Australia’s Sweet Poison: How Sugar is Ravaging Our Livers (And Why the Experts Are Dangerously Wrong)

By | Big Fat Lies, Sugar, Sweet Poison | No Comments

The so-called experts are obsessed with obesity, wagging their fingers at our expanding waistlines like disappointed schoolmarms. But obesity is a symptom, not the disease. It’s like blaming a cough for pneumonia. The real villain is sugar, the sweet assassin that’s silently sabotaging our insides.

The truth is, obesity and NAFLD often go hand-in-hand, but one doesn’t necessarily cause the other. They’re both symptoms of a deeper problem: our addiction to sugar.

Read More

The Hidden Killer in Your Cupboard

By | Addiction, Big Fat Lies, Sugar, Sweet Poison | No Comments

Why clear labelling is the first step in reclaiming our health

We like to think we’re in control – especially when it comes to the basics, like what we put in our bodies. We buy groceries, scan nutrition labels, and make conscious choices. That’s the comforting story we tell ourselves. But what if our understanding of the choices we make about food is fundamentally flawed? The unfortunate truth is the average Australian consumes over 40 teaspoons of sugar each day. We eat most of that without even realising it. Why? Because the food industry has turned the supermarket into a minefield of confusion.

Sugar, Cocaine, and the Illusion of Choice

Sugar isn’t just about empty calories.  It’s a weaponised ingredient, as addictive as cocaine – and the companies know it. That’s why they hide it under dozens of innocent-sounding names, lurking in your “natural” yoghurt, your “low-fat” salad dressing, even savoury items like baked beans. Think your BBQ sauce is safe?  Think again – it often has more sugar than chocolate sauce! You dutifully scan labels for calories, fat content, or maybe even sodium, completely unaware that the truly dangerous component is slipping by in the fine print.

Sugar is a slow poison, destroying our bodies from the inside out.  Obesity, now a global epidemic, fuels a devastating chain reaction of health problems. Sugar throws your hormones into chaos, paving the way for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.  This leaves you feeling hungry and exhausted, even when you’re eating enough.  And it’s not just about weight — sugar is a major contributor to heart disease, the world’s leading killer.

The damage goes even deeper.  Sugar feeds certain cancers, particularly those of the pancreas and liver. It fogs your mind,  steals your memory, and even speeds up the ageing process. This isn’t about dieting;  it’s about survival.  A high-sugar diet strains our healthcare systems, shortens lives, and steals precious years with loved ones.

Sugar hijacks your brain’s reward centres, just like addictive substances. Your innocent bowl of breakfast cereal becomes the first shot in a cycle: spike, crash, repeat.  This isn’t willpower failing – it’s your neurochemistry fighting back to recapture that feeling of pleasure. It’s a cycle most of us are stuck in, and they designed it that way.  It’s your brain rebelling against a chemical onslaught, and while you’re waging war with your willpower, they’re counting their money.

It’s not about weakness, it’s about a rigged game.  We’re asked to decipher complex codes while our own biology, hijacked by hidden sugar, sabotages us from within.  We deserve better.

When “Healthy” Means Profit, Not Nutrition

The food industry’s stance on labelling is a masterclass in hypocrisy. In the US Companies behind cereals like Froot Loops, their boxes plastered with cartoon mascots, desperately cling to the word “healthy”. It’s a calculated gamble, banking on the US regulators backing down rather than risk lawsuits and industry outrage. After all, if “healthy” has any real meaning, these sugar bombs are no better than lollies disguised as breakfast. They target kids, manipulating reward systems and taste buds with sugar, artificial colours and flavours while providing zero nutritional value. It’s a brazen scheme, one that depends on obscuring the truth from worried parents. Regulators look the other way, bought off by lobbyist cash while our bodies pay the price. It’s a sweet deal for the industry, a bitter pill for our health.

History in a Sugar-Coated Shell

This fight is a rerun of Big Tobacco’s playbook. Remember those ads featuring smiling doctors pushing cigarettes? We’ve been here before. But today, instead of smoke-filled offices, it’s supermarket aisles lined with “wholesome” cereals. Forget hidden ingredients in tiny fonts; imagine soft drinks with stark warning labels like cigarette packs. It works: in the UK, Chile and Israel, clear “high in sugar” labels have driven down consumption, empowered shoppers, and prompted companies to change. Imagine a world where you don’t have to decipher codes to avoid accidentally poisoning your family.

