I start my new job today (woo!) so I had to spend the holiday weekend task-managing the house and trying to figure out which projects I didn’t actually get to while on my “vacation.” One of them was re-styling the bookcase in our front room. (Hey – it’s the first thing people see when they walk in. It SHOULD have style!) I got sick of organizing books in a trendy matter, so it’s about 80% done. (And may stay that way.)

Part of the task entailed clearing out books to donate to [insert charity of choice.] Cleaning the shelves also helped me discover some long lost books – like the one on blender cocktails (!) and the tour book to Seattle that I apparently bought fairly recently but don’t remember. And of course, the sh*t ton of Disney memorabilia books.

I also found the small collection of vintage Diabetes cookbooks that my mom passed on (read: stuff in a box of crap after I moved out and gave me on a later date) for my home. These things are OLD. Among the yellowed pages are a whole book on Exchanges, cooking desserts with natural sweeteners and fruit (relavant!)… and this thing:

Oddly enough – this was a “thing” in the early 80s – purposely adding in fructose to meals so lose weight. The question was why did my parents have this for a newly diagnosed 2 year old? This maybe?

The non-corn syrup version of fructose is apparently a low GI sweetener. I guess it would be similar to adding bananas to sweeten Paleo bread or Splenda to sweeten – well – anything. But rather than figuring out how to get food to naturally sweeten using non-chemical means, we add a teaspoon here… a table spoon there… of Fructose.

There were lots of recipes in the book for desserts… sweets… salad dressings…etc. Plus, since this was a diet book to help people lose weight (questionable) there were dinner recipes for meats and fish. However – EVERYTHING* involved adding fructose.

See? You need to add sugar to huevos rancheros? WHY? Because it’ll confuse your appetite later. (Kind of the common complaint about Splenda, eh?)

Needless to say – the book is going to charity. I’m curious if my parents every tried this fad and what it did to my blood sugars later.

*Mostly everything. The tuna dishes were spared.