If Hostess Brands goes down, I’ll be sad over lost livelihoods, many of them in New York. But there will be no sentimental mourning here over the products, a prime mover behind the type 2 diabetes that left my father wheelchair-bound before his premature death and that might have done the same to me.
There’s no “Twinkie Defense” for a nearly nutrition-free snack, however popular and perfectly legal, that’s so ruinous to the body yet so cheap that anyone can afford it.
Consuming too much sugar doesn’t cause diabetes; rather, it exploits a body’s inability to accept and process its own insulin, worsening the condition to such an extent that the habit and the disease are often incorrectly equated.
But the correlation is undeniable. I subsisted since childhood on a diet top-heavy with killer foods and beverages. That included presumably healthier fresh-fruit juice, which until a terrifying onslaught of diabetic symptoms three years ago, I downed by the quart — the equivalent of mainlining glucose.
My sugar craving started in childhood with Hostess CupCakes, Twinkies and Ho Hos. They filled our pantry. Nothing beat their instantaneous soft-and-sweet solace to banish a moment’s anxiety.
I ate so much Hostess and other poisons that I didn’t perceive them as sickly sweet but merely as the way all snacks and desserts were supposed to taste.
Not surprisingly, I was overweight much of my life — not quite fat but often carrying between 10 and 40 pounds more than a guy of my stature can handle. I knew I should change my eating habits, but I kicked the can down the road: One day, I lied to myself, I’ll just give up the junk.
But even after I became a restaurant critic, enjoying meals using the finest ingredients cooked by famous chefs — and aspiring to make fine distinctions among them — I didn’t lose my weakness for Hostess.
Most irresistible were the chocolate and “golden” cupcakes with eight white squiggles on top. Without squiggles, the “cream”-filled round would have been just another 181-calorie gulp of flour, sugar, sodium and cocoa.
The squiggles’ barely perceptible weight on the tongue registered as “texture.” An addict like me even fooled himself into thinking they could actually be tasted, the way M&M’s lovers believe different colors lend different flavors.
Hostess CupCakes’ machine-tooled mouth feel made it easy to down a two-pack, containing nearly 400 calories, in two minutes. With a measly 1 gram of fiber per cake, they left me just as hungry as before and craving only more sugar.
In recent years it’s been fashionable in serious-food circles to regard the CupCakes with ironic affection. Famous pastry chefs came up with recipes to replicate the look of Hostess using fancy organic ingredients.
The Crumbs bakery chain perfected the style with a squiggle-topped, chocolate “Colossal Cupcake” “made by hand, baked with love.” They taste a lot better than Hostess, but they’re bigger and even worse for you, packing 540 calories per cake.
When I first stumbled on to them, in the summer of 2009, it was a trip to heaven: my junk-food favorite elevated to “real-food” status. I finished one off in five minutes.
One month later, I was swamped by a torrent of simultaneous symptoms: inexplicable daytime sweats, repeated nighttime urination, and vision so blurry my reading glasses no longer worked. My blood sugar level approached 400, four times the healthy average.
It was the scare I needed. To my doctors’ surprise and my own, I was able to turn off my craving for the bottomless bilge.
The trick was to give it all up at once: no smaller portions, no cheating. Giving up empty sugar calories isn’t like giving up drugs, alcohol, smoking or even caffeine — there are no withdrawal symptoms.
Life without Hostess has been wonderful ever since. I lost 30 pounds in 18 months, and at 62, I have the energy I knew 25 years ago.
I’ve rarely been tempted to go back to my old ways. But sometimes, in a grocery store late at night, weary from work and wine, I heard the song of the white squiggles.
No longer.