The Real Battleground

But true change means more than labels. It’s about making truly healthy options as enticing, accessible, and yes, as profitable for companies as their sugary traps. Until nutritious food is as aggressively marketed and widely available, we’re fighting a losing battle. For now, the industry profits, kids become addicted, and our health spirals downward. This is a fight for the future, and it begins with demanding honesty on the shelves.

The Sweet Smell of Revolution

Picture your local supermarket. Aisles overflowing with processed foods, their addictive ingredients masked by bright colours and clever slogans. This isn’t about feeding our bodies, it’s about feeding profits. We deserve better!. Imagine shops where instead every aisle offers mouthwatering, satisfying foods that actually make you healthier. Imagine that being the easy choice, the profitable choice…or maybe they’d rather keep selling us slow-acting poison disguised as breakfast.

Right now, we’re losing a war waged with hidden sugar and deceptive marketing. Let’s demand clear sugar labelling on every product. Let’s make it easy to spot the garbage. Let’s make it easy for people to vote with their wallet. That’s how we create change, one shopping trip at a time. The revolution starts at the checkout.

How to use habits to quit sugar

By | Addiction, Sugar, Sweet Poison | One Comment

If your New Year resolution was to be healthier then you could do a lot worse than quitting sugar. Sugar makes us fat, gives us Type II diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, kidney disease, fatty liver disease and makes us more prone to infection, just to name a few of its greatest hits. The only problem is that it is just a wee bit addictive, so quitting is an awful lot easier said than done. Happily, the emerging science of ‘habits’ might be just the ticket we need to eliminate the Sweet Poison from our lives.

We do a lot of things habitually. A habit is a low energy automated thought process. We use them all the time to do repetitive tasks. We use them help us navigate to a place we travel to every day. We use them to catch a ball and we use them to cook our dinner.  I am using them now to type this article. I don’t need to know where the keys are. My brain just knows and lets me focus on what I am typing rather than how I am typing it.

Habits are procedures that we have assigned to the ‘auto-pilot’ domain in our brain (the basal ganglia) so we can do some higher order thinking (or watch Netflix) at the same time. It’s as close as the human brain comes to parallel processing.  We shove as much of our thinking into Habit subroutines as we can. Our brain is constantly on the lookout for repetitive actions that can be packaged up as a habit because every habit we can create decreases our brain’s energy requirement or increases the amount of thinking we can get done.

Uncertainty creates habits

To record a habit, we need dopamine.  Dopamine is generated if the procedure being coded either, requires we make lots of decisions or generates a reward or both. When we learn the route (without navigation) to a new destination we are on high alert because we have high levels of uncertainty about every decision we make – do I turn left before or after the McDonalds?  The uncertainty ensures dopamine levels are high and our learning is quickly encoded into a habit routine.  This is why manually learned routes are ‘memorable’ but routes ‘learned’ with the assistance of Google Maps are not. Using an app is outsourcing your habit formation routines to the software.

Sugar creates habits

Sometimes the behaviour itself generates the dopamine. Some substances artificially stimulate it, ensuring any behaviour associated with obtaining the substance is efficiently packaged as a habit. Sugar is one of these substances. This is why we develop habits around consuming it.

We go to the same coffee shop every morning and buy the same muffin. We see the same drink machine in the same place each day and automatically buy a Coke.  We walk past the sweets bowl on the receptionist’s desk and automatically take one. We relax in front of the telly and automatically reach for ice-cream.  We buy a pie and automatically add sauce. These are all habits.  They all happen without us really thinking about them at all.  And we will do them all over and over again without a moment’s thought – literally.

Just because we don’t think about habits, doesn’t mean we can’t.  We can manually override a habit subroutine, but it does require persistent effort.  As soon as you aren’t watching you will slip back into the habit subroutine unless you break the habit.

