| Today’s letter |
| One piece of fruit where the candy bar was |
| In 1967, three scientists at Harvard published a review in the New England Journal of Medicine that blamed fat, not sugar, for heart disease. The paper read like any other academic literature review. What nobody reading it knew was that the Sugar Research Foundation had paid for it: $6,500 at the time, close to fifty thousand dollars in today’s money. Their funding was nowhere in the paper. |
| That came out in 2016, when researchers at UC San Francisco found the paper trail. But the industry’s work was already done. For decades the advice was cut fat. Now the advice has flipped: cut sugar. No Sugar September just ended. The 30-day sugar detox clips are all over your feed, promising that if you quit long enough, the cravings will disappear… and if they don’t, well, that’s on you. It lands hardest on the woman who did exactly what she was told. |
| “Why can’t I just stop wanting it?” |
| She was disciplined. That was never the problem. She tried the 30-day no-sugar challenge, read every label at the store, skipped dessert at restaurants, sat through office birthdays with nothing on her plate. All because she wanted to be the person who beat the craving for good. |
| The advice said two weeks. Give it two weeks without sugar and the craving will fade. She made it past two weeks, past three, past thirty days. The craving on day thirty felt the same as day one. So she went back to the cookies and blamed herself for not being strong enough. |
| Here’s what gets me. |
| Her sweet tooth was never a weakness. The industry built a business around it. |
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| Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study. |
| Researchers at Wageningen University recruited 180 healthy adults for a six-month trial. They split them into three groups: one that got 10 to 15 percent of its daily calories from sweet foods, one at 25 to 30 percent, and one at 40 to 45 percent. About half the food each person ate was provided by the researchers, so this was not a diet diary or a checklist: it was controlled. |
| What they changed was sweetness across the whole diet, not added sugar on its own: the sweet taste came from sugar, from fruit and from low-calorie sweeteners together. Urinary markers confirmed the three groups actually ate different amounts of it. This was measured, not self-reported. Then, at the end of six months, the researchers tested each person’s preference for sweetness. |
| What they found |
| Wageningen University, 2026. Čad et al., The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. |
| The low sweetness group (no change after six months) |
| Their preference for sweetness did not budge. Body weight did not change. Disease markers did not improve. And when the trial ended, they went right back to eating what they ate before, within one to four months. |
| The high sweetness group (no change either) |
| The people eating the most sweetness, around 40 to 45 percent of their calories, came out in the same place on every measure. Sweetness was not the variable. |
| Six months of eating less sweetness did not train a single person to want less of it. |
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| In other words, the craving for sweet food is not a habit you can break by white-knuckling through a month… six months in a controlled trial did not budge it. |
| Her discipline was not the issue. She was fighting a preference that six months in a controlled trial could not change. You were too. |
| So if sweetness itself is not the problem, what is? |
| The wanting is not the variable. It stayed where it was at every level the trial tested, and it came back to baseline in everyone within four months. What changes is how many calories ride along with it. A candy bar delivers the sweetness with almost nothing else attached, which is how it was built. Fruit delivers it with water and fiber in the package. The sweetness was never the part anyone could win against. What carries it was always the part that could change. |
| She never stood a chance. Neither did you, I’d bet. |
| That’s the part no one says out loud… |
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| Try this today |
| Tomorrow, at the time the craving usually hits (afternoon or after dinner), swap engineered sweet snacks (a candy bar, a packaged cookie, a sweetened granola bar) for naturally sweet whole foods: a piece of fruit, a handful of frozen grapes, or two dates. The sweetness stays. Only the form changes. One swap, once a day. And if you still want the other thing afterward, have it. Nothing is banned here. If you have diabetes or follow a plan from your doctor, keep that plan and bring this up at your next visit. |
| The craving was never the enemy. What delivered it was. |
| Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick. |
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| The fruit is not magic. It carries sweetness with water and fiber attached, and a candy bar carries it with nothing attached. That is the whole difference. |
| The sugar industry knew in 1967 that sweetness was worth protecting. They paid to move the blame onto fat. Nearly sixty years later the wellness world flipped the target and told her to quit sweetness altogether. Both missed the point. She could have kept the sweetness the whole time. |
| Nobody has to train herself out of something her body was built to want. The only thing that needs to change is what brings it. There’s still time for you. |
| You never needed to quit the sweetness… |
| It was never your fault. |
| — Cole |
| P.S. If you have ever quit sugar and watched the cravings come right back, hit reply and type SAME. |
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