Chapter 2: Breaking the Spell
Chapter 2: Breaking the Spell
Safety Message: Sugar
diabetic
any carb can turn to sugar- eat sugar, wheat, doesnt leave you a choice what to have- aside from being a vegetarian
10 days feeling different taste buds- the average,cells on the tongue takes 3 weeks to regenerate. recommend leave off sugar 3 weeks,then whencome back feel like sue felt.
not craving as much, when start tasting food, sugary food, wont taste good any more accustomed to a new normal
complex carbbs- make sur ethe food contains fiber- fruits and whole grains, and helps the absorption of sugar slowly, so no sugar spike.
good first stepw reducing sugar islooking at added sugar inproducst. whenstart looking, amazing - just a couple years- crackers and ketchup, that dont assoicate with sugar or sweetnesss
there is uaually an equivalent that does not have as much added, eye opening when see how difficult to get away from
The best thing this generation has going for it is informed mamas.” -one of my coworkers when gave a safety message onsugar.
This is the most important thing to talk about with employees that work from home. One of the biggest dangers to your health is what you put on your plate.
frui- limited and seasonal
Recipe 2: Sugar-Free Marshmallows (with Marshmallow Root)
Highlights:
The American Heart Association recommends a maximum limit of added sugars per day to be:
25 grams of added sugar for women
36g for men
But in real life, the following are the averages for daily use of it for various age groups:
50g: Babies and toddlers under 3 years old
Though this sensitive group has a 0g recommended limit, in reality, they are doubling the maximum adult limit. Our babies are eating twice the limit of what adults should be eating. And they are a fraction the size of an adult. (Let’s say 20 lb vs 160 lbs)
70g: The average person eats 70 grams of sugar every day (3x more than the recommended limit).
144g: The worst demographic of the groups studied are teenagers, who eat 6x the adult limit on AVERAGE, every single day. And on “average” means some are way more. Our brains are still developing until 25 years old. How could sugar be stunting their potential?
Studies on Sugar
A 2023 study by researchers from China and the U.S. compiled 8,601 scientific studies on sugar to evaluate its impact on 83 health outcomes. It found “significant harmful associations” between dietary sugar consumption and
18 endocrine/metabolic outcomes (hormones)
10 cardiovascular outcomes, seven cancer outcomes (heart)
10 other outcomes (neuropsychiatric, dental, hepatic, osteal, and allergic) were detected (so these are mental, dental, liver, skeletal, and immuno-related)
Hope in Recovery upon Removal
A study of 300 kids with ADD were put on an elimination diet (removal of processed foods), and within 3 months, 72% of the children no longer had symptoms of ADD. This shows the remarkable power of resilience and the ability to bounce back.
And Some insights into how we got here:
The JAMA International Medicine Journal published a story in 2016 on some information from the the 1960’s. Apparently the sugar industry has been discovered to have quietly paid scientists to blame heart disease on fat. So all those labels on sugary cereals that say “heart healthy” for low fat status, are totally not “heart healthy”, due to their sugar content.
This is well beyond conspiracy theory, and more well time to get serious about pushing back about the norms we have let slide in the last 100 years.
How We made sugar innocent
We tell our kids- go ahead, but not too much. It is confusing. We supply them (and encourage them to sell) girl scout cookies, cakes, Halloween treats, ice cream trucks, coke at games, etc
This is NOT about guilt or blame, but awareness of where we are, how we are sending mixed signals to our children, and offering alternatives available to us to enjoy sweet treats that do not compromise health.
This is NOT a willpower problem – the addiction to sugary foods is a rational response to food designed to make us want more. (coke was literally made of cocaine originally. Lay’s potato chips slogan is literally, “Bet you can’t eat just one”). We have engineered the exact combinations of salt, sugar, and fat to get us to keep eating without feeling full. That sugar rush that triggers dopamine release in your brain's reward center activates the same pathway that gets triggered by cocaine and alcohol. Sugar is more easily defined as a drug than a food. We CANNOT live off of it alone- as we could with real food, and it DOES cause domanine dependant reactions when we try to quite. Even marijuana does not cause withdrawal or addiction like sugar does.
Again, QUALITY matters
There are many kinds of sugars, and many more names for it. All sugars are not created equal.
The truth is we need tiny amounts of glucose, something that appears to be a co-transporting molecule helping to transport other nutrients to virtually every cell in the body.
But various kinds of sugars have various levels of glucose and fructose. The way our body absorbs them tells us something about their biological realities: fructose is primarily metabolized in the liver, while glucose can be metabolized anywhere – for use immediately, rather than just the liver. This makes a huge difference in how our blood sugar levels are spiked after eating it" (aka hormones are affected, insulin), as the fructose is backed up in the liver. And we do see liver fatigue in diets too high in sugar.
Our Relationship with Sugar
Sugar was once a rare luxury. Here are just a few kinds we see in nature:
Honey: 10k years used by humans, has antioxidants and antimicrobial properties (fights off things for us, protective of us!), has been used as ancient medicine, and even caused us to evolve a relationship with a honeyguide bird in Africa, that signals to humans where to find hives to share in the golden elixer.
And its scarcity: A bee lives only in a single season, and in that season, flies on average 55,000 miles (2x around the world) to make only 1/12 of a tsp. Take too much from a hive, and they cannot survive.
Maple Syrup: An antioxidant powerhouse. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. While trees make oxygen, they also make sap that helps the tree (and us) be protected against oxidative damage (AKA damage due to exposure to air). But 90% of syrup sold in America is the fake stuff, with zero health benenfits.
Cane Sugar: Extraordinarily intensive labor. It is very time sensitive for harvesting/crushing, requiring meticulous care, and laws that enable slave labor.
Then we see a shift in the 1970’s with the industrialization of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Corn itself is not bad, but only 10% of the crop in the US goes to farming the vegetable. The rest is to be processed heavily to become a very unhealthy thing. So we created something our bodies were never designed to handle, made it available everywhere, all the time, and in some places, have made it cheaper than clean water.
In a past where obtaining sugar was difficult, and expensive, our bodies never had to deal with the kind of onslaught we see today. It is cheap, everywhere, and stamped with children’s cartoons (something outlawed in other countries).
There is a riddle about sugar I love:
Sugar in a baby’s brain is called ADHD
Sugar in an adult’s brain is called Dementia
Sugar in your eyes is called Glaucoma
Sugar lighting up on a PET scan is called Cancer
Sugar in your skin is called Aging (skin as made of collagen and elastin, but sugar causes cross-linking of collagen = stiffening)
Sugar on your teeth is called Cavities
Sugar in your sleep is called Insomnia
Sugar in your blood is called Diabetes
In more detail:
Fat storage, Metabolism: Frequent spikes keep insulin high; high insulin locks fat in storage and keeps hunger noisy.
Aging skin, Inflammation & skin: Glycation (“sugar-gluing”) stiffens collagen, aging skin and joints faster.
Brain fog, Mood & focus: Roller-coaster blood sugar often means roller-coaster moods and foggier thinking.
Immunity (getting sick) tied to Gut health: Microbiome: Ultra-processed sweeteners and refined carbs favor opportunistic microbes and crowd out diversity; a simpler ecosystem is a less resilient one.
Teeth & cavities: The microbiomes in our gut are connected to those in our mouths. Cavities are not just a not a “mouth” problem— they show there is a microbial and substrate problem. If you feed the wrong bugs, get a more destructive outcome.
——
We have made sugar innocent.
We dress it in holiday colors. We bake it into birthday cakes and frost it into love letters for our children. We hand it to them with a smile and then whisper, “Not too much,” as if the contradiction won’t lead to confusion. We tell ourselves it’s “just for special occasions,” and then notice how every weekend becomes a special occasion: a party, a playdate, a game, an after-school reward, a treat for surviving another Tuesday. The spell works because it trades on love. It turns our warmest memories into a delivery system.
Coke is one company that jumped on this tactic directly. It chose to be the drink of stadiums, of childhood memories and feelings of joy and excitement.
I know the spell well. For years I made elaborate sugar cookies—the kind that take days and fancy equipment. I took baking classes, learned glossy royal icing techniques, practiced the delicate flick of a piping bag, dipped bourbon cherries in dark chocolate and lined them up for Christmas presents. My grandma did the same, dropping crescent cookies at the dentist’s office, irony never noticed.
To change your mind on something like this is hard. We notice it all the time, that push and pull and tug of "have this, but only this much." Is it self care to dive in, or self care to avoid it? We must constantly ask ourselves, is it really that bad?
Back then, if you’d asked me about health I would have waved you off—it’s a celebration. Until I had me own diet reset. Now I get headaches immediately with one bite of corn syrup.
And until I had kids. Until I watched tiny bodies ricochet between euphoria and meltdowns. Until the ice-cream truck blared through the park and I found myself—an engineer, a mother, an herbalist—wondering when we decided that marketing for their microbiome discomfort gets to have the loudest voice in my child’s brain.
This chapter isn’t an indictment of joy. It’s an invitation to reclaim it.
Until I removed it from my own diet, I had no idea how much control sugar had over me. I had no idea how wonderful it could feel to kick sugar out of my life.
What if we could still make birthday cakes and marshmallows and all those magical treats—and actually make them healthy? What if the problem isn't the tradition, but the modern ingredients? What if we've been making poison look like love, when we could be sharing love in our food that actually feeds us, body and soul?
How the Spell Was Cast
Let’s take the emotion out for a moment and look with an engineer’s eyes. Your body is a system with exquisitely tuned sensors. When you eat real food, physical material travels through receptors in your stomach, past hormones from your gut, up to your brain, hopefully to say, “Oh perfect. That was enough, thank you.
But refined sugar—isolated, concentrated, frictionless—bypasses much of that process. Blood sugar spikes fast. Your pancreas floods insulin to clean it up. You crash. The brain, reading “emergency,” and demands more of that fast “energy”. Meanwhile, dopamine flickers in the reward centers.
That’s a designed response to a designed product. Food scientists have spent decades mapping the “bliss point”—that sweet spot (literally) where you crave more without feeling satisfied. The same behavioral economists who once optimized cigarette sales trained their sights on snacks, sauces, yogurts, baby foods. This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s a business model.
And the numbers are sobering: the average person routinely eats far above recommended added-sugar limits, with teens often the highest consumers. Kids under two—who need exactly zero added sugar—are still getting plenty. Not because parents are careless, but because sugar has been woven into almost everything, from breakfast “foods” to sauces to snacks marketed as healthy. The spell works best when it’s invisible.
Remembering What Sweetness Was
Our ancestors knew sweetness as medicine and celebration—rare, seasonal, earned by relationship and patience. Real maple syrup is a lesson in restraint: trees bleed sweetness slowly; it takes roughly forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. Honey is a masterclass in community; a single bee makes about 1/12th of a teaspoon in her entire life. These facts don’t mean “never touch sweetness.” They mean treat it like the jewel it is—complex, mineral-rich, antioxidant-laden, rooted in place and story. A spoon of real honey carries the memory of fields; real maple carries the cool of spring mornings.
Industrial sweeteners flipped the script. High-fructose corn syrup made “always” possible. Cheap, ubiquitous, shelf-stable. We swapped complexity for consistency, context for convenience, and then wondered why our bodies felt restless and robbed.
