Opinion: The Winemaker's Wife on Dry January
So, I guess it’s understandable that I got things wrong, dry meaning something very specific to winemakers: the absence of fermentable sugar (glucose and fructose) from grapes in a wine. I thought Dry January—consuming no sugar for the month of —was a terrific idea, since sugar is one of the most addictive (and insidious) poisons known to humankind.
In fact, while wine has proven to have a valuable role in human evolution by, among other things, purifying contaminated water, stimulating appetite, and being central to religious rituals, and has been incorporated into our culture for over 10,000 years, the same can’t be said about sugar.
Processed sugar is relatively new in human history; arguably, the epigenetic impact on human evolution remains to be seen. So new, in fact, that a visitor to the royal Palace of Greenwich in 1598 took note of Queen Elizabeth’s black teeth, “a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar.” Processed sugar was still a rarity only 400 years ago.
My source on that gross tidbit about the black teeth is William Dufty, who is authoritative on the topic of sugar, and anyone interested in avoiding sugar for the month of January, would do well to read his 1975 classic Sugar Blues while detoxing. As if the negative health impacts of sugar are not enough, he writes about the unsavory sociology of sugar, including its role in slavery.
“What’s the number one thing people do when they stop drinking alcohol? They replace it with sugar. There’s a ton of information on the link between alcohol and sugar cravings. If you’re going to go without alcohol, including wine, for the month of January, then you should really consider banning sugar from your life, too.”
“’No cask of sugar arrives in Europe to which blood is not sticking. In view of the misery of these slaves, anyone with feelings should renounce these wares and refuse the enjoyment of what is only bought with tears and death of countless unhappy creatures.’ Thus wrote French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius in the middle of the eighteenth century when France had moved into the front ranks of the sugar trade. The Sorbonne condemned him. Priests persuaded the court he was full of dangerous ideas; he recanted—in part to save his skin—and his book was burned by hangmen.”
Call me naïve, but I’m a tad surprised that sort of thing (book burning by hangmen) was still going on during The Age of Reason, otherwise known as The Enlightenment. On the other hand, that sort of thing still goes on today, only by other means such as lawfare, shadow banning, even suiciding, when someone threatens the hegemony. And that makes it all the more interesting to me that the hegemony still likes sugar, an addictive poison hidden in most processed foods under many different names: “evaporated cane juice, corn syrup, corn sweeteners, high-fructose corn syrup, crystalline fructose, fructose, sucrose, malt, malt syrup, barley malt syrup, barely malt extract, maltose, maltodextrin, dextrose, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, beet juice, muscovato, succanat,” etc.
By hegemony, I mean of course, the prevailing elite power structure, including The World Health Organization, which has stated that no amount of alcohol, including wine, is safe, yet which states that the equivalent of 14 sugar cubes a day (gross!) is just fine for adults.
The list of synonyms for sugar comes from Dr. Cate Shanahan MD’s great book Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. I was lucky enough to briefly have Dr. Cate as my general practitioner here in Napa before she left to advise the L.A. Lakers and others about diet and metabolism. In the book, she writes about her habit, as a young physician, of drinking coffee sweetened with a quarter cup of homemade caramel sauce, which led to premature joint pain and difficulty walking. Only after giving up sugar, which glycates or stiffens cells and tissues, was she able to move freely.
Those were my “hippie mamma” years, for sure. I couldn’t believe my luck in finding a physician whose philosophy was sympatico with my own. She understood that my cholesterol ratio was frameable because I ate lots of butter.
Unfortunately, we didn’t interact beyond that new patient exam, since I was never sick. I had a feeling she wouldn’t last long as a general practitioner. If you read the case studies in her book, you’ll understand why: she healed people of numerous potentially chronic diseases simply by getting them off sugar, which is not what you’re supposed to do in our current medical model.
She healed a health-nut nurse of seizures by getting her to stop consuming energy drinks, energy bars, and juice. She healed a young, athletic scuba instructor of cardiac symptoms by getting him to give up a candy bar habit. She healed a nurse with nervous system disorders and migraines by getting her off sugar. There’s no money to be made in that kind of medicine.
Giving up sugar is hard, since it’s in everything from mayonnaise to “healthy” whole wheat bread. And because of its ubiquitousness, I’d argue that it’s impossible to find any meaningful data on the negative health impact of sugar. Search for statistics on global sugar-related deaths, and there’s really only one number that repeatedly pops up:184,000 deaths per year from sugary drinks.
I don’t think it’s relevant to compare the 184,000 deaths from sugary drinks to the 2.6 million deaths from alcoholic drinks. (By the way, how do you even know when someone has died from a sugary drink?)
