Year of No Sugar by Eve O. Schaub

without the toxic effects to our bodies of fructose and without endangering the world’s supply of bananas. What more could we possibly ask for? Well, I’ll give you one word: chocolate.
    Sure, we had our Ovaltine, which was a decent hot chocolate stand-in, and I could even make a delicious brownie now that we had dextrose to mix with the cocoa, but actual chocolate was one thing we just were not going to get. Or so we thought.
    And then one day Steve came home with a shiny, foil-wrapped bar. It looked an awful lot like my long-lost friend chocolate, and I felt sinful just looking at the thing. I gasped and averted my eyes.
    But, “No!” he said. “Look— we can eat this .”
    Now, when your name is Eve, you tend to be a little waryof temptation scenarios, so I eyed my husband keenly. In my desperation to find sweet substitutes that our Year of No Sugar could accommodate, I thought I had seen it all. Could it possibly be there was something I had missed?
    ChocoPerfection was the name, with the tag line “Sugar Free…Naturally!” If it was good—which I highly doubted—how could it possibly be okay? Upon hearing of our project, our friend Ellen had given the bar to Steve.
    â€œI,” she had said ominously, “am about to change your life.”
    We eyed the gold wrapper. We read the ingredients. We reread the ingredients. There were two I wasn’t familiar with: oligofructose and erythritol. Hmmmm. Sounded suspicious. I looked it up. Turns out, oligofructose is extracted from fruits or vegetables—in this case from chicory root. It is touted as being not only not bad , but it is, in fact, health promoting on account of the extremely high amount of dietary fiber (one ChocoPerfection bar brings with it an astounding 52 percent of recommended dietary fiber) as well as “probiotic” effects—which is to say it is believed to stimulate the growth of good bacteria in the colon.
    Then we have erythritol. I found out that it is a “sugar alcohol,” which generally isn’t such a good thing, since sugar alcohols such as xylitol and Maltitol are known to be associated with laxative properties and “gastric distress.” Ew! However, according to unerring wisdom of the Internet, erythritol is unique: unlike other sugar alcohols, it is absorbed in the small intestine and then excreted. Translation? No tummy troubles.
    The upshot was that, together, oligofructose and erythritol might just have a pretty good thing going. They supplement one another’s sweetness and counteract one another’saftertaste. There were only two downsides that I could see, and they didn’t appear to be deal breakers: firstly, after we tried our bar from Ellen, I found that that boatload of fiber made my tummy gurgly. Now, could I live with that if it meant I could have real (tasting) chocolate? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full. My second complaint was its expense: one tiny 1.8-ounce bar goes for between three and four dollars—nearly a dollar a bite. Again, if that meant I could have an actual (tasting) authentic (seeming) bona fide (your results may vary) chocolate bar once in a while during our long, long, LONG Year of No Sugar? Pardon me while I go mortgage the house. I have chocolate to buy, people.
    Just like with dextrose powder, we would have to order these bars online. (We had entered the Land of Extreme Groceries, apparently.) That’s when we found out that the same company also made a granular “sugar” for use in baking. At forty some dollars a pound, it wasn’t exactly going to make the folks at Domino quake in their sugar-encrusted boots, but to us it sounded like we might just have hit the jackpot. We placed an order for a batch of the dollar-per-bite bars and one very pricey little bag of “sugar.”
    When our package at last arrived, it didn’t take long to realize that the faux sugar was a bit of a disappointment.