The Plant Who Tried to Warn Us
I discovered marshmallow root in an herbalism class. Althaea officinalis—the “mallow of the marsh.” Its very name, from the Greek althainein (“to heal”), told its purpose. For centuries, people simmered its roots to soothe sore throats and irritated bellies. It’s rich in mucilaginous polysaccharides—the silken, slippery compounds that coat and protect membranes.
And then: Paris, the 1800s. Apothecaries whipped marshmallow root with honey into a confection for the sick. It was medicine, sweetened to help it go down. As industry marched on, the root was slowly removed, then the honey, then the story—until only a white cylinder of sugar, corn syrup, and artificial flavor remained… still called by the plant’s name. The label kept the memory; the body lost the benefit.
That’s the arc of so much modern food: isolate, extract, replace, rename. But names are breadcrumbs. We can follow them home.
What Sugar Does (Gently, Clearly)
You already know sugar can wreak havoc—but here’s a simple, compassionate map:
Metabolism: Frequent spikes keep insulin high; high insulin locks fat in storage and keeps hunger noisy.
Inflammation & skin: Glycation (“sugar-gluing”) stiffens collagen, aging skin and joints faster.
Mood & focus: Roller-coaster blood sugar often means roller-coaster moods and foggier thinking.
Microbiome: Ultra-processed sweeteners and refined carbs favor opportunistic microbes and crowd out diversity; a simpler ecosystem is a less resilient one.
Teeth & cavities: Not a “mouth” problem—a microbial and substrate problem. Feed the wrong bugs, get the wrong outcome.
None of this is about shame. It’s about orientation. Once you see the map, you can choose a different route.
The Calorie Confusion
Calories, by the way, are being talked about with the wrong set of units, a unit of energy without direction.
For example, speed is a measure of how fast you are moving, while velocity takes into consideration the direction. You can be moving really really fast, but not going anywhere (like a hamster wheel, or backwards).
When we talk about calories, we cannot say what we work off equals what came in. That energy has to be absorbed and transformed, and if you don’t give it anything useful, you are revving the engine with the wrong kind of fuel in the tank!
Think of them as boxes from a delivery truck: 200 goes of nuts vs candy, 100 calories of nuts vs candy, do very different things to your body.
Your body cares about what is useful inside of those boxes: Amino acids? Minerals? Phytonutrients? Or packing peanuts and a toxic dump with a direct address to the liver? Exercise can’t turn packing peanuts into parts. Revving a sports car on bad oil doesn’t make the engine work better, it only wears out the car. The input matters.
What Sugar Actually Is (And Isn't)
Sugar isn't food—not really. It's more easily defined as a drug than food.
Food gives us essential nutrients that our bodies require to function: vitamins, minerals, protein, healthy fats. Food satisfies hunger and naturally signals when we've had enough.
Drugs, on the other hand, cause us to want more of them, constantly. They're refined to create dependency, to keep us buying more. They provide no essential nutrients yet trigger powerful cravings to continue eating.
Yes, our bodies need glucose (a form of sugar) to function—but only a teeny amount we get from vegetables, whole grains, and other real foods. Our bodies can even make glucose from protein when needed. We don’t need added sugar—the refined, concentrated doses flooding our food supply.
Refined sugar fits the drug definition perfectly. Sugar companies have spent decades engineering the perfect "bliss point"—that precise combination of sweetness that triggers maximum craving while bypassing your natural ability to say “I’m full”. Every refined sugar product is designed to make you want another bite, another sip, or another purchase. And it hooks us as young as possible.
Modern doctors complain about mothers coming in for checkups with a strange brown liquid in their child’s baby bottle. It’s soda, because “they like it” so much.
There are a lot of things wrong with this, but the problem isn't just the type of sugar we’re consuming—it's the dose, the speed, and what comes with it.
In nature, sugars come in tiny amounts, slowly absorbed, packaged with fiber that makes you feel full and are given nutrients your body needs, and knows how to use. And they only come at certain times of the year.
An apple has about 10 grams of sugar, while soda has 40 grams. But there is more to look at here than just the numbers. An apple’s 10 grams of natural sugars are wrapped in fiber that takes time to break down, plus vitamins and antioxidants. Your body processes it slowly, you feel satisfied, and you naturally stop eating.
The way food is processed destroys this natural balance. A can of soda give us 40 grams of isolated sugar—equivalent to 4 apples—directly into your bloodstream in minutes, with zero fiber, zero nutrients, and zero signals of your body saying it is full, happy, content. With soda, your body floods with insulin, crashes, and then craves more of it.
We've been convinced that a substance processed beyond recognition, and stripped of everything nature gave with it, that this could be called a food. That's the spell we need to break.
Our food-like-substances, as described by Dr. Mark Hyman, have been refined to ensure they cause maximum addiction while providing zero nutrition.
The Engineer's Analysis: How the System Actually Works
Food is very personal. We are hard wired to crave the foods our parents fed us. And we are offended if someone tells us to eat a different way. It was easier to convert people’s religions than their food choices and food words in the past.
But let’s take the emotion away from food for a second to look at what our bodies see. Put on the VR glasses to look around the room and hunt for real nutrients that our body can use, not just temporary mouth pleasure that harms us.
As an engineer, I care about what's actually happening in your brain when you eat sugar. This is about data, systems, and root cause analysis.
When you eat refined sugar, the glucose in your blood spikes right away—sometimes jumping 40, 60, even 100 points from where it was. All that glucose can damage your blood vessels. So your pancreas, in panic mode, dumps insulin into your bloodstream to grab all that glucose before it damages your cells.
That does not sound like self care- right off the bat.
But your pancreas often overshoots, dumping too much insulin, leaving you with lower blood sugar than when you started. Your brain interprets this crash as an emergency and sends out urgent craving signaling for more of that sugar.
It might sound like our bodies are naive, but really, they are terribly confused. Never in millions of years of evolution has it seen its own species trying to poison and trick itself.
This isn't a willpower problem—feeling weak because we want more of the drug we just had: it's a rational response by your body trying to control a problem of a predatory modern business tactic. Meanwhile, that same sugar rush triggers dopamine release in your brain's reward center—the same pathway activated by cocaine and alcohol. And remember where Coca Cola gets its name from: its initial ingredient was literally cocaine. Your brain learns to associate sugar with pleasure and relief, not possibly understanding that could have all been on purpose.
No wonder you can't eat just one cookie. The slogan for chips is “Bet you can’t eat just one.” The snack was designed to make you want another one, to keep buying more.
But I can empathize with the engineers hired to create a food people want to come back and eat more of. They just did too good of a job. In fact, it made more sense to ask that of them, that then come back 50 years later and ask them to make foods less addicting, because people are too obese and our country’s health was suffering too much. Now, they are asked to make foods taste less good, to be less profitable.
This does not mean real food tastes bad, it just breaks down the problem into the nuances of the science of addiction.
The Science of Engineered Addiction
Most of us don’t know the food industry has spent decades, and billions of dollars studying exactly how to make you crave more. In his book "Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Giants Hooked Us," Michael Moss interviews top food executives and scientists who did research for the companies that rule our food system. "I feel so sorry for the public," said Robert Lin, retired lead scientist at Frito Lay. "I was employed at a time I couldn't do much about it."
When we started to understand cigarettes were a problem, the exact same humans, the same executives from disgraced cigarette companies, were hired by major food companies to share their understanding of addiction, to design more addicting foods. And they had the money to design studies that could never be funded by the government, to understand ourselves, and learn what it takes to make our brains light up and want more. The amount of money they were able to spend on this kind of science tells us how grossly productive their tactics were.
Scientists were asked to make food taste good—to make it "addictive." When scientists were trying to find out what makes rats addicted to food, it wasn't fat alone. The rats would eat it and give up eventually. It was when eating sugar combined with fat, in the form of donuts, that the test animals became food zombies. They could not stop eating, even to death. Donuts are our ultimate zombie biscuits, as told by Peter Attia.
Many of the foods we eat are genetically designed to bypass our brain's natural "stop" signals. Our eyes see colors and think "variety" and "energy," but our bodies aren't getting the array of they expect and need when they see those kinds of colors in nature. We've been stripping, extracting, refining, and chemically altering foods until they're profitable, pretending they're all part of the food spectrum we should be able to eat. But our bodies don't know what to do with these nutritionally scarce, highly addictive items that are chemically closer to plastic than actual food.
They're not just void of nutrition—they're causing incredible harm inside our bodies and minds.
The Numbers Tell the Devastating Story
The American Heart Association puts a limit on how much sugar we are expecting to eat. Now remember, with food, they often say eat at least this much proten, etc. To get more of it. With sugar, they only say stop eating it at a certain limit.
It recommends a maximum 25 grams of added sugar for women, 36g for men. Based on real-life averages:
Babies and toddlers under 3 years old are eating 50 grams on average, every day (though recommended zero—doubling the adult limit). Our babies are eating twice the limit of what adults should be eating. So they are at 50 grams, the limit is 25.
And the average person eats 70 grams of sugar every day (3x more than the recommended limit).
The worst of the groups studied are teenagers, who eat the most at 144 grams an AVERAGE (6x the limit), every single day. And on “average” means some are way more.
We're raising children who've been biochemically studied and programmed to crave addictive substances from birth, then wondering why they struggle with food, focus, and emotional regulation as they grow up.
Children under two years old should have no added sugar in their diet at all. Yet they double the adult limit. Added sugars alter their expectation of food, creating dependencies by hijacking dopamine receptors, greatly increasing their risk of addiction to other substances. It also impairs their ability to cope with moderate stressors, and slows cognitive development. It slows their brain development.
The Innocent Face of Addiction
We put Girl Scouts on doorsteps selling what is essentially a drug. We teach our young girls to profit from other people's addictions. This is a system that uses our most trusted relationships, our most innocent representatives, to distribute addictive substances, and make a profit, by hijacking other children's brain chemistry.
We've completely inverted the natural order. Sugar used to be medicine, doled out in careful doses for special occasions or illness. Treasured for its rarity, and benefits to us. Now syrupy soda is cheaper than clean water in many places around the world, served in a form far worse than anything our ancestors ever encountered.
The Hidden Economics Targeting the Vulnerable
American taxpayers subsidize about $4 billion worth of soda products annually through SNAP—the program meant to provide nutrition to families that need it the most. This money that flows directly from the tax payer’s Treasury to pay for food into the businesses that sell soda. This drain accounts for 0.4% of the Entire GDP of America, funded straight to soda. Americans pay for the food stamp program, which goes directly to big soda businesses.
People will fight fiercely to keep up their habit of drinking Coca-Cola, and that's their right. But the question isn't whether people should be allowed to drink soda—it's whether taxpayers should be forced to pay for other people’s sugary drinks to be cheaper- subsidizing the purchase of products that have no nutritional justification and actively contribute to the health problems we're simultaneously spending billions trying to treat. Let people spend their own money on whatever they want to, but not money specifically designated for nutrition.
It's like a triple payment. Our taxes subsidize it, you pay it the counter, and then we pay again, massively through health pay.
These foods are not “cheaper” for being subsidized. We pay to have the costs artificially lowered, then pay again with our ailing health and health costs. Our costs of health care are expected to cripple us if the trend continues. The real cost of a fast food burger should not be $4, in reality, it should be $400, or $4,000 considering what health care costs without insurance.