Breaking sugar habits

There are four steps to breaking a habit created by an addictive (dopamine generating) substance:

  1. Identify the habit
  2. Remove the sugar from the habit
  3. Neutralize the craving
  4. Find support

Identify the Habit

Identifying a habit is a simple as making a list (or preparing a fearless self-inventory as Step 4 of Alcoholic Anonymous puts it).  You can do it now. Think about your day today. Now fearlessly list each and every time you consumed something that obviously contained sugar. Your list might look like:

  1. Ate Sultana Bran for breakfast
  2. Drank orange juice for breakfast
  3. Purchased muffin with morning coffee
  4. Ate birthday cake at afternoon tea in office
  5. Took handful of jellybeans from co-worker’s lolly jar
  6. Bought energy drink from vending machine at train station
  7. Had ice-cream in front of TV after dinner.

Every one of those things is likely to be something you do most of the time.  And in each case, you probably barely remember doing it. Indeed, you probably struggled to list them at all and even now you’re not sure you got them all – amiright?

Remove Sugar

You could progressively eliminate each habit in its entirety but that will be hard going. The science tells us it is easier to change an element of a habit than it is to delete it altogether.  Your brain went to a lot of trouble to create these habits and it will not let go of them easily.  So, I suggest that the best approach is to remove the sugar containing element but otherwise leave the habit intact.

So, for the first two listed above this means having breakfast as usual but substituting a low or no sugar alternative – say Week-bix instead of Sultana Bran and water, milk or a hot beverage instead of the juice.  You are still executing the habit routine; you are just doing it without the dopamine generating sugar.

Nix the Craving

Needless to say, it will not be that easy. Cravings for dopamine generating substances do not just vanish because you changed your breakfast one morning. Repeated dopamine hits cause our brain to temporarily rewire so that we crave more hits. You will need more than a simple substitution plan.

The craving will fade but it can take up to three months and you will need help while it does. Two things will help you get through the withdrawal phase, dopamine hit substitution, and peer reinforcement. Substitution is the strategy used in many drug assisted addiction programs. They substitute methadone for heroin or nicotine patches for cigarettes. The idea is to replace the addictive substance with one that is still potentially addictive but delivers a lower dopamine hit, then lower the dose over time.  If you wanted to implement it with sugar, then caffeine could be the way to go.  Replace a sugar hit with a coffee (without sugar) in habits that permit it. Substitution can work but, on its own, it is not particularly effective.

Find Support

A recent review of all popular smoking cessation programs available in the UK found that of the available pharmacological interventions, the most likely to succeed is varenicline, a drug which produces a less powerful dopamine release than nicotine. The next most effective method is a combination of nicotine patch with nicotine gum or spray. With each method, the counselling that goes with it makes a massive difference.

The counselling sessions are based on a variety of theoretical models that have very little in common. It seems the model used does not materially affect the outcome. The important things seem to be the existence and scheduled nature of counselling and whether or not it is in a group setting. Group therapy, being able to talk to other people who have quit or are quitting, triples the effectiveness of all pharmacological treatments. Similarly, the group meetings are likely to be the secret to the success of Alcoholics Anonymous.

The most effective method we know of for breaking addiction is anything involving group therapy. It doesn’t seem to matter what that group therapy entails if there is regular contact with people in the same boat. That contact can be in person or online, but it must be regular. There is something about the group dynamic which makes us want to do what the group values; that is, remaining abstinent. The research shows we can quit on our own but three times as many of us succeed if we can regularly interact with people who are quitting or have quit.

Addiction is not a choice we make. People don’t choose to keep doing something that will kill them. In fact, most don’t want to keep doing it. Most smokers would quit tomorrow if they could. Simply telling yourself that ugly things will happen to you if you keep going with the addictive behaviour or substance has no effect whatsoever. That is just stressful information, and the thing most people are likely to do to relieve stress is turn to their favourite addiction.

The key is to find the sugar hidden in your daily habits, admit it is there, plan for it not to be there and do it all with others who are in the same boat.  It might sound like tinkering, but these small changes to cravings driven routines will cumulatively drag you kicking and screaming away from sugar addiction. Suddenly you will be in a place where you, and not an addictive substance, determine what you will eat and the circumstances in which you eat it.

