Valentine’s Sugar Challenge!

Nothing says, “I love you” like a plate of assorted fruits and veggies. Fruit and vegetable gift baskets not only delight girls but boys are equally in love with them as well. Baskets full of fresh produce symbolize desire and passion—so give your lover a box full of organic food to share while living out your romantic fantasies!

We’ve heard the story above so many times about chocolate that hearing it about anything else seems absurd.

The Challenge

Can you imagine a Valentine’s Day without sugar? OMG! What would happen? How can you show the person you love that you actually care if you don’t give them sugar to eat? How can you administer self love without downing something sweet and chocolaty?

Can you NOT CONFORM and avoid all sugar sweetened junk food on Valentine’s Day? Can you make it through this week without eating the junk food people everywhere seem to be consuming as if it’s the last year candy will be sold on February 14th?

10 Unsweet Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Your Sweetie

In 2009, I posted 10 Sugar-Free Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas. Below are ten new ideas for Valentine’s Day gifts that do not contain sugar!

1. Tickets to See a Show

You know what your partner likes. Buy good seats and go.

2. A Week of Nightly Massages

This is especially nice if you administer the massages when your partner is tired and/or tense. A week of massage beats a store bought box of chocolates any day!

3. Create a New Love Ritual

Admit it, you’ve got some kind of “Friday night television” or “Saturday morning wake up” that you do with your lover. Make up a new ritual like “Sunday afternoon walk” or “Monday morning talk.”

4. Something Utilitarian

If you’re with someone who doesn’t like cutesy things that end up sitting around the house gathering dust, get them something they’ll use. A new tool, hobby supplies, or a discount card at the store they always go to can make your practical person feel appreciated. 

5. Go Local

What’s more romantic than community theater? How about a local comedy show? Church potluck? A lecture? There’s something out there that can become an adventure for the two of you.

6. Head to the Beach

If you’re close enough to the coast, go there!

7. Get a Book

Who doesn’t love a good book? Better yet if the book contains a secret note that contains a promise for gift #2.

8. Go to the Movies

Make some kind of snack that has no sugar and head off to the worst movie that’s showing. Doing so will guarantee that you and your partner bond over questioning the terrible plot you just witnessed.

9. Stay in and Watch a Movie

Make dinner with a sugar free dessert. Then stay in, watch a movie, and eat well.

10. Give of Yourself

Spending time with the one you love is a valuable gift. Don’t take it for granted! Block out a significant amount of time together to just do whatever. Making time for the one you love is love.

The Government Already Regulates Sugar in Our Food

A February 2012 report in the journal Nature suggests sugar is toxic and should be regulated like tobacco or alcohol. As a result, news outlets across America are writing about whether the government should be involved in our food. The common response is “stay out of it” and “that never works.” However, the government regulates substances in our food all the time and is doing so right now.

As of not too long ago, food manufacturers were not allowed to sweeten their products with Stevia. Stevia, a zero calorie plant based sweetener, has been used for years in other countries. In America, however, it was banned by the FDA as a food additive—yet the FDA approved use of the controversial Aspartame as an artificial sweetener! That meant that if you wanted to purchase and ingest Stevia you would have to go to a health food store where it could only be sold as a food supplement. Nobody was legally allowed to make a food product sweetened by Stevia in America until recently.

In 2008, the FDA approved the use of Stevia with a Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) acceptance letter for Cargill, the largest privately owned company in the US. Who knows why the FDA suddenly changed its mind about Stevia? Riding the wake of that decision, other Stevia companies and food makers followed up with their own FDA applications and received GRAS acceptance letters for their brands of Stevia products. Stevia is now okay in the USA.

The United States government subsidizes the production of corn. Corn is used in producing High Fructose Corn Syrup, which, according to a 2009 report entitled Sweetening the Pot from The Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University:

The report also states:

If you argue that the government should not be involved in food and farming at all then fight to have subsidies removed. Problem is, the average American only gets upset when they fear that their children might have soda pulled from the menu in the school cafeteria. This sounds scary because they claim it’s a gateway to the government telling them that they can’t carry weapons or smoke cigarettes. Sugar supporting public relations people know this kind of fear so they spin an issue of public health as one of “personal responsibility.”

Is there a problem with regulating the kinds of foods our children eat in school if we’re working in favor of fresh and healthy? It’s not hard to figure out what is a good or bad food choice for children. Why not prevent corporations from putting commercials for junk food in front of our kids during children’s television programming? Remember, someone had to argue that cigarette manufacturers shouldn’t be allowed to market to kids or advertise on television. Imagine the backlash for the maverick who (years ago) suggested that smoking be banned from hospitals! Yet people still smoke. And they own weapons. But kids don’t—not as a part of their school curriculum.

One day we’re going to look back at this sweet period in time and say, “What were we thinking?”

Should the Government Regulate Sugar in Food?

The Pressure is On

Attention is on the amount of sugar in our diets. When an issue like this becomes big enough to get debated about on the government level, you know it’s of social concern.

Doctors have come forward and said that eating too much sugar is contributing to obesity and health problems. (See the Dr. Robert Lustig video, Sugar: the Bitter Truth.)

