San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Doctor’s date with destiny led to new career
It was a taste of date syrup that made Sylvie Charles give up a career in medicine.
While a resident at UC San Francisco in 2015, Charles was on an extended medical leave after a spinal injury. It was the first time she really had time to think about what she wanted since she was 17, about to start college and hell-bent on becoming a doctor. During the time off, she realized her real passion was to provide nourishing food to people — to prevent disease rather than treat it.
“What I had always been passionate about was integrative health and wellness,” says Charles, now 31. She wasn’t sure that continuing in her medical practice would resonate with the Eastern part of medicine that felt natural to her.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Charles had grown up with ayurvedic practices, which rely heavily on food as medicine. During medical school at the University of Southern California, where she worked at Los Angeles CountyUSC Medical Center, the number of patients suffering from dietrelated illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease — health problems increasingly associated with high sugar consumption — was overwhelming.
“It really was one of the more impactful experiences of my life. At L.A. County you’re really exposed to some of the sickest people in all walks of life,” she says.
Inspired by her mother and aunt’s cooking, Charles made her first foray into the food business with a line of bottled Indian sauces made without refined sugar. She was working on a recipe for traditional tamarind sauce when she decided to use dates instead of sugar as a sweetener. She already knew dates’ nutritional components well: Compared to cane sugar and even maple syrup and honey, they have a low glycemic index and are high in minerals, antioxidants and fiber.
So she simmered plump Medjool dates in water until tender, strained them and pureed them. She dipped a spoon into the pot. The dates had dissolved into a liquid caramel, not too sweet, with the depth of molasses but without its bitterness.
Charles instantly knew date syrup was her destiny.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh — this is really delightful,’ ” recalls Charles with a warm, gentle laugh. “What a way to get both serious flavor and serious nutrition.”
Charles dropped out of her residency and last year launched the new company she calls Just Date Syrup. While her Indian sauces were a hard sell, the syrup found a market right away, including at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and the online grocer Good Eggs, and will be at Whole Foods in the fall.
While her parents thought she was having a mental breakdown when she first left her medical practice — her father and fatherin-law are both doctors, and her mother-in-law is a nurse — they have since come around. Her husband also stopped practicing medicine to work in a venture capital firm that invests in biotechnology.
“Our generation values doing something you love,” Charles says. “And there are more people leaving to find careers that are related to medicine, or not.”
In her case, the connection is pretty clear. Alternative sweeteners have become a hot commodity as research continues to link sugar intake with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and liver disease. While sodas and other sweetened beverages are an obvious culprit, 74 percent of packaged foods, from whole wheat bread to pasta sauce, contain added sugar, according to a 2012 study in Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Charles says that using date syrup can help anyone avoid spikes in blood sugar caused by sweeteners with a higher glycemic index, which can negatively affect mental and physical performance. Dates are also popular among adherents of paleo and other diets that don’t allow traditional sweeteners. A ready-to-go syrup allows home cooks to avoid having to pit, soak and puree them, while still retaining some of the fiber.
Charles was happy to discover
“What I had always been passionate about was integrative health and wellness.” Sylvie Charles, Just Date Syrup
that dates have been used in ayurvedic practice for thousands of years, to promote sleep and induce labor — which is fortuitous since she’s expecting her first child.
From a flavor perspective, dates complement coffee particularly well, and Charles has created recipes for date syrup granola, salad dressing, Chinese and Japanese sauces, and beverages that are typically loaded with sugar, such as her Strawberry Mint Agua Fresca.
Date syrup can be used in a 1:1 ratio for liquid sweeteners in recipes, but it is more challenging to use in standard baking recipes. Charles uses it in a tahini chocolate chip cookie that she adapted from a popular recipe by Toronto pastry chef Danielle Oron. Her company is developing a fruitderived granulated sweetener for baking, not necessarily made from dates, that should be ready in 2019.
The hitch for now is the price. At $8.99 for an 8.8-ounce bottle, Charles’ syrup is out of reach for the lower-income patients she was originally inspired by. There are lessexpensive imports from the Middle East, but many of those have added cane sugar.
Charles says her plan is to bring the price down to $6.99 by the end of 2019, which will still be a lot more than a bag of sugar. But she also plans to sell it to venues that serve populations at risk, such as hospitals.
“That’s ground zero for someone who needs a lifestyle change,” she says. “Part of my goal will be to shift that paradigm to bring delicious items into the hospital that are better for you.”