Let's Grow Issue 5

TheOrganicFarmHarvesting since 1995
Let’s GROW
Dear Friends,
Welcome to the 5th
issue of ‘Let’s Grow’, a fortnightly e-zine
on Earth matters.
In this issue, we’ve discussed at length some interesting
correlations between sugar and decision-making...
We’ve also brought you:
* Some decision-making tips and techniques
* ‘Cane Banes’ - a bird’s-eye view of sugarcane farming
* A Carnatic music competition announcement
* A new Flower Quiz, and the winners of last issue’s quiz
We’re happy to share that Havi Vishnu, a young and talented
illustrator, has joined the Let’s Grow team... Welcome Vishnu!
Do participate in the making of the next issue by sending in
your quiz answers, songs, and your feedback on this issue.
Here’s wishing you a safe and productive fortnight ahead...
We’ll send you our issues every 2nd
and 4th
weekend from
now on…
Love,
Ramashree & Sumana
(Contact Info on the last page)
Issue 5
June282020

Photos - Verse - Tips - Insights - Interviews - Poetry - Recipes - Techniques - Proﬁles
Can you Identify this Flower?
Here are the names of our readers who
answered last issues’ question correctly -
this is indeed a Bitter Gourd flower:
Akila Viswanath, Anjali Sharma, Bama
Selvam, Geeta Meenu, Indisjaivik Aura,
Janapriya Naveen Kumar, Jheyabharathi
Soundararajan, Katyayani Madhira, Lakshmi Boss, Mallika
RamaKrishna Potru, Neelam Qazi, Padma Srinath, Priya
Lakshmanan, Radha Sudharshan, Rajalakshmi Sreenivasan,
Ram Raj, Sangeeta Verma, Sanvi Vivek, Bhat, Shivleela Hazare,
Shubha Subramaniam, Subhashini Sekhar, Valarmathi
Kaviyarasan, & Vanita Suri.
Thank you all for sending in your answers!
Here is the ﬂower of a fruit this
time instead of a vegetable -
Can you identify it?
Please WhatsApp us the answer
to 90801 70795
We’ll post the names of the
correct responders in the next
issue :-)

e Sweet Tru
Sugar has been part of our lives, our plates and our hospital
bills for a while now. These lockdown days, when we are
making more food choices, are probably a good time to
look closer at some sugary facts.
‘Sugar’ and ‘sweet’ have become closely associated in our
vocabularies, but all sugars aren’t sweet. In fact all sugars
are not created equal either. Dr. M Madhu Bashini, MD
(General Medicine), and well-known diabetologist
explains, “from what we know now, different types of
simple sugars are each metabolised in a certain way,
irrespective of their source. So whether the glucose is
from jaggery or white sugar or from corn syrup, it is treated
by the body as a simple sugar. The differences vis-a-vis
sources arise because of the quantity consumed, and
because of the other nutrients or ﬁbre that may be present
in the food, or the other chemicals present because of
processing.” Here is a handy table of sugary facts:
Glycemic
index
tastein our body
sugar
type
Primary source of energy, signals
the release of insulin
Metabolised in liver, low impact on
blood glucose levels and insulin
Leads to elevation of blood glucose
Raises blood glucose levels after
breakdown by lactase
Glucose
Fructose
Sucrose
Lactose
100
19
65
41
Not
sweet
Very
sweet
Sweet
Mildly
sweet

Knowing how sugar (ie glucose) works in the body is
crucial to deciding what kinds of sweet somethings to eat
or avoid. So here is an insight into sugar metabolism by
Dr. Anupama Paranandi (Internal Medicine): “Two of the
keychemicalsinglucosemetabolismareinsulinandglucagon.
Insulin removes glucose from the blood circulation by
allowing the cells of the body to take in glucose for normal
function. Glucagon allows for breakdown of fuel sources
in the body (glycogen in the liver and fats throughout the
body) to allow for enough glucose to be in the system during
a fasting state. A ﬁne balance between the two in a healthy
person allows tight control of blood glucose levels.”
***
“It’s worth mentioning that there is insulin - independent
glucose metabolism in muscle cells. This
comes into play with any activity or
exercise that is glucose demanding.
So, one can ‘preserve’ endogenous
insulin (i.e., the insulin made by the body)
with exercise.
Essentially, glucose metabolism is a
complicated set of regulatory processes,
with innumerable enzymes and hormones,
High Glucose
Concentration
Low Glucose
Concentration
Insulin released
Glucagon released
Cells use up
Glucose
Glycogen made
into glucose
A simpliﬁed view of our body’s glucose processes in blood

