I grew up on soda. My kids are no different. They want to eat crap all the time. Even though we don't keep sweets and treats in the house and have a habit of not eating that way, they ask for things every single day. Every single day. EVERY SINGLE DAY! And it drives us crazy every night! NO! WE ARE NOT GOING OUT FOR ICE CREAM! NO! WE ARE NOT GOING TO SIFT FOR CUPCAKES! Why do you keep asking that when you get the same answer every day?! Oh! My! Gosh!

People, especially kids, don't have the ability to look at their food choices objectively and weigh the advantages and the disadvantages and choose accordingly. Mostly, because they can't see what the disadvantages are. Or choose not to see them. Most people respond to things the same way my younger boy responds to food:
"Yum, this is full of sugar and carbs; this is awesome!" [Even though it's objectively bad for him.]
"Yuck! That's green and leafy and disgusting!" [Even though it's good for him.]
However, if you work with the things that are good for you, eventually, you will like them. And I know, because I grew up hating broccoli and yams, hating them with a passion (at one point, I think I vowed to my mother that I would never EVER eat broccoli), but those are two of my favorite foods now. And my younger son also likes yams, now, because we kept making him eat them.

The real issue is that you have to train yourself to like the things that are good for you. And it's not easy. I grew up with a cook for a mother. A southern cook. Let me just tell you right now that the southern diet is not the most healthy in the world. Even the things in it that are good for you are cooked in such a way as to not be good for you. They'll boil the nutrients right out of anything. And, if it can't be boiled, they'll batter it and fry it. Or, you know, throw sugar all over it. Want to eat strawberries in the south? Cut them up and toss sugar on  them. Why? It's already fruit; it doesn't need sugar. But that's how I ate strawberries when I was a kid. And why eat broccoli when there was fried okra as an option (and the okra smelled so much better!)?

At some point, though, you have to look at what you're putting in your body and say, "Is this good for me?" If the answer is "no," you have to train yourself into a different behavior set. And, no, I can't tell you how to do that. You have to figure that out for yourself.

Of course, I'm not really talking about food here. I mean, I am talking about food, but I'm also talking about books. Of course, I'm not the first to compare books to food. I'm probably not even the first to compare junk food to junk books. At any rate, just like most people (in the US, at least) spend way too much time eating junk food, most people that read (because most people actually do not read) spend way too much time reading junk books. Popcorn books.

A lot of people would say, "but at least they're reading something," and I almost agree with that. Except that saying that would be like saying of an adult that was still eating baby food, "well, at least, s/he's eating something." Yeah, I know it's not the same, but it kind of is.

See, I know some people that like to brag about how many books they read. And, yes, they read a lot of books. A couple of them read, like, 250 books a year. But they're all the same kind of book (and I'm not gonna say what kind that is), and they amount to popcorn. At least, that's how I visual it. All pretty much the same with very little substance. Not challenging. Not anything.

So when someone says, "at least, they're reading;" I think, "I'm not so sure about that."

I don't have a problem with reading for pleasure. Reading is great, and reading should be enjoyable. I also think reading should prompt us to think and, hopefully, to grow. The occasional treat is fine, but you really shouldn't try to live off of them (treats), just like you shouldn't use McDonald's as your dietary staple. Okay, McDonald's is trying to reform a little, so we'll go with Burger King. [Actually, it's been so long since I ate at either of those places, I don't know how they are.]

Other than observing people that just read the equivalent of literary junk food all the time, it's my own kids that got me thinking about this. Just like not letting them have popcorn all the time, I can't let them read easy, non-challenging books all the time.

When I was a kid, I didn't have anyone to help me navigate books. My family does not read. I stumbled my way through on Hardy Boys and stuff I could pick up at school until I started having things assigned  to me, and, even then, in my head there was a differentiation between what I read on my own and what I was assigned at school. It didn't matter that I liked the books I was being assigned at school; they were still a different category, so I spent my time otherwise reading literary junk. It wasn't until my junior year of high school that I figured out that I could explore "real" literature on my own. Of course, by that time, I'd wasted seven years of reading on (mostly) popcorn.

I don't want my kids to do that. Not that I force them to read anything, but I do make suggestions.

There's nothing wrong with reading the occasional piece of fluff. It's nice to have a mental break from thinking from time to time. It's something else entirely to devote yourself to only mental fluff. It makes it difficult to recognize something that is actually, really, good, because it's too challenging to get into. Everyone should challenge themselves to grow as readers. To start reading, to read more broadly, to read more deeply. Learn to like your broccoli and yams. I did.