The same government spent only $650 million to prevent chronic diseases like diabetes, that are caused by soda and other sugary things.
Stated again, this means money given by the total public from taxes spent $4B directly on soda, but much less than $1B on prevention of the diseases created by things including soda.
The people in our country with the least income are not allowed to use their SNAP benefits to buy hot rotisserie chicken—ready-to-eat protein—but they can buy unlimited amounts of soda, a product with only negative nutritional value.
Those Hit the Hardest
I feel like it is important to explain some of the things working against the American people.
Not only is the food system full of crap, it advertises hardest to those with the least money. None of this is accidental.
In an analysis of food marketing research shows that marketing most heavily targets the poor, the “super users”. Those with the least money spend the most on non-nutritional addictive processed garbage. We find a higher concentration of billboards for highly processed foods found in areas of the most poverty, where people have the highest rates of diabetes and the worst health outcomes that make things like more Covid lethal.
And it is not getting better. From 2013 to 2017, in just 3 years, spending on TV advertising for unhealthy food directed at Black teens increased by 50 percent—from $217 million to $333 million. Communities that need the most help, are target the most with advertising- not help.
We are all being studied, and the results of that study are being used to keep you buying foods that are slowly killing you. Not killing you immediately, just slowly enough so you can them be a long term customer to the doctor who sells drugs for mega insurance companies to manage (ie maintain) chronic problems with no end in sight. This is our capitalist economy summed in a nutshell: eep people alive, but in a zombie state- too exhausted to change anything about it. Just keep the money flowing, at any cost.
What would be the soda company's incentive to stop? There wouldn't be one, not internally. It has to be us. We have to start before the government catches on, because the way politics works, lobbyists infest our city halls like cockroaches. Things change only when enough people demand it.
The Rational Response
When we understand this manipulation, modern eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia start to look like rational responses to a poisoned food system. When your food is toxic, refusing to eat it shows wisdom. The problem is that most people conclude there are no good options, when the truth is there are choices that make us feel amazing AND feed us deeply AND taste incredible.
Being overweight isn't a moral failing—it's a sign that our hormones are disrupted by foods designed to override our natural satiety signals.
The school lunch program was created at a time when Americans were too skinny, ie malnourished, to be recrutied for the world wars. By the next one, Americans were too fat to join. In both cases, it was a problem of malnourishment. Just because we eat a lot, does not mean we are getting any nutrients. In fact, it proves we are not getting nutrients, since our bodies would feel full and signal us to stop eating if it got what it needed.
The Science of Harm: What Sugar Actually Does to Us
You have to think about your body up close. Think of your blood stream as a superhighway to distribute nutrients. When food is coming through, this is seen as nutrients passing through. Cells that need something, hold out a flag to say, do you have any of this? And nutrients are distributed through the blood stream. Processed foods with things like sugar and cheap fried canola oils pass through, but never get picked up. Instead of being helpful, they just leave more of a mess to be cleaned up, often times even blocking the nutrient absorption of key minerals. Vitamin E is one we know that gets blocked if we eat too many bad oils.
Things like hormonal birth control also block vitamin absorption, and anyone taking it should be warned of this, and be advised to take a vitamin panel regularly to watch for the depletion of their vitamin status. Safety studies max out at 4 years. Many women are on it for decades, and surprised to find out their bones are weak and now have more problems because they were handed a pill like candy.
We’ve known this long enough that these things are bad for us. None of this is new.
In 2016, NPR reported that 50 years ago, the sugar industry quietly paid scientists to point the blame at fat instead of sugar for heart disease. That's where we got the confusion about "healthy" seed oils and margarine instead of butter. And then the major turn around 10 years ago saying, oh, forget the margarine. The whole “low fat” craze was due to this misconception. It was in this moment that sugar was portrayed as innocent, while fat was the culprit for our ailing health. But we actually need to eat healthy fat to lose fat. But that is for another chapter.
In 2014, researchers analyzed almost 9,000 scientific studies on sugar, from decades of research, and found that sugar is linked to a higher risk of 45 health problems. Among them, sugar is implicated in heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancer, and depression.
It takes 17 years for research to make it into education of doctors. But this is over 50 years of research on sugar that has been ignored and not shared loudly enough.
Cancer can be described as what happens when sugar in your blood. When someone goes for a PET scan to check for cancer, they first drink a sugary drink, a glucose solution. The parts of their body with cancer light up because cancer cells gorge on the sugar- this fast energy, with no care of nutrition. Cancer cells are like zombies, they just want to grow without care of the host. This should be a major red flag: sugar literally feeds cancer cells—cells that forget to die and want to grow like a zombie apocalypse in your body. Often doctors are shocked when they are offered to see it this way.
Just two blood sugar spikes per week doubles your chances of developing depression. Not to mention diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, ADHD—the list continues.
The damage doesn't stop there. We can see:
Diabetes as sugar overwhelming your bloodstream
Brain fog as sugar inflaming the neurons in your brain
Acne as sugar feeding harmful bacteria in your skin
Cavities as feeding the bacteria on your teeth
Depression as sugar crashing your neurotransmitters
Wrinkles as sugar cross-linking your collagen
Fatty liver as sugar stored where it shouldn't be
Mood swings as sugar on a biochemical roller coaster
We already know sugar isn't good for us, but we keep finding excuses to keep it around. We don't connect it to the seemingly unrelated problems that it causes- or at the very least, is associated with. Sugar doesn't just make us jittery—it's terrible for our microbiome, disrupts our hormones, feeds inflammation, and creates chaos in every system it touches.
And this is a problem for us beyond cellular level- down to the microbe level.
The more sugar we consume, the simpler our gut microbiome becomes. Like the other parts of our body that jump on this cheap energy- it focuses on that, and nothing else. It creates a war within our microbiome that craves balance and diversity. Those with autism often crave white and yellow foods—refined, processed foods stripped of nutrients and fiber. Yet gut therapies are showing promise in cases once thought untreatable. The same can be said for alzheimers. We're not just cutting people's lives shorter— making those lives less vibrant, we're messing them up from birth. Autism can be described as a child’s loss of empathy, with behavioral problems but also the lack of eye contact and a natural want for connection. Could we be changing our behavior and ability to connect with one another because of our sugar addiction and poor diets? The implications are staggering.
We are the first generation to be expected to live a shorter life span than our parents. This means we have gotten some things very wrong, very recently. Now that we know better, maybe we can stop this deterioration.
Folk Lore and Lost Wisdom: What Our Ancestors Knew
There's a Native American folk story that tries to explain why maple syrup is so hard to come by. Once upon a time, syrup flowed freely from the maple trees. Humans spent all their time sleeping beneath them, drinking the sweet sap, ignoring all their other tasks. In response, the wise ones asked the trees to pour out the syrup more slowly, making it much harder to extract. From then on, only with tremendous patience do we get real maple syrup.
This wisdom story captures something we've forgotten: we were never meant to sit under trees drinking sap all day. Yet that's exactly what we're doing now.
Real maple syrup has healing properties—like sap, it acts as a bandaid for trees when they get damaged. The antioxidants in real maple syrup aren't just medicine for the trees—they work similarly in our bodies, helping neutralize free radicals before they can cause cellular damage.
We have to know what oxidation means to know why we would want anti-oxidants. Oxidation is the reason we cover our food in the fridge. It causes aging in our skin, wearing out the collagen in our skin. All cells are effected by it, and some foods, known as anti-oxidants, protect this from happening. Oxygen is essential for life - we need it for our cells to breath and create energy. But it is also highly reactive and can form unstable molecules called free radicals. Think of these as like, bandits, or more simply: rascals. These free rascals can damage cells, proteins, and even our DNA through oxidative stress, contributing to aging and disease.
Trees make oxygen, but they also create compounds that fight the damage caused by oxygen. Maple syrup is an antioxidant powerhouse with 24 different known antioxidants and 67 polyphenols that help neutralize free radicals in our bodies.
Natural sugar—whether from berries, maple syrup, or sugar cane—really isn't so bad for us in its original form. Found seasonally, it was prized and stashed away for special events. But when high fructose corn syrup was industrialized in the 1970s, everything changed. We created something our bodies were never designed to handle, available everywhere, all the time, cheaper than clean water.
90% of maple syrup sold is the fake stuff, made of high fructose corn syrup and who-knows-what else. It is a shell of what it once was, more harmful than helpful, and not nearly as delicious as the real thing. But we still call it syrup. You would never see fake maple syrup in a fancy restaurant. The most expensive restaurants use the best ingredients which just happen to be the ones LEAST processed. Follow the flavor back to the earth made goods.
Even in our parents' memories (and some of our own), sugar was rare and expensive. The real natural stuff requires backbreaking work, so it was never cheap. Sugar cane plantations only boomed with the aid of forced slave labor. Sugar was never available to us in abundance. We were biologically designed to jump on sugar when we saw it—because it was supposed to be rare and healing.
Honey’s Power
Syrup is just one example of nature’s honey, but honey is one used in Egypt’s original marshmallow recipe, and can be in our own as well, thousands of years later.
Of course, just like syrup, honey is not easy to come by. We have to battle the bees, and ensure we do not take more than they need to survive.
A single bee will visit around 2-4 million flowers and fly roughly 55,000 miles to produce just one pound of honey - that's more than twice around the Earth! During peak season, a strong hive with 60,000 bees can produce 60-100 pounds of surplus honey every year. Each bee makes only about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her entire 6-week lifespan during active season.
This stuff is like liquid gold, not to be wasted, when we understand how it got here on our plates. When we are removed from the food system, as most Americans are, we have no idea why waste matters when food appears to be so abundant. Food waste is a major concern, but so is the empathy for the creatures and trees and animals that put in effort to make these medicines for themselves.
Traditional medicine has used honey for wound healing, cough suppression, and digestive issues for millennia. Modern research supports many of these uses: honey has proven antimicrobial properties due to its low water content, acidity, and hydrogen peroxide production. Modern studies agree with folk medicine that it does indeed aid in wound healing, burns, and for controlling coughs. The WHO and American Academy of Pediatrics recommend it over cough medicines for children over one year.
Humans have been harvesting honey for at least 8,000-10,000 years. Cave paintings in Spain show honey hunting scenes from around 6,000 BC. The Egyptians were young in comparison, doing the same 2,500 BC. Honey was so valuable it was used as currency and buried with pharaohs.
There have even been some amazing animal partnerships that help us find honey together, most famously the honeyguide bird (Indicator indicator) in Africa. Its name tells its history in both latin and english. The long standing timeline that would require this kind of relationship only points to the antiquity we are dealing with here. The Hadza people of Tanzania have specific whistles and calls to communicate with the birds. The honeyguide leads humans to wild bee colonies - sometimes over a mile away - then waits while humans use smoke and tools to access the honey. In return, the bird gets access to beeswax it couldn't reach alone.
Honey knockoffs found in the story often come with concerning changes to nature’s single ingredient of honey, including high fructose corn syrup, rice syrup, cane sugar, and even a man made version from various chemicals. Chinese honey has been particularly problematic, sometimes containing antibiotics, heavy metals, or being completely artificial.
