Sugar-free sanctuaries offer goodies to diabetics

Melissa Schorr

Monday, Feb. 23, 1998 | 9:22 a.m.

Diabetics are salivating.

They twirl about on a sugar-free high, just like, well, overgrown kids in a candy store.

Chocolate marshmallow sticks. Cheesecake. Eclairs.

A storeful of forbidden fruit, suddenly ripe for the picking.

Pecan rolls. Tiramisu. Boardwalk taffy.

Here is everything they'd been told they'd never taste again. Black forest cake. Raspberry cheese pockets. Maple syrup.

It's payback time for all those years of passing up and being passed over. Revenge for all those birthday parties without birthday cake, for cardboard cookies that cost $5 a package, for sugarless ice cream that tastes, as one diabetic put it, "like taking a bath with your socks on."

For false hopes raised by packages that loudly proclaim "No Sugar Added," but in the fine print note that they still contain off-limits sweeteners such as molasses or corn syrup.

Here is their passport to nirvana: the land of sugar-free salvation.

For the estimated 100,000 diabetic Nevadans who have to carefully control their sugar intake, local stores such as Mrs. Williams Sugar-Free Diabetic Delights and the new Sugarless Shack: Diabetic Fantasies, are more than Heavenly-Hash godsends -- they can truly be Lifesavers.

All sweet, no cheat

Janet Dietz lost her first husband, Wayne, to diabetes-related heart trouble.

When she saw her second husband, Ron, also a diabetic, scarfing down Entemann's cheesecakes at an alarming rate, she said to herself, "there's got to be a way -- I'm not losing another one."

And, $5,000 dollars of failed food experiments later, Mrs. William's 7-year-old South Decatur bakery (slogan: sweet so you don't have to cheat) is bursting at the seams -- while her husband has actually lost 65 pounds.

Dietz (Williams is her maiden name) provides hundreds of pies weekly to casino buffets across town, sells hundreds of pounds of chocolates for diabetics and is considering revealing her recipes in a tell-all cookbook.

And while the store attracts a surprising range of sugarphobes -- AIDS patients, recovering alcoholics (whose alcoholic cravings worsen from eating sugary treats), parents warding off their children's tooth decay, dieters and health devotees -- it is primarily intended for those with faulty pancreases.

"I never realized how bad diabetics had it until I opened this shop," Deitz says. "I was told, 'Screw the people, triple your prices, you can get whatever you want because you have a product they can't get anywhere else.' That devastated me. I know the costs of being diabetic. I said, 'No, they get screwed enough.' "

Shack attack

Across town, Shonnie Wilson's motives for opening the Sugarless Shack also hit close to home. Both of Wilson's parents had diabetes, and they passed it on to her.

"Twenty years ago, I can remember my mother sitting with her shot of insulin and her ice cream, and I could never understand it," she says. "Now that I'm a diabetic, I can understand why she did that, because there wasn't anything else out there."

She and her husband, Jim, opened the store in May, hoping to create a one-stop-shopping outlet for hard to find sugar-free items such as barbecue sauce and cough syrup. "I think customers can relate to us more, because one of us has diabetes," she says.

But at times, both owners can feel their efforts are for naught. They have watched customers deteriorate before their eyes: losing their kidneys, losing their eyesight, losing their lives.

"Its amazing how many of our customers have gone downhill," Wilson says somberly. "It's quite an aggressive disease, once it gets hold of you -- if you don't get it treated."

Diabetic dilemma

"Most people have some idea of what they should be doing," says Margaret Riedl, a registered dietician at Desert Springs Hospital's Diabetes Treatment Center, "but they don't have the motivation."

That constant test of will-power can be enough to make a grown man cry -- or worse. "It's a great character builder," sighs Lee Pete, 73, a semi-retired radio host who was diagnosed with diabetes a year ago, as he recalls a recent night dining out with friends at the Broiler:

"They have Bananas Foster on the desert: french vanilla ice cream, burnt brown sugar, bananas and a thin crust on the top. It looked so good, you want to kill. Of the six people I'm with, they all had it but me. I was sitting there, and I said, 'If one more person slurps their juice up, I'm going to get up and hit somebody.' I can take everything, but I can't take that. They all started to laugh. They thought I was joking. I'm not joking."

