Cutting sugar is sweet idea

It's not often that I'm ahead of the American Heart Association.

But I was this time.

In a report released last week, the AHA, for the first time in its history, came out swinging against sugar, recommending that Americans limit their intake of what are known as "added sugars." These are the sugars not naturally occurring in foods and basically includes anything sweet in soda, cakes, cookies, pies, candy, chocolate, breakfast cereal, white bread, chocolate milk and so forth.

Also known as My Entire Diet.

Or At least it used to be my entire diet. Until last spring, when I was feeling a bit sluggish and mentioned this to my brother, who in turn recommended I read "In Defense of Food," a book by Michael Pollan.

I wanted to read a book about food about as much as I wanted to give up 7-Eleven apple fritters.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only does Pollan know a thing or two about food, he can write about it so it sounds as entertaining as Charles Barkley talking about basketball.

In his book, which became a New York Times best-seller, he points to what he calls the Western diet — basically the food we Americans routinely eat — as the root cause of a bunch of bad things such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer.

We should stay away from most everything processed — or, as Pollan points out, "everything in the middle of the supermarket."

Good advice, but, hey, baby steps.

I decided to start with cutting out sugar.

For 10 days I would not eat any added sugar. That meant no soft drinks on the desk, no desserts and no making the rounds of the Deseret News taking candy from nice people who are thoughtful enough to put out bowls of sweets on their desks.

If you are what you eat at work, I would have been a mix of a Mr. Goodbar, a Krackel and a Snickers.

It meant no cake, no pie, no cookies, no morning runs to the 7-Eleven for fritters and chocolate milk.

I felt like Manny Ramirez giving up steroids.

I didn't like it at all the first few days. Old bad habits die hard. It was all I could do to stop typing mid-paragraph and make my way to Lisa Bowen's candy dish on the eighth floor.

I used to do that, oh, about every 10 minutes.

But I resisted, reminded of what Pollan says in his book — that the alarming rise of obesity and the type II diabetes epidemic, among other health woes, can in many ways be charted directly back to the early 1980s when so-called health scientists refined high fructose corn syrup to the point that it could replace regular old sugar in lots of foods, especially soft drinks.