Local honey retains its natural pollen, enzymes, and beneficial compounds that processing destroys. There is even a folk story that locally sourced honey can help build allergy tolerance to an area, due to the small pollen content used by those bees.
Any company can write “local” in its name, since that is just a relative term. Check for yourself just how local it is. I live in California, and I’ve seen a brand name called “Local Honey” sourced in Minnesota.
When we harvest honey, we should only be taking the surplus that bees don't need for survival - but this requires careful, knowledgeable beekeeping. A typical hive needs about 30-60 pounds of honey to survive winter. In colder regions, they might need 90 pounds. Responsible beekeepers only harvest from "surplus" honey supers - boxes placed above the main hive body where bees store extra honey beyond what they need. Industrial operations sometimes take too much, then feed bees sugar water or corn syrup, which weakens their immune systems and nutritional health. Some commercial operations harvest almost everything and substitute cheap sugar feeds.
If we took the entire combs, we risk destroying the colony- meaning no more honey for anyone. But people like the Hadza follow sustainable traditional practices, partnered with the honeyguide birds, that allow them to hold onto these long term friendships. They would understand that healthy, well-fed bees are more productive long-term than stressed, undernourished colonies. We should learn the same about our own selves.
Sugar sources in nature are rare and precious - tree saps, fruits, nectar - requiring complex relationships between plants, pollinators, and then more relationships to access the bees’ treasure. Honey is a perfect example of how our ancestors understood food as medicine and community resource rather than isolated commodity.
Sugar Comparisons
Some argue that "sugar is sugar", but I disagree. We can still eat some good stuff, and do much better for ourselves than the mainstream.
Various kinds of sugars are made up of different percentages of fructose and glucose. Just for comparison, cane sugar is made up of equal parts glucose and fructose (50% each), while high fructose corn syrup typically contains 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Slight differences in percentage points may not seem like much on paper, but the slightly higher fructose content in high fructose corn syrup matters metabolically. Fructose is primarily metabolized in the liver, while glucose can be metabolized anywhere essentially. Fructose alone has a lower glycemic index (19-23) compared to glucose (100), this doesn't tell the whole story since fructose must be processed by the liver and can contribute to fatty liver disease in large quantities. This is why glucose has a more predictable and manageable effect on blood sugar compared to fructose. When you eat glucose (or sucrose, which breaks down into glucose and fructose), the glucose gets distributed throughout your body's cells for immediate use, while the fructose component gets shuttled directly to your liver for processing.
The distributed nature of glucose metabolism is also why your body has developed sophisticated systems (insulin, glucagon) to regulate glucose levels, since so many different tissues depend on it for energy.
Blood sugar is another thing to pay attention to. The glycemic index is one way to see how much something has potential to spike blood sugar.
Based on glycemic index research, here's how common sweeteners compare on the GI (glycemic index):
Stevia: 0 to 1
Sugar alcohols (xylitol, erythritol): 0 to 13
Fructose: 19 to 23
Agave nectar: 15 to 30
Coconut sugar: 35
Cane sugar: 43 (raw material)
Maple syrup: 54
Honey: 50 to 55
Table sugar: 65 (processed, often made from either sugar cane or sugar beets)
High fructose corn syrup: 62 to 68
High Fructose Corn Syrup
The transition from sugar to high fructose corn syrup happened remarkably quickly. It was introduced in 1970. By 1980, half of the sweetener in Coca Cola was allowed to be HFCS, and within 4 years of it, all of it was. Pepsi was also 100% HFCS.
Reagan’s policy’s in 1981 raised tarrifs on sugar, making HFCS much more in demand, and artificially cheap.
Sugar Cane’s history
Sugar cane is actually a tropical grass. Traditionally, its harvesting was extraordinarily labor-intensive. They took a year and a half to mature, and needed to be crushed within hours of harvesting, or else it would start fermenting. Workers faced dangerous conditions, from the hand tools to crushing mills to cutting and managing boiling houses.
Whole cane sugar retains some molasses and trace amounts of minerals, while refined white sugar contains almost zero vitamins or minerals.
Sugar became a problem right around the historical time of colonialization. The pope wrote a treatise on the acceptability of making slaves of people who cannot be converted. And within a few decades, the slave trade exploded.
Breaking the Spell (Without Breaking Your Heart)
I don’t want a life without cake. I want a life where cake does something good for me. I want it all.
I write a lot about sugar-free dessert options because I believe we can have food that is good-for-you AND good-tasting. We can feel amazing and eat good food. We don't have to choose one or the other. That's a false choice created by a food system that prioritizes profit over our wellbeing.
Some easy tips for replacing popular choices with less damaging ones:
Choose real over fake: honey, maple, dates, ripe fruit—sweetness that arrives with minerals and meaning.
Slow the delivery: fiber, fat, and protein buffer sweetness.
Retrain the palate: after a reset, strawberries taste like fireworks again.
Re-enchant dessert: upgrade ingredients and rituals
And yes—make marshmallows. The real thing.
The Plant People's Wisdom: How We Lost Our Way
I had already been talking about sugar, researching and writing about it for years when I found myself in an herbalism course about the medicines in our backyard. One struck me, a plant called the marsh mallow. The mallow of the marsh. This tall plant lives alongside waterways like rivers, with showy pink flowers, and grows a medicine within itself to combat that wetness of its environment. It used to be a remedy for sore throats, as far back as the Egyptians along the Nile.
But, the marshmallow as medicine? Its name had been hiding its healing history in plain sight. What was once ground up roots and a gooey medicine, turned into its modern day sugar bomb, with nothing promising about it at all- health wise. It was once mixed with honey, nature’s bee medicine, that has amazing healing properties in itself. It was coveted by french Parisians, after the French guy Napoleon took over Egypt for 3 years around 1800 AD, bringing back the Rosetta stone, and this ancient medicinal recipe. The ancient name for Egypt, Khem, gives us the root of our name for the scientific field of CHEMistry.
Anyway- the french were obsessed with all things Egyptian culture for the next hundred years or so, even making a state-sponsored-book about Egypt and modeling their rebuild of the city of Paris around its architecture and city planning. In the meantim, the marshmallow had became famous! In the next few hundred years of industrialization, every healing part of this medicine was replaced, becoming a literal shell of its ancient healing ancestor. But miraculously, its name remained. It left us something to trace back its true origin story- and healing potential still in our grasp.
The Latin name for the marsh mallow plant comes from Greek althainein, meaning "to heal or cure," while its family, malvaceae, derives from malake, meaning "soft"—all due to the plant's healing properties. Marshmallow's medicine comes from mucilaginous polysaccharides that bind with water to produce protective coating around membranes. This "slippery" quality blocks irritation to damaged tissue and prevents bacteria from entering broken skin or lungs, helping our immunity fight infection. Modern science confirms its ancient use, approving this mallow plant as a way to bolster innate immunity while healing tissue without cytotoxic side effects in most modern medicinces.
Most plant medicines are more gentle and effective than their modern counterparts. But nobody can patent a plant. To make money, we need to isolate them and add something like a chemical and claim it to be our own.
Once, if you had a sore throat, an ancient ancestor would have handed you a marshmallow. Now, we hand them to a child only for temporary mouth pleasure and added risk of obesity and everything that comes with it.
This pattern repeats everywhere I look. It was the plants themselves that were the most intelligent teachers, and the natives that lived and working among them, inspiring the best science and scientists that later colonists overlooked and misunderstood. Every pharmaceutical breakthrough traces back to some forgotten root, leaf, or flower that indigenous peoples had been using safely for thousands of years. Yet we call their knowledge "primitive" while we take their discoveries, isolate single compounds, patent them, and sell them back as "advanced medicine." Once upon a time, our ancestors were viewed as wise. Old was smart. Then there was a moment of domination, and old became synonymous with “outdated”. But we should not be so fast to jump to the same conclusion. We have much to relearn.
Most artificial vanilla (85% of global production) now comes from some form of petroleum and pine. Natural vanilla beans and extracts contains several hundred flavor compounds. When food science isolates artificial flavors, they pull out the ones with the most health benefits, giving us shells of the original with none of the benefit. If you have every tried natural vanilla, it is impossible to go back.
The plant people who preserved this knowledge—mostly women, mostly marginalized—were dismissed as backward, the old “crone” lost her “crown”, the “venerated” became associated with “venereal”, and their wisdom buried under the authority of those who never bothered to listen. The history here is fascinating, and to be discussed much further in an upcoming work.
Nature is very wise, and so are the indigenous cultures that have been drowned out that lived close to it.
When you use real ingredients—real vanilla instead of petroleum-derived vanillin, real maple syrup instead of high fructose corn syrup, real butter instead of industrial oils—the flavors are more complex, more satisfying, more delicious, and more healing than anything engineered in a lab.
There's something magical about cooking with ingredients that carry the story of their origins—honey that holds the essence of million offlowers, maple syrup that concentrates decades of spring mornings, vanilla beans that traveled across oceans. When you work with these ancient allies, you're not just making food; you're participating in alchemy, transforming simple elements into something that nourishes both body and soul.
Your cells recognize this difference. They respond to real ingredients with gratitude rather than confusion, with energy rather than inflammation, with satisfaction rather than endless craving.
The Deeper Sweetness: What You've Really Created
What you've created isn't just a sugar-free marshmallow. You've created proof that you can satisfy cravings without triggering biochemical chaos. The gelatin provides amino acids that support gut health and beautiful skin. The honey provides minerals and antioxidants. The marshmallow root connects you to thousands of years of healing wisdom.
These marshmallows won't trigger the blood sugar spike that sends you searching for more sugar an hour later. They'll satisfy your desire for something sweet while actually supporting your body's natural functions.
Recipe: Sugar-Free Marshmallows (with Marshmallow Root)
Fluffy, campfire-worthy, and gut-friendly. Sweetened with raw honey, stabilized with grass-fed gelatin, and infused with the plant that gave marshmallows their name.
Heads-up: Honey is not appropriate for children under 1 year old. For little ones, swap in pure maple syrup.
Ingredients (1 8Ă—8 pan)
1 cup water, divided
3 Tbsp unflavored grass-fed gelatin
½ cup raw honey (or maple syrup)
½ tsp real vanilla extract (or scraped vanilla bean)
½ tsp fine sea salt
1 Tbsp marshmallow root powder (or ÂĽ cup strong cold infusion; see note)
½ cup arrowroot starch (or coconut flour) for dusting
Optional, for a classic feel: 1–2 tsp gelatin-free cocoa or cinnamon to dust
Marshmallow Root Note
For extra soothing power, you can replace ¼ cup of the water with a cold infusion: soak 2 Tbsp dried marshmallow root in ½ cup cool water for 6–8 hours, strain, and measure ¼ cup for the recipe. If using the infusion, reduce the water in Step 1 accordingly and keep the 1 Tbsp marshmallow powder for structure and flavor.