"I'd say every household either is or knows somebody who is diabetic," Wilson says. "But not everybody is considerate enough to make sure they watch out for the diabetic. We had one woman having a dinner party who had a diabetic coming, she came in and (purchased) four slices of tiramisu. But I've gone places where there's nothing, and you just back off (from having) dessert."

A few restaurants, such as Marie Callender's and the Country Inn, now offer pies with no sugar added, and nearly every hotel buffet in town carries sugar-free desserts, such as Mrs. Williams' or Tiffany's Pies' baked goods.

"As far as the buffet goes, you almost have to offer 'no sugar added' " says Lisa Garcia, sales representative for Tiffany's Pies, a 9-year-old local wholesale and retail bakery that offers 19 different pies made with NutraSweet. "People are tired of jello."

And while supermarkets and food manufacturers have also made an effort to beef up the number of sugar-free goodies on the shelf, Ron Dietz points out that their taste can leave something to be desired -- like a supermarket blueberry pie that a customer told him was downright sour.

"We buy a lot of products just to taste and see if they've come up with something better than ours," he explains. "Most of it still tastes bad, you can't wash the aftertaste out with hot coffee -- and I've tried."

The last sugar-free item he bought years ago for his own use was a package of "ooey gooey chocolate sugar-free cookies." "I spit it out," he recalls. "She heard me complaining all the time about the taste, and that's how she got to doing this. I said, 'until you give me something that tastes really good, I ain't giving up my sweets.' Eclairs, cream puffs -- these are things I grew up on and now I can have 'em, and they taste just as good, and they're sugar free."

Indeed, after tasting some of Mrs. Williams' creations, customers have been known to propose marriage on the spot. Even their spouses have conceded she'd be a welcome addition to the family.

"You have to come here for a few pleasures, or you're going to be shooting craps at the stores and get yourself in trouble," says Pete, who has come into the Sugarless Shack during an afternoon to replenish his supplies, after going through three packages of lemon cookies in four days.

"This," he declares, "is an absolute oasis."

Beware the catches

Of course, there is a catch to sugar-free cookery.

The bitter truth is this: products made without sugar, which acts as a preservative and a thickener, have a shorter shelf life and a tendency to go flat, while artificial sweeteners such as NutraSweet and Equal can turn nasty when you try to cook them.

Even worse, foods made with sweetener substitutes such as sorbitol or mannitol tend to produce a lovely little laxative effect that redefines the term "sickly-sweet."

"They think, 'Sugar-free, oh, I can eat all I want,' and that's not really true," Dietz says. "I'm not going to sell them everything and say, 'Go home and eat it, see you tomorrow.' "

And diabetic doesn't necessarily mean dietetic -- low in calories.

"For whatever they take out, they have to replace something," Wilson says. "You cannot indulge in the sugar-free stuff. Just because they take the sugar out doesn't mean they took the calories or cholesterol out."

The danger, Riedl warns, is that clients confuse "sugar-free" with "consequence-free."

"They are a lesser of two evil choices, but they're not purely 'free foods,' she explains. "Everything you eat makes sugar. Some of the specialty products, when we look at carbohydrates (which the body turns into sugar), may not be significantly reduced. And sometimes, when they reduce the sugar, they increase the fat content. It's a jungle out there."

"People come in here wanting fat-free, cholesterol-free, sugar-free, low-salt -- so you suggest they buy a bottle of water," Wilson says. "There is nothing that's got everything out of it -- except air."

And diabetes educators say cutting sugar out entirely is not even necessary. "They think, now all my favorite foods are gone, (but) you can really have everything," says Susan Gaver, a certified diabetes educator at Diabetes Care Network, Inc., which carries diabetic candy and medical supplies. "It's just knowing how to work it in."

"Very often, they learn they don't need all sugar-free products, they just need to understand how to work with their diet," agrees Debbie Devald, executive director of the American Diabetes Association's Las Vegas chapter. "I have a daughter with diabetics, and I never go to a sugar-free store. When you first learn (of it), that's all we were looking for, then I realized the impracticality of not shopping like a normal person shops."

For many newly-diagnosed diabetics, this sudden inconvenience becomes a "not fair" issue. After a lifetime of fad diets and worrying about their weight, Riedl says, "they are finally at the point in their lives when they should be able to eat what they want, when they want it."

Instead, they have to read the labels, resist temptation -- and rely on sugar-free sanctuaries to meld their sweet dreams with the bittersweet reality.

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