Sugar makes you fat and, if you consume it for long enough, it will kill you. It is converted directly to fat by your liver and it destroys your body’s ability to control your appetite. Without a functioning appetite control you will want to eat more of everything and no amount of dieting or willpower will change that. The more sugar you eat, the fatter you will probably be. But that will be the least of your worries.

Looking unpleasant in work-out gear won’t kill you (although it might cause blindness in passers-by), but the metabolic effects of sugar consumption will. Even if you’ve managed to control your weight, you haven’t escaped; you’ve just avoided the most obvious symptom. Some high-quality studies now confirm that sugar consumption leads straight down a path to fatty liver disease, then insulin resistance, PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome), Type II Diabetes and on to depression, anxiety and ultimately dementia. Other studies tell us sugar is responsible for high blood pressure, chronic kidney failure, premature aging, infertility and gout. Even worse than that, it’s as addictive as nicotine and embedded in almost everything you eat. So, no matter how much you want to stop eating it, you won’t be able to, unless you break that addiction first. Yes, sugar will make you fatter today (and rot your teeth), but give it a few decades and it may well end your life in any one of a long list of unpleasant ways.

The detailed evidence behind all of those alarming statements is contained in my books Sweet Poison and The Sweet Poison Quit Plan. But this book is not about disease or evidence – it’s about fun. It’s about still having treats even though you have thrown out the sugar. It’s about having something to feed your sugar-addicted guests and having something to put in the school lunch-box. It’s about not missing out.

Table sugar (sucrose) is half glucose and half fructose. The glucose half is critically important to our survival. We are a machine that runs on a fuel of pure glucose. Every cell in our body uses it for energy and it is the only fuel our brain can use at all. Don’t worry that you’re missing out on glucose if you don’t eat sugar, as almost every food we eat is ultimately converted to glucose by our efficient fuel extraction system. Glucose is a perfectly normal and necessary part of our diet. It is the fructose half that causes all the destruction and disease. So when I say you’re about to cook without sugar, I mean the fructose half of sugar. While chemically dextrose (the commercial name for glucose) is also a sugar, when I use the word ‘sugar’ I mean the stuff you sprinkle on your cereal, scientifically known as sucrose.

There are plenty of alternative sweeteners I could have used instead of sugar. Natvia (Stevia and Erythritol) and Splenda (sucralose) are two of the more popular sugar alternatives being promoted to bakers, and you will find them in a lot of commercial sugar-free foods. While these sweeteners have been approved for use in Australia, they haven’t jumped all the scientific hurdles. It is because they are relatively new in our food supply and there is sufficient scientific caution about their long term safety that I decided to avoid them. Not because I know there is anything wrong with them (I don’t), just because I believe the evidence is not clear enough yet to make that call.

If there is anything my reading on hormone and endocrine systems has taught me, it is that we are exquisitely adapted to a very specific set of chemicals found in our environment in very specific quantities and ratios. So it made sense to follow the more challenging (from a cooking perspective) route of trying to use a product that I knew for certain we were chemically adapted to: glucose. Cooking without fructose can present a bit of challenge because it is primarily the fructose half that makes sugar – that is, table sugar – (and the foods made from it) sweet.

This book provides recipes for many popular fructose-replacement foods. It is not about how to make meals that are obviously sugarfree (like bacon and eggs); rather, it is a guide to making sweet foods that can satisfy without the risk of re-addiction to sugar, using dextrose (as well as glucose syrup and rice malt syrup) as the sweetener. These are recipes for you to use to make special treats for the rest of your life.

The recipes in my book The Sweet Poison Quit Plan were developed by a mum (my wife, Lizzie) and designed for everyday use (things like the tea cake on page 59 and others you’ll recognise if you’ve read that book). A few of these recipes are included here, but most of the recipes were developed by Peta Dent. Peta is a proper chef, so the recipes are full-on, professionally developed desserts and sweet treats fit for inclusion in any TV chef’s collection. This doesn’t mean they’re hard to make or use bizarre ingredients (Guatamalan chia seeds anyone?).

Peta has cooked each of the recipes dozens of times, trying different combinations and adjusting the quantities until we (and a random selection of sugar-addicted and sugar-free guinea pigs) were happy with the end product. I’ve tasted all of them. The quality control was hard work, but someone had to battle through all that ice cream and cake (okay, I had a little help from the kids!). Lizzie has also made a lot the recipes to make sure an average person in an average kitchen with an average supermarket down the road can pull them off . They’re spectacularly good and we are very excited by the sheer abundance of high-quality fructose-free options this book represents.

So you’ve shelled out serious money for a chef-developed cookbook and that’s what you’ve got, except that everything between these pages is designed to be safe for recovering sugar-holics.

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