Method
Bloom
Pour ½ cup water into the bowl of a stand mixer. Sprinkle gelatin evenly over the surface. Let it sit 10 minutes until spongy.Make the syrup
In a small saucepan, combine remaining ½ cup water, honey, and salt. Bring to a gentle simmer without stirring, until the mixture reaches 230°F (a soft-ball stage that plays nicer with honey). Remove from heat.Whip
Start the mixer on low (whisk attachment). In a thin stream, carefully pour the hot syrup down the side of the bowl into the bloomed gelatin. Increase speed to high and whip 10–12 minutes, until the mixture grows glossy, thick, and holds soft peaks—like a cloud finding its shape.Finish the magic
In the final minute, beat in vanilla and marshmallow root powder. The aroma should be floral, faintly herbal, real.Set
Dust an 8Ă—8 pan generously with arrowroot. Scrape the marshmallow into the pan, smooth the top with a greased spatula, and dust the surface lightly. Let set 4 hours (or overnight) at room temperature.Cut
Turn out onto a cutting board dusted with arrowroot. Use a dusted knife to cut squares or a dusted cookie cutter for whimsy. Toss pieces in a little more arrowroot to keep them from sticking.
Storage: Airtight container at room temp up to 5 days, or freeze up to 2 months (they thaw in minutes).
To toast: These toast! Skewer and hover over gentle heat until caramelized at the edges.
Why These Work for Your Body
Gelatin provides glycine and proline—amino acids that support a healthy gut lining, skin elasticity, and connective tissue.
Raw honey (or maple) brings minerals, antioxidants, and complexity; far less is needed for satisfaction once your palate resets.
Marshmallow root contributes the silken mucilage that soothes and coats—an old medicine returning to the table.
A New Tradition: The Sweetness Ceremony
Make ceremony your ally. Here’s a simple ritual to anchor the change:
Name it: “We eat sweetness that loves us back.”
Choose it: Pick one celebration dessert you’ll always upgrade (these marshmallows, a honey-sweetened birthday cake, chocolate truffles with dates).
Pair it: Always serve dessert with something that slows absorption: whipped coconut cream, nuts, yogurt, or after a protein-rich meal.
Savor it: Phones away. Candles lit. Two bites in silence. Teach your nervous system that dessert is a complete experience, not a sprint.
For Families (and Parties)
The marshmallow bar: Squares + bowls of toasted coconut, chopped nuts, cacao nibs, freeze-dried berries. Let kids “roll their own.”
S’mores, upgraded: Dark-chocolate squares + cassava or almond-flour crackers.
Hot cocoa night: Unsweetened cocoa + warmed milk of choice + one marshmallow; let the honey come from the marshmallow itself.
The Engineer’s Debrief (Short and Sweet)
If you change the input, the system self-corrects.
The goal isn’t “no sweetness”; it’s true sweetness.
Reduce the peak, reduce the crash. Pair sweet with fiber/fat/protein.
Replace fake with real; your palate will recalibrate fast.
Ritual beats rules. Make better the default.
The Reframe That Frees You
You are not the problem. The system is. Once you see that, the spell thins. You don’t have to grit your teeth at every birthday party or ban joy from your kitchen. You just need to put joy back in its right relationship—with nature, with your biology, with the kind of sweetness that satisfies without stealing tomorrow’s energy.
The first time I made these marshmallows with marshmallow root, I felt like I’d found a hidden door in a house I’d lived in my entire life. On the other side: real flavor, steady energy, kids who could enjoy dessert and still sleep, a celebration that didn’t demand a sacrifice I wasn’t willing to make. When I shared them, thousands of people felt that same click of recognition—oh. This is what we meant all along.
Tradition is a living practice. We get to keep what serves us, and evolve what harms.
The Sweet Life: Welcome to the Other Side
Real sweetness—the kind that satisfies at a cellular level—comes from energy that's stable and strong. It comes from the satisfaction of creating something beautiful with your own hands, from breaking free from the endless cycle of craving and guilt.
These marshmallows are just the beginning. They're proof that you can satisfy cravings without sabotaging health, that you can enjoy sweetness without surrendering your power of choice.
The spell is broken the moment you realize you were always free to choose. Sugar only has power over you when you don't understand what it's doing. Once you see clearly, you can navigate the sweet world with wisdom instead of being swept away by biochemical manipulation.
We can still create those magical moments without poisoning the people we love. We can use the most basic, pure ingredients possible instead of the refined stuff engineered for profit. We can make memories that nourish instead of harm.
This isn't about perfection or never enjoying sweet things again. It's about having choices—real choices, not the illusion of choice between different brands of the same harmful substances.
The spell breaks when you realize you were never the problem. The system is the problem, and you have more power to step outside that system than you ever imagined.
Next up (Chapter 3): Food as a language your cells speak fluently—and how color becomes your easiest daily translator.
———
Chapter 2: Breaking the Spell
Recipe 2: Sugar-Free Marshmallows from Scratch
We've made sugar innocent, perpetuating a great deception where we lovingly create sugary treats with our children while simultaneously telling them not to eat too much—a contradiction that leaves kids confused and parents constantly managing the fallout. What we call "food" is actually a refined drug engineered by food scientists to trigger the same brain pathways as cocaine, creating biochemical addiction that overrides our natural satiety signals and causes everything from cancer (which literally feeds on sugar) to depression, autism, and countless other modern ailments. We've forgotten that our ancestors treated sugar as rare medicine, carefully dosed and seasonal, while plants like the marsh mallow once provided healing sweetness that has been stripped away and replaced with petroleum-derived chemicals that retain only the name of their medicinal origins. But we can reclaim both incredible taste and health by making our own versions of beloved treats using real ingredients—like these sugar-free marshmallows made with actual marshmallow root, raw honey, and grass-fed gelatin—proving that when we work with our biology instead of against it, we can break free from the engineered addiction cycle and reconnect with the ancient wisdom encoded in our cells, where science and soul converge to create true nourishment that satisfies both body and spirit.
Chapter 2: Breaking the Spell
Recipe 2: Sugar-Free Marshmallows from Scratch
"We have made sugar innocent."
The Great Deception We Pass Down
We spend hours in our kitchens creating beautiful home-baked cookies, pies and cakes, lovingly decorating sugar cookies for holidays with our children, building traditions around birthday cakes and holiday treats. We make these moments feel magical, fill them with love and connection and joy. They become the centerpiece of our gatherings.
Then we turn around and tell our kids, "Actually, we don't really want you to eat that. Not too much of it."
Our kids come away confused, with headaches and behavioral outbursts and cavities, but we think it's worth it. We tell ourselves the celebration was worth the damage. Some even say it is self care to give in to the beautiful tasting things in life. And we love to see the smile on people’s faces when we bring them something sweet. But in the back of our minds, we wonder, we try to restrict ourselves, and we try to convince ourselves a little sugar can’t be so bad.
What is really happening is that we tend to perpetuate things without question—traditions we're used to, ingredients we've never investigated. Things the people around us make easy to enjoy. And we partake in contradictions we stopped asking our own parents about a long time ago. We pass down customs without understanding their origins, without asking if they still serve us, without knowing if there is actual wisdom hiding in the lyrics we've forgotten. We are humming along to a song, trying to remember what it was about.
I used to spend days making elaborate sugar cookies, taking classes, remembering my own grandma filling her kitchen with baskets of home made moon shaped cookies she would drop off even to her dentist (irony here never noticed- of bringing sugar to her dentist). I would take off a few days of work before holidays, learning to make the perfect chocolate coating for bourbon soaked cherry truffles, perfecting frosting techniques, feeling good about my effort, and not worrying too much about their health impact. "It's just a special event," I'd think to myself. "These are harmless, just for fun"—until I had my own kids and realized it essentially means every weekend our kids eat this stuff- when they visit friends' houses or birthday parties, we know they're going to have some major sweets. The ice cream truck rolls right past them in the park - something my husband and I think should be illegal now that we know better. We as parents are told to limit sugar. If we know better about sugar’s consequences, does that mean we have to ask them to try to ignore the song and screaming of happy kids with the bright sprinkle ice cream cones? We have been taught an incomplete message from conflicting sources.
To change your mind on something like this is hard. We notice it all the time, that push and pull and tug of "have this, but only this much." Is it self care to dive in, or self care to avoid it? We must constantly ask ourselves, is it really that bad?
Until I removed it from my own diet, I had no idea how much control sugar had over me. I had no idea how wonderful it could feel to kick sugar out of my life.
But what if we could still make birthday cakes and marshmallows and all those magical treats—and actually make them healthy? What if the problem isn't the tradition, but the modern ingredients? What if we've been making poison look like love, when we could be sharing love in our food that actually feeds us, body and soul?
What Sugar Actually Is (And Isn't)
Sugar isn't food—not really. It's more easily defined as a drug than food.
Food gives us essential nutrients that our bodies require to function: vitamins, minerals, protein, healthy fats. Food satisfies hunger and naturally signals when we've had enough.
Drugs, on the other hand, cause us to want more of them, constantly. They're refined to create dependency, to keep us buying more. They provide no essential nutrients yet trigger powerful cravings to continue eating.
Yes, our bodies need glucose (a form of sugar) to function—but only a teeny amount we get from vegetables, whole grains, and other real foods. Our bodies can even make glucose from protein when needed. We don’t need added sugar—the refined, concentrated doses flooding our food supply.
Refined sugar fits the drug definition perfectly. Sugar companies have spent decades engineering the perfect "bliss point"—that precise combination of sweetness that triggers maximum craving while bypassing your natural ability to say “I’m full”. Every refined sugar product is designed to make you want another bite, another sip, or another purchase. And it hooks us as young as possible.
Modern doctors complain about mothers coming in for checkups with a strange brown liquid in their child’s baby bottle. It’s soda, because “they like it” so much.
There are a lot of things wrong with this, but the problem isn't just the type of sugar we’re consuming—it's the dose, the speed, and what comes with it.
In nature, sugars come in tiny amounts, slowly absorbed, packaged with fiber that makes you feel full and are given nutrients your body needs, and knows how to use. And they only come at certain times of the year.
An apple has about 10 grams of sugar, while soda has 40 grams. But there is more to look at here than just the numbers. An apple’s 10 grams of natural sugars are wrapped in fiber that takes time to break down, plus vitamins and antioxidants. Your body processes it slowly, you feel satisfied, and you naturally stop eating.
The way food is processed destroys this natural balance. A can of soda give us 40 grams of isolated sugar—equivalent to 4 apples—directly into your bloodstream in minutes, with zero fiber, zero nutrients, and zero signals of your body saying it is full, happy, content. With soda, your body floods with insulin, crashes, and then craves more of it.
We've been convinced that a substance processed beyond recognition, and stripped of everything nature gave with it, that this could be called a food. That's the spell we need to break.
Our food-like-substances, as described by Dr. Mark Hyman, have been refined to ensure they cause maximum addiction while providing zero nutrition.
The Engineer's Analysis: How the System Actually Works
Food is very personal. We are hard wired to crave the foods our parents fed us. And we are offended if someone tells us to eat a different way. It was easier to convert people’s religions than their food choices and food words in the past.
But let’s take the emotion away from food for a second to look at what our bodies see. Put on the VR glasses to look around the room and hunt for real nutrients that our body can use, not just temporary mouth pleasure that harms us.
As an engineer, I care about what's actually happening in your brain when you eat sugar. This is about data, systems, and root cause analysis.
When you eat refined sugar, the glucose in your blood spikes right away—sometimes jumping 40, 60, even 100 points from where it was. All that glucose can damage your blood vessels. So your pancreas, in panic mode, dumps insulin into your bloodstream to grab all that glucose before it damages your cells.