either directly (e.g., insulin) or indirectly (e.g., cortisol)
regulating it, but any type of food you consume eventually
gets converted to glucose and then processed for use by the
body, except for fructose, the sugars in fruit. Fructose can
be metabolised in the liver, which converts it to glycogen
(a fuel source in the liver) and fat. This is not a problem if
you eat natural fruit, as a significant amount of the fructose
from fruit either gets used up by the bacteria in your gut or
is converted in your gut to glucose. Therefore, only a frac-
tion of the fructose from whole fruits is transported to the
liver for conversion to glycogen and fat.”
That’s just juice! I
want something more
Wow i’m full!
In fact, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to take in too
much fructose from eating whole fruits. This is because:
Fruits are naturally high in fibre. Fibre induces a feeling
of fullness and satiety, causing you to stop eating long
before the fructose in the fruit reaches anywhere near ex-
cessive levels. (This is not the case with fruit-juice, mind
you. For instance, 3 medium-sized oranges would make
only 1 cup of orange-juice. You could certainly drink up
a cup of orange juice in one go, but it’s unlikely that you
would eat 3 full oranges at a time. Further, eating 3 orang-
es would probably make you feel very full, but the juice
wouldn’t do this at all, making you go searching for
something else to eat as well! If the juice had added
*

*
sugar, then all those simple sugars would immediately
hit your blood stream at once causing a dramatic spike
in insulin and promoting weight gain.
Fructose is the sweetest of the simple sugars. So the
amount of fructose that makes a fruit taste sweet, is
LESS than the amount of sucrose it would take to make
an artiﬁcial food taste as sweet.
But we all know this. We all know eating fruits is a better
idea than eating candy, cake, juices and beverages with
added sugar, and other manmade desserts which have
added sugar. Then why do we have these things? The
answer may seem obvious - because eating sweet things
‘feels’ good - but this answer is not entirely satisfactory, is
it? It’s not satisfactory because there are so many caveats
to this answer. Not everyone has sugar cravings. Even if
they do, not everyone always gives in to sugar cravings.
Even if they do give in, there’s so much variability to it -
some are satisﬁed with one small piece of candy, while
some may have a large tub of chocolate ice-cream and still
want more. This would mean the issue is not so much with
the sugar without, but the decision-making within.
Has decision-making got something to do with sugar
within? Turns out it does indeed! To understand how, we
LESS sugar
MORE nutrition
MORE sugar
LESS nutrition

need to turn to a milestone study on ego depletion - a using
up of mental resources to make decisions - conducted by
Dr.Roy F Baumeister et al (1998) that helped him
understand and explain the construct of decision fatigue,
the tenet that each decision we make depletes our reserve
of will-power and makes subsequent decision-making
more difﬁcult and error-prone.
It was an experiment following this one, conducted by
then-graduate student Matthew Gailliot, that brought to
light conclusive evidence that people who had just eaten
were able to perform better on lab tasks requiring the
exercise of will-power. The interesting and relevant part
for us here is that what they ate did not alter their level of
will-power - a luscious, thick milkshake full of added
sugar produced comparable results to a “tasteless concoction
of low-dairy glop”. To establish cause and effect, researchers
at Baumeister’s lab tried a series of experiments involving
lemonade mixed either with sugar or with a diet sweetener.
The sugary lemonade provided a burst of glucose, the
effects of which could be observed right away in the lab;
the sugarless variety tasted quite similar withoutproviding
the same burst of glucose. Again and again, glucose in the
Willpow
er
Fuel for
willpower
Glucose
E F
Infographic Depicting Matthew Gailliot’s findings

blood restored willpower, but the artificial sweetener had no
effect. The glucose would mitigate the ego-depletion and
sometimes completely reverse it. The restored willpower
improved people’s self-control as well as the quality of their
decisions: they resisted irrational bias when making choices,
and when asked to make financial decisions, they were
more likely to choose the better long-term strategy instead
of going for a quick payoff.
As with any new finding, the idea that glucose in the blood
translates to will-power in behaviour had believers as well
as nay-sayers.As it happens, it was one of the initial skeptics,
Dr.Todd Heatherton, who later conducted his own
research, and reported that “administering glucose
completely reversed the brain changes wrought by ego-
depletion” - a finding, he said, that thoroughly surprised
him. 'Heatherton’s results not only provided further
evidence that glucose is a vital part of willpower; they
helped solve the puzzle over how glucose could work without
global changes in the brain’s total energy use. Apparently,
ego depletion causes activity to rise in some parts of the brain
andtodeclineinothers.Yourbraindoesnotstopworkingwhen
Fasting State Nooo...

glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing
others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and
pays less attention to long-term prospects.’
Coming back to food choices, and eating to sugar-filled
snacks, the sweet taste of the snack is an immediate reward.
We are able to resist it in two cases - one when we have
enough glucose in our blood already and two, when we
have not been making a whole host of decisions in the last
few hours, ie, our ego is not depleted. Let’s look at the
second option first - in today's world, we are surrounded by
options, and we continually make decisions. Exercise or
sleep? Which card? Meet someone now or later? Google
Meet or WebEx? Whose WhatsApp msg should I respond
to first? Which news site do I believe? And on and on…
So there’s hardly a time when
we are not suffering from
decision-fatigue,especial-
ly because the more de-
cisions you’ve al-
ready made, the more
‘depleted’ you are. So
the way to avoid sugary
(and harmful) snacks is to al-
ready have enough glucose in
your blood. Is that a catch-22 situation? That to avoid
eating sugar, you must already have sufficient sugar in your
blood? Not really, because when you eat complex carbohy-
drates, they are digested and assimilated gradually, provid-
ing your body with sustained fuel over a long duration.
There’s harldly
a time in today’s
world when we
are not suffering
from decision
fatigue...

“Therefore,” concludes Dr.Paranandi, “the most effective
way to minimise sugar cravings, maintain good health and
ﬁtness, and be kind to your body, is to consume foods in
their least processed forms. Such foods would be organically
grown fruits and vegetables and whole grains.”
It’s an added bonus that this is not only the way to maintain
good health, but, also to have more will-power and be better
at as crucial a life-skill as decision-making.
***
Cane Banes
Havingapieceofrawsugarcaneisanunbelievablyjuicyexperience,
and one we mustn’t miss. However, growing 70 lakh tonnes of it
(2019-20, India) crushing it, processing it, adding it to desserts,
eating these, and then suffering from a host of health problems…
How wise is that?
We are facing enormous water stress already, and sugarcane is a
thirsty crop. It needs 180 - 250 cms of water over 12-18 months.
This is more than even the whole year’s average rainfall of 119
cms. So farmers have to irrigate sugarcane, and many of them
grossly overdo it too.And there are the added issues of chemical use,
harmful runoff, harvesting and processing hazards… And the
ballooning demand poses a major threat to biodiversity too…
One clear way forward is to consciously reduce our demand for
white sugar (and other sugarcane by-products such as bagasse,
molasses and alcohol).
In the last few weeks, we have destroyed some markets and given
birth to many new ones.Ours is the‘Invisible Hand’that controls
the economy.If this Invisible Hand were to reach out for healthier
diets, a great deal more would be protected than our own bodies.

Don’t make decisions right before
meal-times, at the end of the day or
when you’re hungry. Sleep on it!
Do NOT eat foods which taste
sweet but give you no glucose in your
blood - in your brain’s search for a
decision-making high, you’ll keep
having it, but to no avail. While the
calories pile on! Examples would be
desserts with artificial sweeteners, or
HFCS (High Fructose Corn
Syrup)
Don’t leave minor decision-making
(what to wear, etc) for the morning,
do it the previous night
Make sure you eat starchy complex
carbohydrates before meetings / exams
/importantevents.
Apply your knowledge about the
relationshipbetweensugarandbehaviourin
yourinteractions.Eg.ifyouknowsomeone
hassugar-relatedpathology,trytoletthem
timetheirdecision-makingaccordingtotheir
readiness
Developgoodhabits-they’retheultimate
answer to unnecessary decision-fatigue.
(We all know some invariants about
others in the family - Grandpa’s walk
time,Mom’stea-time.Thesefixedlines
save them and others unnecessary
decisions. Develop your own beneficial
invariants.)
DOs DON’Ts

To subscribe to ‘Let’s Grow’, please go to:
https://theorganicfarm.in/letsgrow
Contact us at:
Phone: 98402 77566
90801 70795
Email ID:info@theorganicfarm.in
Website: www.theorganicfarm.in/letsgrow
Facebook:www.facebook.com/theorganicfarm
e
Illustrations: Havi Vishnu, Alladi Sumana
Content: Alladi Ramashree
Credits
References in this issue:
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30658906/
2. "The Amazing Multimillion-Year History of Processed Food" in Scientiﬁc American 309, 3, 50-55 (September
2013)doi:10.1038/scientiﬁcamerican0913-50
3.’Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength’; Roy F. Baumeister,John Tierney
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-sufer-from-decision-fatigue.html
5. https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/sugar-eplained
6. https://www.statista.com/statistics/249681/total-consumption-of-sugar-worldwide/
7.https://thesleepdoctor.com/2018/05/08/understading-the-conection-betweeen-sleep-and-diabetes
8. https://thesleepdoctor.com/2019/01/29/4-ways-sugar-wrecks-your-sleep/
9. https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/sleep-affects-blood-sugar#
10. https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/sugar-explained
11. https://naturalsociety.com/sugar-the-toxicity-question-and-what-to-do-about-it/
12.https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Baumeister%20et%20al.%20%281998%29.pdf

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