Diabetes is on the rise worldwide, although nobody really knows why. You could speculate that it is due to the increased amount of added and refined sugars in the modern diet. Processed foods are more common and lots of these food products contain sugar or sweetener as a primary ingredient. 

Schools are now under pressure from concerned parents to remove flavored milk from their menu due to the fact that chocolate and strawberry milk contains a ton of added sugars—one single serve carton of chocolate milk (like those sold in school cafeterias) has more sugar than a set of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. Consider your 65 lb. child consuming two cartons of chocolate milk during lunch on top of a sandwich made of sugary white bread, sweetened peanut butter and jelly, and then having candy to boot. And that’s just lunch!

Taxes on sweets and sweet drinks in the United States and abroad have been proposed and shot down. As you can imagine, junk food and fizzy drink manufacturers have done their best to stop such a tax as it would cut into their profit margins.

Recently in America there was a proposed bill to regulate junk food advertising aimed at children. It was shot down. In 2010, Coca Cola spent $4,890,000 on lobbying. In 2011 McDonalds spent $1.1 Million on lobbying. These are bitter congressional battles over who controls nutritional requirements, labeling information, and advertising.

As a blogger I’ve noticed more traffic to my website coming from people who are searching about how to get off sugar. I regularly get emails from closet addicts who cannot manage the amount of sugar they eat. They often struggle quietly and secretly. Many don’t know they have a problem until ‘one binge too many’ sends them searching the Internet and they find my site, or one like it, only to recognize themselves in the contents of these web pages.

Been There, Done That

The current situation closely mirrors battles of the past. Cigarettes used to be available to children and adults. When I was in high school there was a designated smoking lounge—for the students—just beyond the cafeteria where kids could go and light up. That was in the late eighties. 14-year-olds could go outside and feed their smoking habit. It seems crazy by today’s standards and, more importantly, by today’s laws. Today it is illegal to smoke indoors in public places. When the suggestion of limiting parameters on tobacco use came up in the past, smokers and libertarians alike got outraged and claimed big government was infringing upon their personal freedom. However, they’re not working to repeal smoking bans.

Second Hand Sweets

A major difference between smoking and sweets is that smoking not only effects the smoker but it also infringes on the rights of those who are close by. You don’t have a second hand soda if I drink one at a table across the aisle from you in a restaurant. Because choosing what to eat is a solitary activity, people believe it’s something that should be left up to the individual. However, our current choices are not properly labeled.

Decisions, Decisions…

Which do you prefer, meat or a vegetable stir fry? Would it matter to you if you knew that the meat was washed in ammonia and seasoned with sugar? What if you knew that the veggies in the stir fry were genetically modified, sprayed with pesticides, drenched in an artificial corn-based sweetener, and fried in cheap corn oil? Do you want someone to tell you if the chemicals and GMOs used in your food have been linked to illness?

Personal Responsibility

Lots of people feel that what you choose to eat is an issue of “personal responsibility.” Fox recently ran a non-scientific Internet poll where (at the time of this writing) 18,777 people voted that the government should not regulate sugar in our food choices. You can and should always take the time to do the research yourself each time before you eat, right? That would be a little easier if the food was labeled properly. However, if you’ve ever attempted to quit sweets or avoid added sugars in your diet, then you have an idea how of little choice you have in the matter—eat or not.

The majority of foods you are exposed to on a daily basis (foods outside of your home kitchen) have so many chemical additives,  sugars, or sugar substitutes that “personal responsibility” means deciding between a rock and a hard place. Personal responsibility is not a choice you make while looking at a menu. Personal responsibility means an ongoing battle of researching, learning, speaking and acting out about what’s best for your well being. 

The giant money machine that brings food products to your table is already controlling our puppet government through a revolving door of well paid company representatives. With food companies paying millions of dollars to lobby for laws that serve their bottom line, the issue is not a matter of big government telling you what to eat or not. It’s big corporations telling you what you can or can’t eat. Meanwhile the US government is conducting armed raids on organic farms that sell unpasteurized milk!

Either we get involved and influence the government or we sit back and consider, “Do you want fries with that,” and, “Would you like to super size,” as examples of our personal freedom and responsibility.

Do You Have Sweet Dreams?

After jumping off the wagon for two weeks, I’m back to being sugar free. Like clockwork, I had a dream about it.

I was in China with my friend Maria (we went to college there together in real life). In my dream she had moved back and I was visiting. We were in line at a food market, which was outdoors and similar to a bizarre. The checkouts were in turn styles, like when you enter or exit a subway, and I jumped to the next exit because they were selling sweets behind glass counters that lined the pathway.

Maria questioned me. I explained that I was eating sugar again. I purchased a large cookie with black and white icing because the other cookies were flat and looked over cooked. One was crispy with almonds in the center and looked like it was baked with way too much butter. There was a limited selection.

Dreaming about eating sweets is a common and expected part of getting off sugar. I’ve written about my past sweet dreams here and here. When you stop being sweet, you can look forward to a weird (and often guilt riddled) dream about eating sugar. That’s how you know you’re passing the threshold from sweetie to unsweetie.