That does not sound like self care- right off the bat.
But your pancreas often overshoots, dumping too much insulin, leaving you with lower blood sugar than when you started. Your brain interprets this crash as an emergency and sends out urgent craving signaling for more of that sugar.
It might sound like our bodies are naive, but really, they are terribly confused. Never in millions of years of evolution has it seen its own species trying to poison and trick itself.
This isn't a willpower problem—feeling weak because we want more of the drug we just had: it's a rational response by your body trying to control a problem of a predatory modern business tactic. Meanwhile, that same sugar rush triggers dopamine release in your brain's reward center—the same pathway activated by cocaine and alcohol. And remember where Coca Cola gets its name from: its initial ingredient was literally cocaine. Your brain learns to associate sugar with pleasure and relief, not possibly understanding that could have all been on purpose.
No wonder you can't eat just one cookie. The slogan for chips is “Bet you can’t eat just one.” The snack was designed to make you want another one, to keep buying more.
But I can empathize with the engineers hired to create a food people want to come back and eat more of. They just did too good of a job. In fact, it made more sense to ask that of them, that then come back 50 years later and ask them to make foods less addicting, because people are too obese and our country’s health was suffering too much. Now, they are asked to make foods taste less good, to be less profitable.
This does not mean real food tastes bad, it just breaks down the problem into the nuances of the science of addiction.
We’ve Been Looking at The Wrong Units
As an engineer, I have to talk about this idea of calories, because we are using the wrong units to talk about food and energy. Calories are like talking about speed, instead of velocity. Speed is like going fast, but in no particular direction. You could be on a hamster wheel going nowhere, but using a lot of energy. Velocity adds the component of direction. It helps to think of calories like the boxes coming in for delivery. It is not the number of boxes that matter, but what’s inside them. 50 calories of M&M’s is very different from 50 calories of almonds. And when animals are studied to eat just something like chips or candy, they become infertile in just a couple generations, getting so sick, they can no longer make babies. This is the food system we are willingly choosing and perpetuating in the food of our children.
And the concept of working out to work off those calories also makes no sense. Would you fuel a sports car with bad fuel? Of course not. Working out on bad fuel means you exhaust your body further, without putting nutrients in your bloodstream that it needs and expects- then revving the engine to exhaustion.
The Science of Engineered Addiction
Most of us don’t know the food industry has spent decades, and billions of dollars studying exactly how to make you crave more. In his book "Sugar, Salt, Fat: How the Giants Hooked Us," Michael Moss interviews top food executives and scientists who did research for the companies that rule our food system. "I feel so sorry for the public," said Robert Lin, retired lead scientist at Frito Lay. "I was employed at a time I couldn't do much about it."
When we started to understand cigarettes were a problem, the exact same humans, the same executives from disgraced cigarette companies, were hired by major food companies to share their understanding of addiction, to design more addicting foods. And they had the money to design studies that could never be funded by the government, to understand ourselves, and learn what it takes to make our brains light up and want more. The amount of money they were able to spend on this kind of science tells us how grossly productive their tactics were.
Scientists were asked to make food taste good—to make it "addictive." When scientists were trying to find out what makes rats addicted to food, it wasn't fat alone. The rats would eat it and give up eventually. It was when eating sugar combined with fat, in the form of donuts, that the test animals became food zombies. They could not stop eating, even to death. Donuts are our ultimate zombie biscuits, as told by Peter Attia.
Many of the foods we eat are genetically designed to bypass our brain's natural "stop" signals. Our eyes see colors and think "variety" and "energy," but our bodies aren't getting the array of they expect and need when they see those kinds of colors in nature. We've been stripping, extracting, refining, and chemically altering foods until they're profitable, pretending they're all part of the food spectrum we should be able to eat. But our bodies don't know what to do with these nutritionally scarce, highly addictive items that are chemically closer to plastic than actual food.
They're not just void of nutrition—they're causing incredible harm inside our bodies and minds.
The Numbers Tell the Devastating Story
The American Heart Association puts a limit on how much sugar we are expecting to eat. Now remember, with food, they often say eat at least this much proten, etc. To get more of it. With sugar, they only say stop eating it at a certain limit.
It recommends a maximum 25 grams of added sugar for women, 36g for men. Based on real-life averages:
Babies and toddlers under 3 years old are eating 50 grams on average, every day (though recommended zero—doubling the adult limit). Our babies are eating twice the limit of what adults should be eating. So they are at 50 grams, the limit is 25.
And the average person eats 70 grams of sugar every day (3x more than the recommended limit).
The worst of the groups studied are teenagers, who eat the most at 144 grams an AVERAGE (6x the limit), every single day. And on “average” means some are way more.
We're raising children who've been biochemically studied and programmed to crave addictive substances from birth, then wondering why they struggle with food, focus, and emotional regulation as they grow up.
Children under two years old should have no added sugar in their diet at all. Yet they double the adult limit. Added sugars alter their expectation of food, creating dependencies by hijacking dopamine receptors, greatly increasing their risk of addiction to other substances. It also impairs their ability to cope with moderate stressors, and slows cognitive development. It slows their brain development.
The Innocent Face of Addiction
We put Girl Scouts on doorsteps selling what is essentially a drug. We teach our young girls to profit from other people's addictions. This is a system that uses our most trusted relationships, our most innocent representatives, to distribute addictive substances, and make a profit, by hijacking other children's brain chemistry.
We've completely inverted the natural order. Sugar used to be medicine, doled out in careful doses for special occasions or illness. Treasured for its rarity, and benefits to us. Now syrupy soda is cheaper than clean water in many places around the world, served in a form far worse than anything our ancestors ever encountered.
The Hidden Economics Targeting the Vulnerable
American taxpayers subsidize about $4 billion worth of soda products annually through SNAP—the program meant to provide nutrition to families that need it the most. This money that flows directly from the tax payer’s Treasury to pay for food into the businesses that sell soda. This drain accounts for 0.4% of the Entire GDP of America, funded straight to soda. Americans pay for the food stamp program, which goes directly to big soda businesses.
People will fight fiercely to keep up their habit of drinking Coca-Cola, and that's their right. But the question isn't whether people should be allowed to drink soda—it's whether taxpayers should be forced to pay for other people’s sugary drinks to be cheaper- subsidizing the purchase of products that have no nutritional justification and actively contribute to the health problems we're simultaneously spending billions trying to treat. Let people spend their own money on whatever they want to, but not money specifically designated for nutrition.
It's like a triple payment. Our taxes subsidize it, you pay it the counter, and then we pay again, massively through health pay.
These foods are not “cheaper” for being subsidized. We pay to have the costs artificially lowered, then pay again with our ailing health and health costs. Our costs of health care are expected to cripple us if the trend continues. The real cost of a fast food burger should not be $4, in reality, it should be $400, or $4,000 considering what health care costs without insurance.
The same government spent only $650 million to prevent chronic diseases like diabetes, that are caused by soda and other sugary things.
Stated again, this means money given by the total public from taxes spent $4B directly on soda, but much less than $1B on prevention of the diseases created by things including soda.
The people in our country with the least income are not allowed to use their SNAP benefits to buy hot rotisserie chicken—ready-to-eat protein—but they can buy unlimited amounts of soda, a product with only negative nutritional value.
Those Hit the Hardest
I feel like it is important to explain some of the things working against the American people.
Not only is the food system full of crap, it advertises hardest to those with the least money. None of this is accidental.
In an analysis of food marketing research shows that marketing most heavily targets the poor, the “super users”. Those with the least money spend the most on non-nutritional addictive processed garbage. We find a higher concentration of billboards for highly processed foods found in areas of the most poverty, where people have the highest rates of diabetes and the worst health outcomes that make things like more Covid lethal.
And it is not getting better. From 2013 to 2017, in just 3 years, spending on TV advertising for unhealthy food directed at Black teens increased by 50 percent—from $217 million to $333 million. Communities that need the most help, are target the most with advertising- not help.
We are all being studied, and the results of that study are being used to keep you buying foods that are slowly killing you. Not killing you immediately, just slowly enough so you can them be a long term customer to the doctor who sells drugs for mega insurance companies to manage (ie maintain) chronic problems with no end in sight. This is our capitalist economy summed in a nutshell: eep people alive, but in a zombie state- too exhausted to change anything about it. Just keep the money flowing, at any cost.
What would be the soda company's incentive to stop? There wouldn't be one, not internally. It has to be us. We have to start before the government catches on, because the way politics works, lobbyists infest our city halls like cockroaches. Things change only when enough people demand it.
The Rational Response
When we understand this manipulation, modern eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia start to look like rational responses to a poisoned food system. When your food is toxic, refusing to eat it shows wisdom. The problem is that most people conclude there are no good options, when the truth is there are choices that make us feel amazing AND feed us deeply AND taste incredible.
Being overweight isn't a moral failing—it's a sign that our hormones are disrupted by foods designed to override our natural satiety signals.
The school lunch program was created at a time when Americans were too skinny, ie malnourished, to be recrutied for the world wars. By the next one, Americans were too fat to join. In both cases, it was a problem of malnourishment. Just because we eat a lot, does not mean we are getting any nutrients. In fact, it proves we are not getting nutrients, since our bodies would feel full and signal us to stop eating if it got what it needed.
The Science of Harm: What Sugar Actually Does to Us
You have to think about your body up close. Think of your blood stream as a superhighway to distribute nutrients. When food is coming through, this is seen as nutrients passing through. Cells that need something, hold out a flag to say, do you have any of this? And nutrients are distributed through the blood stream. Processed foods with things like sugar and cheap fried canola oils pass through, but never get picked up. Instead of being helpful, they just leave more of a mess to be cleaned up, often times even blocking the nutrient absorption of key minerals. Vitamin E is one we know that gets blocked if we eat too many bad oils.
Things like hormonal birth control also block vitamin absorption, and anyone taking it should be warned of this, and be advised to take a vitamin panel regularly to watch for the depletion of their vitamin status. Safety studies max out at 4 years. Many women are on it for decades, and surprised to find out their bones are weak and now have more problems because they were handed a pill like candy.
We’ve known this long enough that these things are bad for us. None of this is new.
In 2016, NPR reported that 50 years ago, the sugar industry quietly paid scientists to point the blame at fat instead of sugar for heart disease. That's where we got the confusion about "healthy" seed oils and margarine instead of butter. And then the major turn around 10 years ago saying, oh, forget the margarine. The whole “low fat” craze was due to this misconception. It was in this moment that sugar was portrayed as innocent, while fat was the culprit for our ailing health. But we actually need to eat healthy fat to lose fat. But that is for another chapter.
In 2014, researchers analyzed almost 9,000 scientific studies on sugar, from decades of research, and found that sugar is linked to a higher risk of 45 health problems. Among them, sugar is implicated in heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cancer, and depression.
It takes 17 years for research to make it into education of doctors. But this is over 50 years of research on sugar that has been ignored and not shared loudly enough.
Cancer can be described as what happens when sugar in your blood. When someone goes for a PET scan to check for cancer, they first drink a sugary drink, a glucose solution. The parts of their body with cancer light up because cancer cells gorge on the sugar- this fast energy, with no care of nutrition. Cancer cells are like zombies, they just want to grow without care of the host. This should be a major red flag: sugar literally feeds cancer cells—cells that forget to die and want to grow like a zombie apocalypse in your body. Often doctors are shocked when they are offered to see it this way.
