The Masked Villain Known as Icing Sugar

I've been reading The Cure for Everything! by Timothy Caulfield. The author is attempting to untangle "the twisted messages about health, fitness and happiness." so far it has been extremely enlightening. It has also been very depressing by confirming that there are no short cuts when it come to losing weight, getting fit and staying that way. It is going to be one long hard slog that never ends.

One of the things that Caulfield "reveals" is that exercise won't make you loose weight (though, ironically, it will help you maintain your weight). The one and only way to get skinny and toned is to eat less. For most of us that means a lot less.

So last night when I went to visit a couple of friends what I had read was very much on my mind. I was served a pre-mixed Skinny Girl cocktail that one of my hosts gleefully declared was only 100 calories. "But, 100 calories for how much?" I asked. Out came the bottle and some guestimations and estimations based on how big is a can of pop and how much fits into a martini glass and the ultimate conclusion was that we were drinking more than 100 calories worth of Skinny Girl White Cranberry Cosmos.

The conversation turned to what's in what we eat and how we all eat more than nature ever intended, and how some "healthy" foods are "SO bad for us". That's when I was informed that peanut butter contains... ICING SUGAR! Can you believe it? ICING sugar. They already knew that Kraft peanut butter probably wasn't the best thing to eat but ICING sugar was just a step too far. We should be eating natural peanut butter. Not all that nasty ICING sugar.

At the time I let this slide, but I have to say this now: icing sugar is just sugar. It is no better or worse than what you put in your coffee, it's the same sugar ground to a powder. And while natural peanut butter is better probably healthier than that jar of Skippy, it is by no means a health food. Calorically and fat content wise they're virtually identical. One little adjective turned bad guy sugar into the super villain ICING SUGAR.

I can't blame them for not understanding what icing sugar is: most people of my generation have never been around, let alone involved with food preparation. How would they know the difference between butter and frosting is sugar, or that the difference between margarine and mayonaise is basically an egg.