Why you can’t find sugar-free chicken broth — or, the number one reason Whole 30 IS hard
For most of January and some of February 2017, I joined the masses and took the food challenge sweeping social media (it’s very possible that one of your friends, or your friend of a friend that you can’t stand cause their posts are so perfect, ugh) called Whole 30.
The challenge is deceivingly simple — just give up a few key things (sugar, dairy, grains, alcohol, legumes) in the North American diet and 30 days of your time, and you have a good chance of feeling better and looking better, maybe even with the added benefit of losing a couple of pounds or inches if your body is really feeling it.
Except the challenge isn’t that easy.
As the writers of the various books in the series say, “having a baby is hard. Fighting an illness is hard. This is not hard.” Ok, cool. I’m not about to compare my food struggles to someone who is literally providing an incubator for human life, but let’s be real — if you, like me, enjoy various forms of indulgence — that is, copious amounts of sugar in baked goods, a slice of pizza every now and week, even cream in your coffee — then, yes, this IS hard. Hard is relative. I’m not about to have some skinny bitch tell me what is and isn’t hard, especially when it comes to food habits.
The number one question people asked me was “what was the hardest part?”
The answer: realizing just how much fucking sugar is in EVERYTHING. And I really mean EVERYTHING. Cutting it out for a while wasn’t the issue — i think it was kind of a revelation in the same way that Neo realized he’d been living in The Matrix the whole time.
Now before you go and say, “ok June, you’ve fully been drinking the kombucha bullshit they’ve been selling you”, hear me out.
Prepping for the Whole 30 means not only writing down goals and declaring it to your fans on the internet, but it also means cleaning out your place to make sure that you don’t get sidetracked.
Fine, no worries, i gotta part with stuff. But the real work would begin in building my Whole 30 arsenal of products — some of which i had never heard of before — to go with the plethora of fruits, veggies and meat i’d prepare meals with. Going down my list for that week, i had on my list:
- coconut aminos (a yummy replacement for soy sauce)
- chicken broth (easy peasy, i usually had that in my pantry anyway)
- coconut manna (yeah…i’m never buying that again. Another time/post)
- apple cider (to cook with, not drink! challenge accepted)
At the grocery store, most things were surprisingly easy to find, and if I couldn’t find it there, i’m lucky to live in an area of the city where things are readily available or even modifiable — a health food store is 2 doors down one way, and there are 2 organic butcher shops the other way.
Last on my list was the chicken broth, which i needed to make a soup. Cool. I go down the aisle, see the section and make a beeline for it. I check my usual buy, about $1.50, and read the labels for the ingredients.
Water….dextrose.
Shit. Sugar? Ok….but it’s broth. Like, salty. K….next one.
Water, chicken fat, glucose-fructose.
You serious right now? FINE. I’LL TRY THE DAMN ORGANIC ONE. Worth 4 damn dollars.
Water, spices, chicken fat, concentrated vegetables…..honey.
Holy shit. NONE of these brands are sugar free. Chicken broth has SUGAR in it?
Man, this some bullshit.
Thankfully, i thought quickly and changed up my plan, but I was floored in that I never realized until then that sugar is not only a sweetener, but a filler, flavour agent, even an emulsifier in some cases. It permeates every part of our lives. Just think about it this way, during a typical 9–5 day if you work that schedule:
Most days, we get up not feeling that great, probably because we stayed up late and whatever we ate the night before doesn’t have us feeling good (likely cause it caused a sugar crash or five). To keep going throughout the day, we turn to our usual vices in various forms of sugar — smoothies with protein powder, double-doubles, muffins, candy, chips, pop, bread, cocktails after work — you get the picture. What i didn’t realize until i took myself out of that routine was that I too relied on those things to keep me going. No wonder I felt like crap at the end of the day, despite exercising up to 3 times a week.
They say that sugar is a drug, and for a while I thought these fitness gurus were just saying that to get people to buy their products (I’m in marketing — you can’t bullshit a bullshitter). But the 30 days without sugar showed me just how true that is, and also how many companies are complicit in being legal drug pushers and getting us to come back to the taste we know and love (and buy). How else can you explain putting sugar in something traditionally salty like chicken broth?
In case you’re wondering, I did end up finding sugar-free chicken broth…at a local shop in my neighbourhood. The guy who sold it to me with a smile was quite helpful, and assured me that there was no sugar in it as they make it regularly and freeze it.
The price? SEVEN. DOLLARS. For about 4 cups’ worth.
But then again, if that’s a price to pay for health….maybe it’s okay once in a while.