Just two blood sugar spikes per week doubles your chances of developing depression. Not to mention diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's, ADHD—the list continues.
The damage doesn't stop there. We can see:
Diabetes as sugar overwhelming your bloodstream
Brain fog as sugar inflaming the neurons in your brain
Acne as sugar feeding harmful bacteria in your skin
Cavities as feeding the bacteria on your teeth
Depression as sugar crashing your neurotransmitters
Wrinkles as sugar cross-linking your collagen
Fatty liver as sugar stored where it shouldn't be
Mood swings as sugar on a biochemical roller coaster
We already know sugar isn't good for us, but we keep finding excuses to keep it around. We don't connect it to the seemingly unrelated problems that it causes- or at the very least, is associated with. Sugar doesn't just make us jittery—it's terrible for our microbiome, disrupts our hormones, feeds inflammation, and creates chaos in every system it touches.
And this is a problem for us beyond cellular level- down to the microbe level.
The more sugar we consume, the simpler our gut microbiome becomes. Like the other parts of our body that jump on this cheap energy- it focuses on that, and nothing else. It creates a war within our microbiome that craves balance and diversity. Those with autism often crave white and yellow foods—refined, processed foods stripped of nutrients and fiber. Yet gut therapies are showing promise in cases once thought untreatable. The same can be said for alzheimers. We're not just cutting people's lives shorter— making those lives less vibrant, we're messing them up from birth. Autism can be described as a child’s loss of empathy, with behavioral problems but also the lack of eye contact and a natural want for connection. Could we be changing our behavior and ability to connect with one another because of our sugar addiction and poor diets? The implications are staggering.
We are the first generation to be expected to live a shorter life span than our parents. This means we have gotten some things very wrong, very recently. Now that we know better, maybe we can stop this deterioration.
Folk Lore and Lost Wisdom: What Our Ancestors Knew
There's a Native American folk story that tries to explain why maple syrup is so hard to come by. Once upon a time, syrup flowed freely from the maple trees. Humans spent all their time sleeping beneath them, drinking the sweet sap, ignoring all their other tasks. In response, the wise ones asked the trees to pour out the syrup more slowly, making it much harder to extract. From then on, only with tremendous patience do we get real maple syrup.
This wisdom story captures something we've forgotten: we were never meant to sit under trees drinking sap all day. Yet that's exactly what we're doing now.
Real maple syrup has healing properties—like sap, it acts as a bandaid for trees when they get damaged. The antioxidants in real maple syrup aren't just medicine for the trees—they work similarly in our bodies, helping neutralize free radicals before they can cause cellular damage.
We have to know what oxidation means to know why we would want anti-oxidants. Oxidation is the reason we cover our food in the fridge. It causes aging in our skin, wearing out the collagen in our skin. All cells are effected by it, and some foods, known as anti-oxidants, protect this from happening. Oxygen is essential for life - we need it for our cells to breath and create energy. But it is also highly reactive and can form unstable molecules called free radicals. Think of these as like, bandits, or more simply: rascals. These free rascals can damage cells, proteins, and even our DNA through oxidative stress, contributing to aging and disease.
Trees make oxygen, but they also create compounds that fight the damage caused by oxygen. Maple syrup is an antioxidant powerhouse with 24 different known antioxidants and 67 polyphenols that help neutralize free radicals in our bodies.
Natural sugar—whether from berries, maple syrup, or sugar cane—really isn't so bad for us in its original form. Found seasonally, it was prized and stashed away for special events. But when high fructose corn syrup was industrialized in the 1970s, everything changed. We created something our bodies were never designed to handle, available everywhere, all the time, cheaper than clean water.
90% of maple syrup sold is the fake stuff, made of high fructose corn syrup and who-knows-what else. It is a shell of what it once was, more harmful than helpful, and not nearly as delicious as the real thing. But we still call it syrup. You would never see fake maple syrup in a fancy restaurant. The most expensive restaurants use the best ingredients which just happen to be the ones LEAST processed. Follow the flavor back to the earth made goods.
Even in our parents' memories (and some of our own), sugar was rare and expensive. The real natural stuff requires backbreaking work, so it was never cheap. Sugar cane plantations only boomed with the aid of forced slave labor. Sugar was never available to us in abundance. We were biologically designed to jump on sugar when we saw it—because it was supposed to be rare and healing.
Honey’s Power
Syrup is just one example of nature’s honey, but honey is one used in Egypt’s original marshmallow recipe, and can be in our own as well, thousands of years later.
Of course, just like syrup, honey is not easy to come by. We have to battle the bees, and ensure we do not take more than they need to survive.
A single bee will visit around 2-4 million flowers and fly roughly 55,000 miles to produce just one pound of honey - that's more than twice around the Earth! During peak season, a strong hive with 60,000 bees can produce 60-100 pounds of surplus honey every year. Each bee makes only about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her entire 6-week lifespan during active season.
This stuff is like liquid gold, not to be wasted, when we understand how it got here on our plates. When we are removed from the food system, as most Americans are, we have no idea why waste matters when food appears to be so abundant. Food waste is a major concern, but so is the empathy for the creatures and trees and animals that put in effort to make these medicines for themselves.
Traditional medicine has used honey for wound healing, cough suppression, and digestive issues for millennia. Modern research supports many of these uses: honey has proven antimicrobial properties due to its low water content, acidity, and hydrogen peroxide production. Modern studies agree with folk medicine that it does indeed aid in wound healing, burns, and for controlling coughs. The WHO and American Academy of Pediatrics recommend it over cough medicines for children over one year.
Humans have been harvesting honey for at least 8,000-10,000 years. Cave paintings in Spain show honey hunting scenes from around 6,000 BC. The Egyptians were young in comparison, doing the same 2,500 BC. Honey was so valuable it was used as currency and buried with pharaohs.
There have even been some amazing animal partnerships that help us find honey together, most famously the honeyguide bird (Indicator indicator) in Africa. Its name tells its history in both latin and english. The long standing timeline that would require this kind of relationship only points to the antiquity we are dealing with here. The Hadza people of Tanzania have specific whistles and calls to communicate with the birds. The honeyguide leads humans to wild bee colonies - sometimes over a mile away - then waits while humans use smoke and tools to access the honey. In return, the bird gets access to beeswax it couldn't reach alone.
Honey knockoffs found in the story often come with concerning changes to nature’s single ingredient of honey, including high fructose corn syrup, rice syrup, cane sugar, and even a man made version from various chemicals. Chinese honey has been particularly problematic, sometimes containing antibiotics, heavy metals, or being completely artificial.
Local honey retains its natural pollen, enzymes, and beneficial compounds that processing destroys. There is even a folk story that locally sourced honey can help build allergy tolerance to an area, due to the small pollen content used by those bees.
Any company can write “local” in its name, since that is just a relative term. Check for yourself just how local it is. I live in California, and I’ve seen a brand name called “Local Honey” sourced in Minnesota.
When we harvest honey, we should only be taking the surplus that bees don't need for survival - but this requires careful, knowledgeable beekeeping. A typical hive needs about 30-60 pounds of honey to survive winter. In colder regions, they might need 90 pounds. Responsible beekeepers only harvest from "surplus" honey supers - boxes placed above the main hive body where bees store extra honey beyond what they need. Industrial operations sometimes take too much, then feed bees sugar water or corn syrup, which weakens their immune systems and nutritional health. Some commercial operations harvest almost everything and substitute cheap sugar feeds.
If we took the entire combs, we risk destroying the colony- meaning no more honey for anyone. But people like the Hadza follow sustainable traditional practices, partnered with the honeyguide birds, that allow them to hold onto these long term friendships. They would understand that healthy, well-fed bees are more productive long-term than stressed, undernourished colonies. We should learn the same about our own selves.
Sugar sources in nature are rare and precious - tree saps, fruits, nectar - requiring complex relationships between plants, pollinators, and then more relationships to access the bees’ treasure. Honey is a perfect example of how our ancestors understood food as medicine and community resource rather than isolated commodity.
Sugar Comparisons
Some argue that "sugar is sugar", but I disagree. We can still eat some good stuff, and do much better for ourselves than the mainstream.
Various kinds of sugars are made up of different percentages of fructose and glucose. Just for comparison, cane sugar is made up of equal parts glucose and fructose (50% each), while high fructose corn syrup typically contains 55% fructose and 45% glucose. Slight differences in percentage points may not seem like much on paper, but the slightly higher fructose content in high fructose corn syrup matters metabolically. Fructose is primarily metabolized in the liver, while glucose can be metabolized anywhere essentially. Fructose alone has a lower glycemic index (19-23) compared to glucose (100), this doesn't tell the whole story since fructose must be processed by the liver and can contribute to fatty liver disease in large quantities. This is why glucose has a more predictable and manageable effect on blood sugar compared to fructose. When you eat glucose (or sucrose, which breaks down into glucose and fructose), the glucose gets distributed throughout your body's cells for immediate use, while the fructose component gets shuttled directly to your liver for processing.
The distributed nature of glucose metabolism is also why your body has developed sophisticated systems (insulin, glucagon) to regulate glucose levels, since so many different tissues depend on it for energy.
Blood sugar is another thing to pay attention to. The glycemic index is one way to see how much something has potential to spike blood sugar.
Based on glycemic index research, here's how common sweeteners compare on the GI (glycemic index):
Stevia: 0 to 1
Sugar alcohols (xylitol, erythritol): 0 to 13
Fructose: 19 to 23
Agave nectar: 15 to 30
Coconut sugar: 35
Cane sugar: 43 (raw material)
Maple syrup: 54
Honey: 50 to 55
Table sugar: 65 (processed, often made from either sugar cane or sugar beets)
High fructose corn syrup: 62 to 68
High Fructose Corn Syrup
The transition from sugar to high fructose corn syrup happened remarkably quickly. It was introduced in 1970. By 1980, half of the sweetener in Coca Cola was allowed to be HFCS, and within 4 years of it, all of it was. Pepsi was also 100% HFCS.
Reagan’s policy’s in 1981 raised tarrifs on sugar, making HFCS much more in demand, and artificially cheap.
Sugar Cane’s history
Sugar cane is actually a tropical grass. Traditionally, its harvesting was extraordinarily labor-intensive. They took a year and a half to mature, and needed to be crushed within hours of harvesting, or else it would start fermenting. Workers faced dangerous conditions, from the hand tools to crushing mills to cutting and managing boiling houses.
Whole cane sugar retains some molasses and trace amounts of minerals, while refined white sugar contains almost zero vitamins or minerals.
Sugar became a problem right around the historical time of colonialization. The pope wrote a treatise on the acceptability of making slaves of people who cannot be converted. And within a few decades, the slave trade exploded.
Gelatin
The main addition we make in modern times is using gelatin. Gelatin is actually quite good for us, but not necessary. Egytpians did not use it at all. It has lots of protein, is great for joint and bone health, and skin elasticity and even controlling blood sugar.
