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Year of No Sugar: A Memoir Kindle Edition

4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 559 ratings

For fans of the New York Times bestseller I Quit Sugar or Katie Couric's controversial food industry documentary Fed Up, A Year of No Sugar is a "delightfully readable account of how [one family] survived a yearlong sugar-free diet and lived to tell the tale…A funny, intelligent, and informative memoir." —Kirkus

It's dinnertime. Do you know where your sugar is coming from? Most likely everywhere. Sure, it's in ice cream and cookies, but what scared Eve O. Schaub was the secret world of sugar—hidden in bacon, crackers, salad dressing, pasta sauce, chicken broth, and baby food.

With her eyes opened by the work of obesity expert Dr. Robert Lustig and others, Eve challenged her husband and two school-age daughters to join her on a quest to quit sugar for an entire year.

Along the way, Eve uncovered the real costs of our sugar-heavy American diet—including diabetes, obesity, and increased incidences of health problems such as heart disease and cancer. The stories, tips, and recipes she shares throw fresh light on questionable nutritional advice we've been following for years and show that it is possible to eat at restaurants and go grocery shopping—with less and even no added sugar.

Year of No Sugar is what the conversation about "kicking the sugar addiction" looks like for a real American family—a roller coaster of unexpected discoveries and challenges.

"As an outspoken advocate for healthy eating, I found Schaub's book to shine a much-needed spotlight on an aspect of American culture that is making us sick, fat, and unhappy, and it does so with wit and warmth."—Suvir Sara, author of Indian Home Cooking

"Delicious and compelling, her book is just about the best sugar substitute I've ever encountered."—Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Powers


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Review

A confirmed sugar addict since childhood, Schaub was shocked to discover the role of sugar in an array of illnesses and the fact that sugar (mostly high fructose corn syrup) is an ingredient in nearly every American food product. She challenged her family (husband and two young daughters) to join her in a year of abstention from added sugar (everything from table sugar to molasses to fruit juice) and chronicled their trials and triumphs. Inspired by Dr. Robert Lustig s documentary Fat Chance, Schaub learned the connection between overconsumption of sugar and cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Her own research identified sugar in most school and restaurant meals and in surprising places on the store shelves, including sauces, dressings, soups, and breads. She debunks questionable nutritional advice, pokes fun at her own past experiments with health fads, and recalls the particular challenges of sweets-laden Halloween and Christmas. At the end of the year, the family was healthier, and they had accumulated a store of ideas and recipes (included in the book) to counter the craving for something sweet. --Vanessa Bush

About the Author

Eve O. Schaub graduated from Cornell University and Rochester Institute of Technology. She has written for Vermont Life and Vermont Magazine, among other publications. During her family's year of no sugar, Eve blogged regularly and was often a guest on WAMC, New York's NPR affiliate. She lives in Vermont with her family.

Callie Beaulieu has been an actress for several decades. Classically trained, she is predominantly a theater actress, and her work has been seen around the country. Callie recently returned to the US after spending nearly a decade living in the Caribbean. She is a proud member of Actors Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00IT6C2SU
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sourcebooks (8 April 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1.9 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 318 pages
  • Customer reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 559 ratings

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Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
559 global ratings

