Taming the Cookie Monster

written by

Susan Blasko

posted on

May 20, 2025

Taming the Cookie Monster: It’s all about the fat

The all-too-familiar roller-coaster scenario of sugar handling goes something like this: We enjoy a bowl of pasta or cereal, or a plate of pancakes, pizza, a cupcake, or some other refined carb of choice. We experience a high-blood-sugar emergency, followed by an insulin spike to address it, followed by a low-blood-sugar emergency. Low blood sugar then signals the body to start storing fat. Hello weight gain.

Limiting — may I even suggest eliminating — refined carbs is one way of avoiding these metabolic consequences. Substitute simple carbs like fruits and vegetables, and unrefined carbs like whole grains in small amounts.

When the body is preoccupied with sugar emergencies, other systems are neglected. Digestion, circulation, immunity, nervous system (brain), hormone function (thyroid, adrenal, reproduction), all take a back seat. By correcting sugar dysregulation, these neglected systems can return to optimal function.

An effective strategy to curb sugar cravings is to consume fats along with carbohydrates. Digestive fat helps to modulate blood sugar level by slowing down the absorption of sugar and carbohydrates. In turn, insulin release is more measured. No sugar low, no mid-afternoon energy slump, no mood swings associated with sugar emergencies.

Saturated fat is recommended. Oils are also good, but be sure to avoid soy oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, and canola oil. Choose olive oil instead.

To oatmeal, for example, you can add a couple teaspoons of coconut oil and a couple teaspoons of butter, and some cream, a handful of dried fruit, a pinch of salt, and a tablespoon of maple syrup. Or, a pork chop with some fat attached to the meat, and a baked potato holding a pool of melted butter. Now we have a carbohydrate in the presence of a good bit of fat.

The fat prevents the sugar from being absorbed too quickly. Slower absorption prevents a high blood sugar emergency, keeping the insulin release under control. Your body gets an even, normal delivery of sustained energy throughout the day by burning the fat, without an insulin spike and drop in blood sugar to trigger fat storage. You can see how eating all that fat will actually prevent you from gaining weight. Refined carbohydrates alone, on the other hand, will make you fat.

Doing away with the drop in blood sugar prevents sugar cravings and controls hunger. So you’re less likely to reach for a cookie or crackers a half hour after a meal.

Here are more ways to pair fats and carbs. What’s more delicious than any of these:

Sausage and buckwheat pancakes with coconut oil, butter, and maple syrup

• Apple or pear with cheese

• Apple or pear with a handful of nuts

• Cooked greens with bacon, bacon fat and vinegar

Liver pate with raw vegetables

• Cooked vegetables with butter and sour cream

• Peaches with cream

• Berries with yogurt

Try it. Feel the changes. May you be deeply nourished.

More from the blog

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion:  "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition.   That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit.  As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished.  This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer.  You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test.   We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats.  They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not.   We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets:  you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question.  But I'd like to explore it a bit further.   Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history.  The planet is awash in food.   Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way.  We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle.  When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe.  Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory.  Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory.   As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet.  Soil is the skin of the earth.  When it goes, famine results.   The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around.   Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore?  Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough.   The soil trajectory does not look good.  But at Polyface, we're building soil.  Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them.  That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases.   The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century.  At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years.  Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down.  What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff.  By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it.  Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry.  This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before.   African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas.  Why?  We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals.  Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency.  Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease.  Nature uses disease to cull the weak.  Predators pick off the stragglers.  This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point:  the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day.  Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated.  We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children.   Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money.  It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that.  Thank you.  Let's heal the land together. Joel