That’s because sugar is present, not just in beverages, but in pretty much everything we ingest, from medicine to toothpaste, and it contributes to a very wide swathe of health problems, including the following:
premature aging, inflammation and narrowing of blood vessels, birth defects, brain damage and cognitive decline, reduced hormone receptivity, diabetes, nervous system disorders like anxiety, headaches and heart palpitations, gut dysbiosis and overgrowth of candida albicans, loss of bone density and tooth decay by altering the ratio of calcium to phosphorus in the blood, nutrient depletion, chronic overstimulation of pituitary, pancreas, thyroid and adrenals that destroys endocrine system balance, and more. And according to a December 4, 2024 article in Nature, the liver converts fructose into lipids that fuel cancerous tumors.
Human beings are infinitely complex systems subject to myriad compounding and interacting factors, so I’m not a great believer in attributing and assigning things like death codes simplistically. But let’s say that it was possible to accurately track deaths by sugar each year and to come up with a percentage of the roughly 61 million total deaths globally. I have a feeling that the statistic would make the 2.6 million alcohol-induced deaths look tiny by comparison.
Perhaps you’re not convinced, and you would rather give up moderate wine consumption paired with nutrient-dense food as part of your dinner (the only form of alcohol consumption we advocate) than give up sugar. But wait! What’s the number one thing people do when they stop drinking alcohol? They replace it with sugar. There’s a ton of information on the link between alcohol and sugar cravings. If you’re going to go without alcohol, including wine, for the month of January, then you should really consider banning sugar from your life, too; otherwise, you’ll just end up drinking sugary mocktails and reaching for ice cream, all the while virtue signaling about how your skin is glowing and you’re sleeping better than ever, primarily because human beings are very suggestible, and everyone says this is how you should feel.
I won’t participate in Dry January this year, wine-free or sugar-free, because consistent, sustained moderation suits me. But I do understand the need to press a re-set button from time to time. There are many aspects of Dry January that probably appeal to people: participation in a group ritual; the experience of sacrifice or going without in an affluent society; participating in a delimited activity according to a calendar; appealing to an outside source of authority to create boundaries one isn’t comfortable setting on one’s own. None of those are my cup of tea, but I do understand that they are powerful human urges.
Art by Jennifer Anderson
In the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church, the faithful eat and drink according to an ancient calendar of feasting and fasting, the rigor of which might really surprise most Americans. Consider this: while most Americans indulge during the month of December, leading up to Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Eastern Orthodox Christians fast for 40 days until the Feast of the Nativity, when God became incarnate matter for our sake. On December 25, Orthodox Christians celebrate a midnight service, lighting candles in the dark, and then they feast. And when they feast, they feast. They do nothing, feasting or fasting, by halves. I have heard priests say, “Pass the vodka, the herring need to swim.”
This means that for part of November (including Thanksgiving) and the whole month of December, Eastern Orthodox Christians eat what is basically a vegan, no-alcohol diet, except without oil. (With some feast day exceptions, when they can consume fish, oil, and wine.) It’s the no oil part that really gets me.
Consider for a moment what you might cook or eat: you can eat vegetable slurry soup and bread. You can use your advanced thinking skills and order in Vietnamese fresh rolls with tofu and peanut sauce (I don’t think the Church Fathers knew what a nice, oily peanut—or coconut or avocado—was back when they devised the Liturgical Calendar in the 4th century AD). You can make healthy African and Asian curries with coconut milk, or you can (as some do) merely subsist on peanut butter and jelly for a month. The Church Fathers didn’t know about refined sugar, so you can eat as many vegan gummy bears as you want.
I have tried to cook and eat this way, but I can’t do it, I just can’t. Not without feeling like I’m going to die, I have so little energy. So, I’ve made my peace with being a bad Orthodox Christian. But I can’t help wishing the Church Fathers had kept dairy and swapped out sugar in the fast.
Anyone interested in comparing and contrasting Dry January and the Nativity Fast might notice some interesting things: while Dry January and other neo-prohibitionist events seek to decontextualize alcohol in a repeated and aggressive manner, such that (the promoters hope), people eventually give up drinking alcohol altogether, the Nativity Fast is all about contextualizing times of plenty and times of little in a practicable system that gives humans spiritual meaning. There is “a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,” as well as a time to drink wine and a time to refrain from drinking wine.
I’m not trying to convert anyone to my religion here (describing the Nativity Fast likely has the opposite effect), only to point out the beauty in a 2,000 year old Liturgical Calendar.
When the people behind Dry January use their money and political influence to see that candy bars are legally required to have warning labels, like wine bottles (or that all warning labels are removed), then I’ll suspect that maybe they really care about my health. When the WHO states that no amount of sugar is safe for human consumption, then I’ll listen. Until then, their attempts at recommendations seem arbitrary, decontextualized, and open to corruption.