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 April 2016
    Loved the diary-like format of this book with accepts from different members of the family.
    Really eye opening and a worrying insight into our lack of awareness when it comes to food ingredients!
    It will make you want to read the food labels on your favourite foods!
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 April 2014
    I have always been fascinated with nutrition. This book was a light, funny, casual, read, I could not put it down, was done all page to page in 2 days. I can so relate to the author's dilemma and her struggles of whether to be an embracing food culture meber in the Western social cycle or choosing to become a complete social anomaly. I found is funny when she narrated the types of friends she has these days ( same as me), all of a sudden, many of my friends who were normal for years are now Gluten intolerant ( when science says actually 1 out of 1000 people only really are gluten intolerant), some have turned vegan and have tofu and carrot for breakfast, some only eat Apples. What is the right thing to do?? What is too much ?? We all thought the world was flat for the longest time and then came that explosive theory that hey the world isnt flat after all. Just like the author, I am not a nutritionist, nor a doctor, I merely know what i know and love reading about stuff like that, and we use what we know to make our choices. I don't want to be afraid to LIVE, but at the same time, I want to make conscious good choices to stay fit , and healthy. It's tough, the boudaries sometimes seems a little blur. And i am constantly cognisant that a theory today could very well be shattered to pieces tomorrow. We all know so little in the grand scheme of things.
    This book is about Eve and her family's journey in the year of no sugar. How she battled her emotions, you'd see how she becomes an amazing tenacious cook , and i can just imagine how annoying her family would have seemed to me if they were sat next to me in a restaurant. It also shows how emotions, holidays, gestures of goodwill especially in North America is so tied to sweets. Funny that, fructose being something human bodies cannot even digest.
    I wont be doing the year of no sugar anytime soon, besides making you become sugar Nazi and a complete social anomaly, it's simply not sustainable in the society we live in as even Eve had observed with her gargantuan project. That said, I am not planning to poison myself with sugar knowing it's a toxin and walk the rapid path into death through suffering . Also, after the one year of doing no sugar, now she's got back onto having sugar again, though much less than she ( and the family ) used to in previous life, but still , me personally, I'd prefer to make changes that I can consistently practice through for the rest of my life. Maybe Eve and her family needed this to kick start them into the less sugar mindset. I avoid sugar whenever i can, but not to the capacity of interviewing waiters/ waitresses in the restaurant, neither am i overtly obsessive about labels in food, that said, I mostly make my own sauces and on weekends sometimes I like indulging some little sweet things that I like. I think, it's a fair balance and I could do this for the rest of my life...no questions asked. I am living a less sugar lifestyle and I like it very much .

    Its a very good read, a light hearted read, imparts some good recipe, I mostly read it to learn a little more about fructose, and also to understand what the lifestyle of someone who doesn't eat sugar ( at all) would be like. And i wasn't disappointed . Eve has a great sense of humour which made reading fun.
    Highly recommended.
    11 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 January 2020
    I bought this after reading up a lot about this subject and giving up sugar myself 4 montgs ago. However if you read up about sugar you'll find you can't just have a little bit, once a month for example like she did. it's a permanent thing and one you don't deviate from or the addictive cycle starts again. i do use some sweetners but no sugar at all ever and I'm selective as to which sweetners i use. Eachto their own i suppose. I just feel this was half hearted - sorry.
  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 August 2014
    I was disappointed in this book in that the author uses a sugar/fructose substitute regularly in her recipes. She details her everyday experiences but I lost interest quite early on once I realised she was using a sugar substitute so readily. The title seems a bit misleading.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 April 2014
    I bought this book out of curiosity, but as soon as I started reading a lot of things have changed. It's worth reading and I am quite tempted of the Year of No Sugar diet. Maybe starting January!
    5 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 September 2014
    I saw this book advertised on the internet and thought I'd give it a go. I take my fitness seriously and the subject of this read is an interesting one. Going to try and put the methods mentioned into my lifestyle over the next 12 months and see how things go...
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 November 2014
    Brilliant book!! If you're interested in quitting sugar this is about a family who have done it for a year. It's such an easy read too. No jargon involved. I read it so quickly.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 April 2014
    Sure, buy this book for the cute stories. But if you are after anything authoritative on sugar and diets, steer well clear.

    Of course, it all depends on what you expect. Here are some things I did expect but which the book doesn't cover properly: Is sugar addictive, and if so, did they have withdrawal? What type of sugars cause which problems and why? After a year without sugar, were they better off - other than getting a book deal? If you can't afford to cook full-time, then what? [Background: the author convinces her family to spend a year off sugar and as a result, ends up spending all her time cooking.]

    Worse, some of it is seriously misleading. I'm no nutritionist (either), but it's really not that difficult to google "sugar" and find out that it is a generic name for all saccharides. In this book, in Dr Lustig's lectures and -- I gather -- in Gillespie's book, they use "fructose" (the "bad guy") synonymously with "sugar", which is simply wrong. Glucose (the "good guy" according to them) is also a sugar. Xylitol is lumped in with "poison", even though it has been proven to prevent tooth decay and is an essential "good" ingredient in chewing gum (which no-one can surely consume that much of).