Using Marhsmallow root alone, just make a cold infusion by soaking dried marshmallow root for 6-8 hours, strain, then use this liquid in place of some of the water in your recipe
The Plant People's Wisdom: How We Lost Our Way
I had already been talking about sugar, researching and writing about it for years when I found myself in an herbalism course about the medicines in our backyard. One struck me, a plant called the marsh mallow. The mallow of the marsh. This tall plant lives alongside waterways like rivers, with showy pink flowers, and grows a medicine within itself to combat that wetness of its environment. It used to be a remedy for sore throats, as far back as the Egyptians along the Nile.
But, the marshmallow as medicine? Its name had been hiding its healing history in plain sight. What was once ground up roots and a gooey medicine, turned into its modern day sugar bomb, with nothing promising about it at all- health wise. It was once mixed with honey, nature’s bee medicine, that has amazing healing properties in itself. It was coveted by french Parisians, after the French guy Napoleon took over Egypt for 3 years around 1800 AD, bringing back the Rosetta stone, and this ancient medicinal recipe. The ancient name for Egypt, Khem, gives us the root of our name for the scientific field of CHEMistry.
Anyway- the french were obsessed with all things Egyptian culture for the next hundred years or so, even making a state-sponsored-book about Egypt and modeling their rebuild of the city of Paris around its architecture and city planning. In the meantim, the marshmallow had became famous! In the next few hundred years of industrialization, every healing part of this medicine was replaced, becoming a literal shell of its ancient healing ancestor. But miraculously, its name remained. It left us something to trace back its true origin story- and healing potential still in our grasp.
The Latin name for the marsh mallow plant comes from Greek althainein, meaning "to heal or cure," while its family, malvaceae, derives from malake, meaning "soft"—all due to the plant's healing properties. Marshmallow's medicine comes from mucilaginous polysaccharides that bind with water to produce protective coating around membranes. This "slippery" quality blocks irritation to damaged tissue and prevents bacteria from entering broken skin or lungs, helping our immunity fight infection. Modern science confirms its ancient use, approving this mallow plant as a way to bolster innate immunity while healing tissue without cytotoxic side effects in most modern medicinces.
Most plant medicines are more gentle and effective than their modern counterparts. But nobody can patent a plant. To make money, we need to isolate them and add something like a chemical and claim it to be our own.
Once, if you had a sore throat, an ancient ancestor would have handed you a marshmallow. Now, we hand them to a child only for temporary mouth pleasure and added risk of obesity and everything that comes with it.
This pattern repeats everywhere I look. It was the plants themselves that were the most intelligent teachers, and the natives that lived and working among them, inspiring the best science and scientists that later colonists overlooked and misunderstood. Every pharmaceutical breakthrough traces back to some forgotten root, leaf, or flower that indigenous peoples had been using safely for thousands of years. Yet we call their knowledge "primitive" while we take their discoveries, isolate single compounds, patent them, and sell them back as "advanced medicine." Once upon a time, our ancestors were viewed as wise. Old was smart. Then there was a moment of domination, and old became synonymous with “outdated”. But we should not be so fast to jump to the same conclusion. We have much to relearn.
Most artificial vanilla (85% of global production) now comes from some form of petroleum and pine. Natural vanilla beans and extracts contains several hundred flavor compounds. When food science isolates artificial flavors, they pull out the ones with the most health benefits, giving us shells of the original with none of the benefit. If you have every tried natural vanilla, it is impossible to go back.
The plant people who preserved this knowledge—mostly women, mostly marginalized—were dismissed as backward, the old “crone” lost her “crown”, the “venerated” became associated with “venereal”, and their wisdom buried under the authority of those who never bothered to listen. The history here is fascinating, and to be discussed much further in an upcoming work.
Nature is very wise, and so are the indigenous cultures that have been drowned out that lived close to it.
Having It All: The Real Solution
I love desserts. I'm not here to tell you to give up everything delicious and live on kale and deprivation.
I write about sugar-free dessert options because I believe we can have food that is good-for-you AND good-tasting. We can feel amazing and eat good food. We don't have to choose one or the other. That's a false choice created by a food system that prioritizes profit over our wellbeing.
When you use real ingredients—real vanilla instead of petroleum-derived vanillin, real maple syrup instead of high fructose corn syrup, real butter instead of industrial oils—the flavors are more complex, more satisfying, more delicious, and more healing than anything engineered in a lab.
There's something magical about cooking with ingredients that carry the story of their origins—honey that holds the essence of million offlowers, maple syrup that concentrates decades of spring mornings, vanilla beans that traveled across oceans. When you work with these ancient allies, you're not just making food; you're participating in alchemy, transforming simple elements into something that nourishes both body and soul.
Your cells recognize this difference. They respond to real ingredients with gratitude rather than confusion, with energy rather than inflammation, with satisfaction rather than endless craving.
Recipe: Sugar-Free Marshmallows from Scratch
These aren't diet food or sad substitutes. They're fluffy, sweet, nostalgic perfection made with ingredients your body can actually use instead of struggle against.
What you'll need:
1 cup water, divided
3 tablespoons unflavored grass-fed gelatin
½ cup raw honey
½ teaspoon real vanilla extract
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon marshmallow root powder (the secret ingredient!)
½ cup arrowroot powder for dusting
The transformation:
Pour half the water into your stand mixer bowl. Sprinkle gelatin evenly over the water and let it bloom for 10 minutes—watch it transform from powder to a spongy, gel-like mass.
While the gelatin blooms, heat the remaining water with honey and salt until it reaches 230°F. You're creating syrup that will dissolve the gelatin perfectly.
With your mixer running on low, slowly pour the hot honey mixture over the bloomed gelatin. Gradually increase to high speed and beat for 10-15 minutes until it transforms into a thick, white, fluffy cloud that holds peaks.
Add vanilla and marshmallow root powder in the final minute. This is pure alchemy—air and protein and gentle sweetness becoming something greater than the sum of its parts.
Pour into an arrowroot-dusted 8x8 pan and let set for at least 4 hours. Cut into squares with a dusted knife.
The Deeper Sweetness: What You've Really Created
What you've created isn't just a sugar-free marshmallow. You've created proof that you can satisfy cravings without triggering biochemical chaos. The gelatin provides amino acids that support gut health and beautiful skin. The honey provides minerals and antioxidants. The marshmallow root connects you to thousands of years of healing wisdom.
These marshmallows won't trigger the blood sugar spike that sends you searching for more sugar an hour later. They'll satisfy your desire for something sweet while actually supporting your body's natural functions.
When I shared a recipe for marshmallows made with real marsh mallow root on my small platform of 4,000 followers, something unexpected happened—it went viral, gathering 40,000 likes. People were fascinated not just by the recipe, but by the story it told about how far we've strayed from food as medicine.
Each person who made these marshmallows wasn't just creating a confection; they were participating in historical reconstruction, reaching back through time to reclaim something lost.
Finding My Voice
My mom used to tell me, "You will cure cancer." She wanted me to become a doctor, imagined me in a white coat discovering the miracle cure that would save millions.
I feel like I have cured cancer—just not the way she expected. When one-third of all cancers are preventable with lifestyle factors, yet less than 1% of research dollars go toward prevention education, we have a fundamentally broken system. We can stop one-third of all cancers from ever starting by sharing what we already know about chemicals, food, and pollutants, yet we are not telling people about it.
As I write this, my dad is battling cancer, and I'm terrified of losing him. Once cancer takes hold, there is only so much we can do. Modern medicine has some amazing breakthroughs, but nothing can be as good of any treatment as getting our own immunity to recognize cancer from taking hold in the first place.
This is exactly why this work matters so urgently. If "no sugar" was a pill, it would be medical negligence not to prescribe it. Cancer claims 1,630 lives every day in America alone. If we had a medication that could prevent one-third of these deaths, every doctor would be mandated to discuss it. But you can't patent blueberries. There is no money to be made, so nobody is holding the signs to support it.
When you combine maternal fierceness of me becoming a mother, with a mind trained in engineering analysis, the conclusion is inescapable: our food system is systematically poisoning our children, and we need to fix the inputs, not blame the outputs. We have so much work to do, and I want to yell it from the rooftops.
I didn't set out to become someone who talks about food and health. I was just a pregnant engineer looking for natural remedies who stumbled into a world of ancient wisdom and modern corruption. But once I understood the scope of what we're facing—once I saw how systematically our children and families are being targeted—I couldn't stay quiet. I found my voice.
Breaking Free from the Spell
Breaking the sugar spell isn't about perfection or never enjoying sweet things again. It's about reclaiming your ability to choose, about resetting your palate so you can taste real food again.
People feel guilty, weak, and out of control, but they don't realize how much these engineered foods affect their brains. It's not your fault. We could have all the self-control in the world, but it's nearly impossible to ignore the triggers in the world we grew up in.
Being overweight isn't a moral failing—it's a sign that our hormones are disrupted by foods designed to override our natural satiety signals. The same companies that engineer foods to be addictive then sell us diet products when those foods inevitably make us gain weight. They profit twice: first by making us sick, then by making us feel ashamed about being sick.
Your body isn't broken. The food system is broken. When you feed your body real food, it remembers how to regulate itself. When you stop triggering constant insulin spikes, your metabolism finds its natural rhythm.
Once you remove sugar from your diet, a simple strawberry explodes with flavor again. Processed sugar then tastes almost sickeningly sweet once you've reset your palate.
The Mystery Between Science and Soul
Breaking the sugar spell isn't just about biochemistry and blood glucose levels, though those matter enormously. There's something deeper happening—a force we can't quite name but can absolutely feel.
Einstein understood this mystery: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." We are not machines processing inputs and outputs. We are biological beings with ancient wisdom encoded in our cells.
The food industry has cast a spell by severing these connections, by making us forget that we're part of something larger than laboratory-created flavors and engineered bliss points. But your body knows better. Your cells remember. When you taste honey that carries the story of specific flowers, when you feel maple syrup that concentrated decades of spring mornings into amber sweetness, something in you recognizes truth.
When you break the sugar spell, you don't just change your biochemistry. You reconnect with your own deep knowing, with wisdom that helped our species survive for millennia. You remember that you're not separate from nature—you are nature, temporarily organized into human form.
The spell breaks when you trust both your scientific understanding AND your inexplicable knowing—because the deepest truths live where these two ways of seeing converge.
The Sweet Life: Welcome to the Other Side
Real sweetness—the kind that satisfies at a cellular level—comes from energy that's stable and strong. It comes from the satisfaction of creating something beautiful with your own hands, from breaking free from the endless cycle of craving and guilt.
These marshmallows are just the beginning. They're proof that you can satisfy cravings without sabotaging health, that you can enjoy sweetness without surrendering your power of choice.
The spell is broken the moment you realize you were always free to choose. Sugar only has power over you when you don't understand what it's doing. Once you see clearly, you can navigate the sweet world with wisdom instead of being swept away by biochemical manipulation.
We can still create those magical moments without poisoning the people we love. We can use the most basic, pure ingredients possible instead of the refined stuff engineered for profit. We can make memories that nourish instead of harm.
This isn't about perfection or never enjoying sweet things again. It's about having choices—real choices, not the illusion of choice between different brands of the same harmful substances.
The spell breaks when you realize you were never the problem. The system is the problem, and you have more power to step outside that system than you ever imagined.
Welcome to the other side of the spell, where the mysterious and the measurable dance together, and sweetness means something deeper than anyone ever thought to put in a package.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." - Einstein
