Guilty Pleasures

Nobody likes to hear more bad news about sugar, but it’s becoming an inescapable fact that sugar and dementia are linked. My cousin, Kathleen DesMaisons, has worked on and published books about the problems associated with sugar addiction for years, and she helps people reduce their dependency and restore their health.  The science behind the connection to Alzheimer’s disease is fairly recent, but the evidence suggests that sugar toxicity causes inflammation and can also lead to insulin resistance, eventually damaging the brain. Dr. Dale Bredesen in his new book, The End of Alzheimer’s   explains:

Sugar is like fire, a source of energy but very dangerous. If you have a fireplace in your home, the amount of wood and the size of fire needed to heat it depends on the size of the house: Less wood/smaller fire if your house is small, more wood/bigger fire if your house is large. Now imagine that you shrink your house by 90 percent, which is essentially what happens when we move less, as is true of sedentary-living Americans: we need less energy. That makes your fireplace effectively ten times as large. If you kept pouring on the wood and stoking the fire, your house would quickly become unbearably hot, the fire might escape from the fireplace, and you would do everything possible to keep your house from burning down. This is the stress most of us are now experiencing. Our bodies recognize sugar as poisonous, and therefore rapidly activate multiple mechanisms to reduce its concentration in our blood and tissues. For one thing, we store the extra energy as fat, which produces brain-damaging factors called adipokines. (p. 49)

In an interview with Dr. Steven Masley, he goes into more detail about the underlying causes of Alzheimer’s and why a tailored approach is required (the whole interview is worthwhile, but the key explanations start at 12 minutes in). The bottom line is we all could benefit from reducing insulin resistance, restoring insulin sensitivity, and reducing glucose levels by drastically lowering our intake of sugar and white refined carbohydrates in order to repair our metabolism and overall health.

That's easier said than done. The reality is we crave our guilty pleasures, especially sweet ones. My mother loves ice cream, and I love dark chocolate; luckily it turns out that cacao is full of polyphenols and is good for you in moderation. Who doesn’t need a little cookie now and then? We are working on the idea of drastic reduction. Our local pasticceria, which has been in business for 56 years and makes

Itty bitty gelato balls

everything on site using high quality ingredients, makes little balls of gelato dipped in dark chocolate. They are the perfect dessert with built-in portion control (and gelato is better than ice cream in terms of calories, fat, and sugar). We also get hazelnuts and candied orange peels dipped in dark chocolate as a treat to have with our post-lunch espresso. Italians make a gluten-free cookie called Brutti Ma Buoni (ugly but good) with hazelnuts and egg whites that we indulge in from time to time. I recently invented a gluten free cookie recipe that we love with oats, raisins, walnuts, and a mashed banana. Here is the recipe (amounts are approximate for about 20 cookies):

Banana Walnut Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

These smell really good while baking.

1 ripe banana

1 egg

3 tbls coconut oil (softened consistency)

¼ cup sugar

½ tsp vanilla

1 tsp baking powder

¼ cup rice flour

2 tbls tapioca flour

½ tsp xanthum gum

Pinch of salt

1 cup organic oats

3 tbls raisins

¼ cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 375 degrees, and use parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Mix the coconut oil and sugar until combined, add the egg and beat until a little frothy. Add the banana and mash with a fork, and add the vanilla. Combine dry ingredients and add to the wet ingredients, mixing in raisins and walnuts when combined. Drop spoonfuls of dough on the cookie sheet and bake for 12-15 minutes until slightly brown on the edges.

Another way to drastically reduce your sugar intake is to indulge in other less harmful guilty

Borini's store window in Rome

pleasures. For us, that means Italian shoes. I recently discovered a store in Via dei Pettinari, Borini, that makes beautiful handmade leather shoes in my size. Let’s just say I got a bit carried away. I cannot resist the comfort of shoes that slide onto my bare feet like soft leather gloves. I can’t bear the ugly look of Crocs when all around me are beautiful Roman women, simply elegant from head to toe. Fortunately, my mother’s favorite brand of Italian shoes, Manas by Lea Foscati, were on sale at the Friday outdoor market, so it all balanced out in the end.

Shoe selfie