    Moreover, there are many reasons why labeling fructose bad and glucose good is surely wrong. I'm not advocating eating either (!), but a) fructose is sweeter, so you can use less of it, hence stocking up on fewer "empty calories"; and b) fructose doesn't cause a spike in blood sugar, so you avoid the subsequent crash later. I do believe Dr Lustig when he says that too much fructose is bad for you -- but to use glucose instead is surely not the point! A year without sugar but with lots of baked goodies made with dextrose is, in my opinion, absolutely not a year without sugar.

    The book does make compellingly the argument we have heard before and which I believe in: processed food is a health problem. And another point: availability of higher-quality easy-to-access food is critical. [We are all time-poor, so cooking everything from scratch is not an option.] It is extremely clear about the evilness of juice and soda. And I agree that any kind of treats should be just that - a treat, not an every-day or every-meal occurence.

    The saving grace, and the reason I felt the book deserved to be finished, is its honesty. The author shares in her soul searching about food, sugar, sweets and love. These are complex issues that each of us has to puzzle out for ourselves, and while I would have found it more helpful for the science to be more robust, I still valued hearing another perspective.
    20 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Susan Taylor
    5.0 out of 5 stars I am happy
    Reviewed in Canada on 2 March 2019
    very interesting book
  • Fiona Maxwell
    5.0 out of 5 stars A story many people can empathise with
    Reviewed in Australia on 18 May 2017
    I really enjoyed this book. I used the Whispersync option, reading and listening. It is an interesting story to hear how people view clutter, hording and/or what may be just a very big mess. I also found it hard to relate to how Eve, and probably many other people, feel that if you remove the physical item then the memory and emotions also disappear. I can accept that a physical item may jog your memory of an event, but for me, I don't think it is necessary to have a physical item in order to remember an event. I could also really relate to the concept of having rather than using because once you use something, once it's gone it's gone, so I have selected to have an item, or two, rather than use that item. I would recommend this to anyone who feels they have a hell room and want to hear how someone approached their hell room. It is not a self-help get organised book, so if you are expecting that then I would look for something. However, this can, and does, give you an idea of what to do and perhaps where to start.
  • MARGARET M KELLY
    5.0 out of 5 stars Very readable
    Reviewed in the United States on 15 April 2014
    A Year of No Sugar is so readable that my 13-year old stole my copy and finished it before I did. Her reaction: “Can we do this too?”

    Schaub's writing is funny and imaginative. She describes something as being “harder to find than plaid shorts at a motorcycle rally”; kids trading Halloween candy “like pirates, or maybe bankers.” She tosses in a seemingly endless supply of cultural references, from Sanjay Gupta to Laura Ingalls Wilder to Edward Cullen to Carmen Miranda, always making you laugh, and feel like part of the club.

    The stories are very relatable. Including excerpts from her young daughter's journal, and describing interactions with family, friends, acquaintances, even waitresses gives a view of just about every way you could imagine people reacting to her family's year-long project. You also get a personal peek into life in small town Vermont.

    This book is an eye-opening look at how hard it is to quit sugar when massive and deep-rooted cultural and corporate forces don't want you to. I am extremely grateful that the Schaubs took this on, because I've gained insight into those forces as well as the reason it's worth fighting them, but I didn't have to slog through the experience myself! I can just take away some of the great lessons they learned and apply them in my own life, which will be much easier. After all, my daughter is already on board.
  • Egitto
    5.0 out of 5 stars interesting read
    Reviewed in Germany on 17 April 2014
    I downloaded this book after it kept popping up in front of my eyes and the idea was really intriguing to me. It was a very interesting read, disturbing sometimes to see how much difficulty the author was facing and a true eye opener. I was surprised also by what happened to the family AFTER they finished the year without sugar - confusion was basically the overall status. So what is going to happen in my household now? I have watched Dr. Lustig's video, I have read this book, I will continue collecting more info and definitely keep my eye on the ingredient list and try to avoid sugar where it doesn't have to be...
  • moscowmule27
    4.0 out of 5 stars what you eat makes what you are
    Reviewed in Japan on 30 June 2014
    I felt it's a really really important thing to chose what I eat. Trying no sugar life myself, let me stress free for daily meal somehow.

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