Why is it that celebrating Easter, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Christmas and birthdays usually involves eating staggering amounts of refined sugar? Why do people we love celebrate us by giving us boxes of chocolates, chocolate bunnies and birthday cakes? It’s not hard to come to the conclusion that they want life’s “sweetness” for us. It really is a genuine expression of love and symbolic generosity. And the holiday treats are tradition, right? Well, sort of.

Those holidays may go back thousands of years, but sugar consumption in the US is literally no more than 200 years old. The American sugar industry began in Louisiana in about 1800. Before that, refined sugar was consumed at a negligible rate because it wasn’t available. That rate is now 150 to 170 pounds of refined sugar or sweeteners per American, per year. That’s a lot of life’s sweetness!! I’m sure our great grandmothers would have balked at the idea of eating their body weight in sugar every year!

And why would we love someone up by giving them treats that spike insulin levels, impair their immunity and strip their blood of the vitamins and minerals needed to digest the “treat?” “Treat” suggests that it’s every once in a while, and if that were the case, it would just be part of experiencing life’s sweetness. But a 32- ounce cup of soda contains the equivalent of 5 feet worth of packets of sugar, and that’s drunk by many Americans every single day in addition to many other sugar sources.

While the Christmas pudding might be a family recipe that goes back generations, our collective modern hyper-sweet culture is really a radical departure from all previous human history. That sounds dramatic, but look at the dramatic effect it’s having on our modern human bodies with the obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics. Our bodies can’t evolve fast enough to keep up with the dramatic changes in our diet. I just heard someone say that our food has changed more in the last 100 years than it had in the previous 30,000 years! Now that’s drama! But it’s also true. It’s also not the only time in history that an industry profited from and encouraged mass addiction.

We’re the frog that jumped into cold water and we’re not noticing how hot it’s getting in here! Culture changes slowly, but it’s at breakneck speed compared to the pace of human evolution. There was a man called Dr Westin Price who got interested in how “modern civilization” was improving people’s quality of life. He was a dentist and he traveled all around the world for decades looking at people’s diets and at their teeth and overall health. He especially focused on “primitive” cultures that ate traditional diets with unrefined whole food. He noticed that they had astonishingly better health than their counterparts in the “modern” world eating a modern diet of white flours and sugar. In fact he found that tooth decay in modern eaters was “often accompanied by serious problems elsewhere in the body such as arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, intestinal complaints and chronic fatigue. (They called it neurasthenia in Price’s day.)” He also discovered a conspicuous lack of these issues when an anscestral diet was followed.

This is what I find funny-slash-scary: if you are the mom who refuses to give out unhealthy Halloween candy or declines the lollipops that store owners offer your toddler, you get the gentle “she’s a health nut” eyeroll. Grandparents seem to express love through bite-size candy. We live in a culture where extreme excess of sugar-intake is NORMAL.

Now I don’t mind swimming against the current, but it does get a little tiring at times. A shift in cultural attitudes towards sugar is BADLY needed.

This is what I’m proud of; my 2 ½ year old son doesn’t know the word “candy.” Today we ate lunch at Boynton McKay and I got us each one of those bitesize dark chocolates at the check out. He unwrapped it and took a bite. I asked him, “How do you like it?” He said, “It’s good.” I asked, “Do you know what it is?” He said, “It’s a …brown thing” and then offered me a bite. A few weeks ago we were in the Hope General Store and he saw the flying chocolate chip ice cream sandwich on the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream freezer. He said, “look mama, it’s a….raisin pancake!”

It’s cute, but of course doomed to end as soon as he is inevitably introduced to the vagaries of our food supply. He’ll beg for it just like any other kid and learn quickly that he’s got no chance of having hyper-sweets in his regular diet. That said, he went to make Easter baskets and colored eggs with his babysitter at the Library last Friday and they came home with this wonderful little handmade basket containing colored eggs, bright tissue paper and Hershey’s kisses. There are lots of holidays when the sugar is just flowing! And the more I restrict him, the more he will want it, so my only hope is to help him see the correlation between eating lots of candy and feeling yucky afterwards AND to frame the cultural trends in a larger context.

Hopefully his comfort food will be good stuff too. The food that he wants to go back to when he’s had a hard day later in life? If it’s anything like what he eats now, he’ll be OK. This toddler eats seaweed and kale with ume vinager, daikon and almond butter on apples. Whole wheat pasta with Braggs and dulse and nutritional yeast is his absolute fave.

And hopefully in the culture of my family we will celebrate each other with cool exotic fruit rather than chocolate bunnies and ice cream sandwiches. I might have to have a contest with my nutrition sisters to see who can get more “health nut eye-rolls” per holiday. The more eye-rolls I get, the more impact I might have on shifting the sugar-crazy “norm.” I can start tomorrow when our Easter egg hunt will feature eggs containing raisins or rubber balls!

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