Last weekend I met up with three friends in Philadelphia to enjoy a very long weekend together. Growing up together in the neighborhoods of Levittown, New York, we have been friends since fourth grade. Except for the pandemic, we get together once a year or more from the four different states in which we have made our adult lives. This time we picked a very old house near Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Built in the 1850s, the house’s kitchen was located underground (first floor), with four more floors above it. The entry and dining room were on the second floor (ground level), with a sitting room on the 5th floor, and bedrooms on floors 3 and 4. We quickly became nimble at navigating the extremely steep, winding staircase.

We cooked a lot of our own meals in the updated kitchen and spent at least as much time hanging out as walking through Center City, goggling at the displays in the Reading Terminal Market, admiring the public art — especially near the Art Museum and along the Ben Franklin Parkway, visiting the Liberty Bell, and seeing a play at Walnut Street Theatre, not to mention enjoying the excitement of the local win that sent the Eagles to the Super Bowl. 

I don’t have to tell you that the meals we prepared were nourishing and healthy, with loads of fresh fruit and vegetables, beans, whole grains, nourishing fats, and high-quality protein. Of course they were. And a few days into our visit, one of our happy crew happened to remark that the reduction in the amount of sugar she was eating appeared to have reduced some of the GI symptoms she’s had since forever. I don’t really know if she meant for me to hear, but I did. And I was absolutely not surprised. What passes for food in this country continues to stun me. 

Did you know that soda, for example, is sweetened with one teaspoon of sugar per ounce of liquid? The average 12-oz. can of soda (pop) contains the equivalent of 12 teaspoons of sugar. Would you add 12 teaspoons of sugar to a glass of iced tea? It seems absurd when asked this way, but we do it every time we drink a can of soda. The amount of sugar hidden in ultraprocessed items is wild. 

I don’t want you to think that we ate no sugar at all. We ate our share! Marilee brought homemade sesame cookies, Randi brought candy-coated sunflower seeds, Jean brought organic pancake mix. And we bought cranberry juice and other mixers in Philadelphia. But when we enjoyed them, we knew we were eating sugar. No secrets, no surprises, nothing hidden. All the sugar we ate was out in the open. And we enjoyed our treats very much.

It’s not the amount of sugar that you choose to eat, but rather the amount of sugar consumed inadvertently when you eat a product prepared by someone else. If you’re starting to feel like your sugar bowl has been taken over by the ultraprocessed food industry, that’s because it has.

If you’ve recently glanced at one of those lists of recommendations for keeping to your budget or reducing debt, there’s always an entry for cutting up your credit cards and paying in cash. Credit cards hide actual costs, and make the real downstream costs invisible. That’s how it is with sugar. I once heard someone remark how different public appropriations would be if politicians were required to count out each dollar by hand. That’s what I’m talking about, but with sugar. When you add your own sugar, you’re much less likely to get in trouble.

Sugar is a stripped carb, which means it isn’t food. If it isn’t food, then it’s FUN. Fun is fine; it’s just not food. I love going to the movies, but I don’t want to live at the theater. Food nourishes; fun entertains.

We can all tolerate treats now and then. A slice of key lime pie on Sundays, something warm and baked on Friday eve (black bean brownies!), a mint after a special restaurant meal, peach cobbler in the summertime, a mug of hot cocoa in winter after building a giant snowman, handfuls of kettle corn on a camping trip. A tray of homemade oatmeal cookies. There are thousands of examples, and plenty of opportunities. These are not the problem.

That’s because the sugar in these treats has mostly been measured out by you. There is nothing hidden about it. You know exactly how much sugar is in there because you put it in yourself. If you add two teaspoons of sugar to a 12 oz. glass of unsweetened iced tea, you will use 85% less sugar than if you drink the equivalent amount of soda. Add one teaspoon of sugar, and the savings rises to 92%. The amount of hidden sugar in our food supply is beyond your imagination.

Take back your sugar bowl, and see what happens.