 

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon from Pexels

What seed oils are really doing to your body

By | Books, Cookbook, Recipes, Vegetable Oils | 9 Comments

VEGETABLE oils are highly unstable.

When they interact with oxygen, they release neurotoxic, DNA mutating chemicals which are known to cause cancer (at least).

Recent improvements in measurement technology have now thrown a spotlight on the quantity of these chemicals released by normal use. And the results are truly terrifying.

Cheap vegetable oil made from seeds (canola, sunflower, corn, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran and soybean oils) is a new addition to the human diet. Unlike animal fats and oils made from fruit (olive, avocado and coconut oils), they’re very high in polyunsaturated fats and in particular something called an omega-6 fat.

A recent study found that when seed oils containing these fats are heated at a normal cooking temperature (of 180 degrees celsius), they create highly toxic chemicals known to be involved in cancer causation.,

And each time the oil was re-used the concentration increased massively. The study showed that by the fifth day of oil re-use, it had five times the concentration of these chemicals that it had on the first (which was already alarmingly high).

But worse than that, the researchers also made the point that all they could measure was the amount of these chemicals left in the oil. Since they are highly volatile, they are constantly escaping into the air around us when the food is being cooked.

According to another recent study, it is likely that this volatility explains the stubbornly high rates of lung cancer among women in Asian countries (where smoking is rare among women, but wok frying with Canola oil is a daily task).

Those toxic molecules are dangerous because they are interact destructively with our DNA. This significantly increases the chances that cancer will develop.

These seed oils are now a core component of our food supply and Australians are sicker now than at any time in our history.

We are almost four times as likely to have thyroid cancer than just three short decades ago. We are more than three times as likely to have liver cancer. We are twice as likely to have melanoma, Motor Neuron Disease, kidney or anal cancer.

Men are more than twice as likely to have prostate cancer and 60 per cent more likely to have testicular cancer. Women are 43 per cent more likely to have breast cancer. And children are paying even more dearly.

A child is 6 times as likely to suffer from leukaemia than at the start of the 20th century. And they are more than four times as likely to suffer from a life threatening allergic reaction than they were just 20 years ago.

The chronic disease tsunami is upon us.

Every day there are thousands of teenagers standing over vats of frying canola oil for eight hour shifts at every fast food restaurant in this country. Every day, there are people cooking with high temperature seed oils in woks and frying pans. And every day there are industrial quantities of heated seed oil being poured into commercial baked and frozen foods.

A century ago, exactly none of these fats were added to our food supply.

Every day 312 new cancer sufferers are diagnosed in Australia. That this is allowed to continue when the science is so clear on the likely cause, is not merely a shame or an embarrassment. It is an outrage and a tragedy.

It is reasonably safe to assume all the fat in processed food comes from seed oils. The good news is that this only applies to food made by others (and usually shoved into a packet with a picture of real food on the front).

Nobody can stop you making and eating real food. All you need is a little know-how.

Also published on news.com.au


Eat Real Food Cookbook Launch Offer

Cookbook bundle540Get the new Eat Real Food Cookbook OR the Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook OR BOTH for 25% OFF.

Just Enter the discount code ERFCB25 at checkout

Both books are of course signed by David

Buy Now

Offer ends 31 December 2016

Why we need to eat real food

By | Books, Cookbook, Sugar, Vegetable Oils | 8 Comments

It turns out that avoiding Type II Diabetes, Obesity and Fatty Liver is the easy bit.

Sugar is very bad news. It destroys (in this order), our teeth, our gut, our liver, our ligaments, our pancreas, our kidneys our blood vessels, our heart and eventually our brain. The science on all of this is now so uncontroversial, that many countries (including the UK) are implementing sugar taxes to help pay for the accelerating damage. But sugar is the lesser of the two dietary evils that have infiltrated our food supply. The other is vegetable oil. And it makes the consequences of sugar consumption look like a mild case of the sniffles. This stuff doesn’t just destroy our lives, it takes out the next generation as well.

