Elizabeth Hanna says she was fired by the American Diabetes Association after refusing to approve recipes heaped with the additive made by a major donor
Elizabeth Hanna had a simple job: help people with diabetes figure out what to eat. Anyone with common sense knows this should probably not entail foods that might increase people’s risk of getting diabetes. But that’s not necessarily the thinking at the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the world’s leading diabetes research and patient advocacy group, which also receives millions of dollars from sponsors in the pharmaceutical, food and agricultural industries.
According to a lawsuit Hanna recently filed against the ADA, the organization – which endorses recipes and food plans on its website and on the websites of “partner” food brands – tried to get her to greenlight recipes that she believed flew in the face of the ADA’s mission. These included recipes like a “cucumber and onion salad” made with a third of a cup of Splenda granulated artificial sweetener, “autumnal sheet-pan veggies” with a quarter cup of Splenda monk fruit sweetener and a “cranberry almond spinach salad” with a quarter cup of Splenda monkfruit sweetener.
Guess which company gave more than $1m to the ADA in 2022? Splenda.
It’s not uncommon for a dressing to have sugar in it I guess. I’ll put maybe a teaspoon of sugar in a homemade vinaigrette sometimes, but that’s all. A third of a cup sounds disgusting.
I was about to say. A third of a cup is more than the ENTIRE VOLUME OF DRESSING I’d consider putting in a salad… that would serve four people.
Maybe a teaspoon of sugar to balance the acidic flavours in the dressing. Maybe.
Looking at that recipe, it reads like “quick pickles” which are normally made with a hot mixture of white vinegar and sugar (and admittedly quite a lot of sugar), but in those the critical step is you drain the pickled vegetables before serving, so the actual amount of sugar retained by the food is still relatively low. No mention of draining before serving here though, so perhaps it is just artificially-sweetened cucumber and vinegar soup? Blergh.
It’s common to add sugar to quick pickles? Unless you’re canning them and need the sweetener to temper the overwhelming flavor of the massive amount of vinegar required to fend off botulism.
Granted, I’m all about the half-sour pickles, which use salt not vinegar, like so: https://brooklynfarmgirl.com/half-sour-pickles-5/
I’ve only ever seen salads with fruits or beets having any sort of sweetener added.