A woman decides to go a year without sugar
What if I went a whole year without sugar? A totally crazy challenge, right? Yet it is this challenge that a mother from Vermont (a region in the northeast of the United States, close to Canada) set herself.
For a year, this mother decided to consume, with her family, as little added sugar as possible while maintaining a “normal” diet.
The story
It all started in 2011. Eve O. Schaub, mother of two, writer by trade, was in need of inspiration. She is looking for ideas for topics to cover for her next writings. She then came across a video (2) on Youtube having generated more than 4.6 million views, dealing with “the harmful effects of fructose on the metabolism”. Shocked by the results of this study , she then decided to set up a family project: no longer consume sugar for 1 year.
The start of the challenge
Eve O. Schaub then embarks on this crazy experiment, taking her family with her.
Eve clarifies that before all this, she had never gone a day in her life without consuming sugar. Following his challenge, a Facebook page was created to tell the story (3) .
She removes from her diet any product containing sugar, sweets and chocolate, of course, but also any dish containing sugar and fructose extract. “ Yes to apples, no to apple juice, ” she says. Several kinds of bread, bacon, honey and other sweet products are also excluded.
The beginnings are difficult. Her daughters and her husband find it difficult to adhere to the project. So she decides to lighten the restriction a bit. Each member of the family has the right to consume one sweet food per day. The husband, for example, chose a soft drink, while the children chose jam. The family also agrees to a chosen dessert per month.
Apart from these differences, the mother quickly understands that added sugar is everywhere, including in restaurant dressings for example. She therefore had to lean, almost necessarily, on new culinary experiments. It is indeed difficult, without doing a good part of the cooking yourself, to avoid added sugar in foods, as this has become common in the food industry.
The results
The family did not lose weight, which Eve explains by the fact that no family member was particularly overweight. But its members felt a certain well-being. Cutting out added sugars allowed the family to eat healthier on a daily basis, which had beneficial effects. Children missed school less for illness, for example.
It is important to remember that this study is in no way scientific , but Eve O. Schaub noticed a change in eating behavior in her family which she is witnessing today, and in herself. The dessert granted monthly was less and less expected and envied, and the consumption of sugar even caused some disgust over time.
Now that the challenge is over, Eve O. Schaub says the strict rules have been dropped, but her family’s sugar consumption has still remained lower. She indicates that after her experience, no one in the family has the same relationship to sugar as before and that it has now become a habit not to consume ” sweet tomato sauce”, for example.
To recount her “saga”, Eve O. Schaub wrote a book entitled ” Year of no sugar ” (4) , a kind of logbook of this family adventure which lasted an entire year.
Stephen Paul is the lead author and founder of My Health Sponsor. Holder of a diploma in health and well-being coaching with more than 200 articles in the field of health, he makes it a point of honor to offer advice based on reliable information, based on scientific research, and verified by health professionals.