Twelve years ago I removed sugar from my diet. I didn’t change anything else. Yep, I still ate meat pies (just without sauce). I still drank beer. And I still didn’t exercise anywhere near enough. I did it because I was obese and the evidence told me that the reason was my sugar consumption. So I stopped eating sugar. It changed my life permanently. I lost 40 kilograms and regained a passion for participating in the lives of my six kids, something that up until then was fading as fast as my weight grew.

Then, a few years into my sugar free life, I discovered something that made it immeasurably harder. Sugar isn’t the only thing that’s been added to our diet in large quantities by the food industry. The other is oils extracted from seeds (usually described as ‘healthy’ vegetable oil).  It isn’t the occasional splash of oil you add to your salad or fry your steak in.  It’s the industrial quantities of the stuff added to your bread, your biscuits, your frozen meals, your sauces and dressings and everything you buy in a restaurant or your favourite take-away.

Cheap vegetable oil made from seeds (canola, sunflower, corn, safflower, grapeseed, rice bran and soybean oils) is a new addition to the human diet. Unlike animal fats and oils made from fruit (olive, avocado and coconut oils), they’re very high in polyunsaturated fats and in particular something called an omega-6 fat.

When omega-6 fats are heated (in a deep fryer or in the human body) they produce highly toxic molecules. Those end-products are dangerous because they are incorporated into every cell in our body and interact destructively with our DNA. This significantly increases the chances that cancer will develop.  But that’s by no means the least of it. Because of their neurotoxic capabilities, these molecules are likely to be heavily involved in motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. They’re also implicated in chronic inflammation, the massive recent increase in allergies, stroke and heart disease. And, less predictably, they probably lie behind the sudden mass decline in male fertility and the massive increases in childhood cancers, Down syndrome and Autism.

Australians are sicker now than at any time in our history and it is getting worse unbelievably quickly.  We are almost four times as likely to have thyroid cancer than just three short decades ago.  We are more than three times as likely to have Liver Cancer.  We are twice as likely to have Melanoma, Motor Neuron Disease, Kidney or Anal cancer.

Men are more than twice as likely to have prostate cancer and 60% more likely to have testicular cancer.  Women are 43% more likely to have breast cancer.  And children are paying even more dearly.  A child is 6 times as likely to suffer from leukemia than at the start of the 20th century. And they more than four times as likely to suffer from a life threatening allergic reaction than they were just 20 years ago.  Sperm counts halved in the 50 years (to 1990). Pregnancies are three times as likely to be affected by Down syndrome over the same period and a child is twice as likely to be autistic.  The chronic disease tsunami is upon us.

These unbelievably cheap sources of fat are even more deadly than sugar and have now infiltrated everything on the supermarket shelves. If I avoided the 99% fat free but high sugar mayo, I was jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. The full fat version had no sugar but was made using sunflower oil.

A century ago, exactly none of these fats were added to our food supply. Now unless you made it yourself, it is reasonably safe to assume all the fat in your food comes from a seed. Avoiding these fats is several orders of magnitude harder than avoiding sugar. Our food supply is stuffed with two ingredients that are more likely than not to cause a slow, lingering and painful death. The good news is that this only applies to food made by others (and usually shoved into a packet with a picture of real food on the front). Nobody can stop you making and eating real food. All you need is a little know-how. And that’s what the Eat Real Food Cookbook is all about.

It’s an odd sort of a cookbook. It explains the science and gives you an easy guide to navigating the supermarket and your local eatery. It’s not the kind of cookbook you’d give to your best friend for her to put on her coffee table (and that neither of you having any intention of reading). It doesn’t show you how to cook flash cakes that look like Darth Vader. And it most certainly doesn’t show you how to make a salad in a jar.

My wife, Lizzie, and our six kids have been living off the recipes and tips in the book for the better part of the last decade. Don’t let the beautiful photography fool you. This is an intensely practical book designed to solve an intensely practical problem. How to create high quality food – simply, inexpensively quickly and every day – that’s completely free of the twin evils of fructose (the dangerous part of sugar) and seed oils (the man-made fats recently added to our food supply).


Eat Real Food Cookbook Launch Offer

Cookbook bundle540Get the new Eat Real Food Cookbook OR the Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook OR BOTH for 25% OFF.

Just Enter the discount code ERFCB25 at checkout

Both books are of course signed by David

Buy Now

The Canadian Heart Foundation comes down hard on Sugar

By | Conflicts of Interest, Sugar, Sweet Poison | 7 Comments

In June this year that Canadian Heart & Stroke Foundation (the Canadian HSF) killed off its ‘Health Check Program.’  Just like the Australian Heart Foundation’s ‘Tick Program’, the HSF Check had been plumbing new lows in prostituting health advice to the interests of the food industry.

Perhaps it was when it took money to put a ‘Check’ on Slush Puppies or maybe it was when they endorsed a children’s snack that was 80% sugar.  Maybe it was just the combined weight of the evidence against sugar, so neatly summarised by the World Health Organisation in January.  But whatever the cause, eventually they did the right thing and said no to Food Industry money.

Now that the interests of their sponsors count for naught, they have released a powerful position statement on sugar.  In a single document they have catapulted themselves from handmaiden of the processed food industry to the world leader in health policy.  They have looked at the evidence and made a persuasive case for immediate action on sugar.

Pay attention Australian Heart Foundation they are making you look like the fools that you are.

In Canada In Australia
No less than 17 major studies are cited in support of a statement that sugar is associated with:

  • heart disease,
  • stroke,
  • obesity,
  • diabetes,
  • high blood cholesterol,
  • cancer and
  • tooth decay.
“sugar … [is] only important in relation to [tooth decay]. … There is no scientific consensus that sugar … causes heart disease.”
Sugar consumption (from all sources) should be no more than 10% (12 teaspoons per day – less than half current Canadian consumption) and preferably less than 5% (6 teaspoons).  “Rather than making choices based on sugar content alone see what else a food offers nutritionally.”
Food labelling needs to be significantly improved to show sugar content properly [sound of crickets]
The Government should:

  • act to reduce the amount of sugar in the food supply
  • tax soft drinks
  • support education programs aimed at reducing sugar
  • restrict marketing to children
  • avoid partnerships with producers of high sugar foods
  • Ban the sale of sugary drinks in hospitals and schools
  • Educate parents on how to avoid sugar in the lunch-box
[more crickets]
The Heart Foundation recommends people avoid packaged and prepared food. The Heart Foundation earns money from the sale of packaged food where sugar is a primary ingredient in the product.

 

Addicted to the sweet stuff? Here’s how to cut sugar from your diet

By | Books, Media, Print, Sugar, Sweet Poison | One Comment

Need to get the sugar out of your diet? Read this extract from The Sweet Poison Quit Plan by David Gillespie for tips.

Sugar addiction is such an integral part of our society that we don’t even have a word (like “alcoholic”, “chocaholic” or “workaholic”) to describe people addicted to sugar. “Eaters” are addicted to sugar, but you can eat without sugar. So I’m inventing a new word for sugar addicts: “sugarholics”. Sugarholics today are in the same position that smokers were in the 1950s.

You used to be able to smoke any time at work. You didn’t have to stop work and stand alone in the middle of a field. You weren’t vilified for lighting up a cigarette in a restaurant. Quite the opposite; if you didn’t smoke, you were the weirdo. Today, sugarholics rule the roost. Everybody is addicted from birth. Not eating the birthday cake in the tea room marks you out as the weirdo. Make no mistake: the task you are about to undertake will not be easy, but it is not an exercise in willpower.

Despite what everybody tells you, if you are a sugarholic, you do not have a personality defect. You are not a glutton. You are not weak-willed. You are chemically addicted to a substance in the food supply called fructose. And until you treat that addiction as the powerful biochemical force that it is, you will never loosen its grip. There are five steps to breaking your addiction.

There are lots of downsides to sugar addiction and the only upside is that you feel normal when you have a hit. Do you really have cause to feel deprived? No, but willpower diets demand that you feel deprived. They ask you to “go without” and to “give up” a treat. Feeling deprived will simply drive you back into the arms of addiction.

If you want to succeed, you mustn’t feel you are being deprived of anything. You need to take pity on the poor hopeless addicts who are all around you ingesting poison. You need to view any offering of sugar not as a temptation to be overcome, but as an attempt to poison you (perhaps a little extreme, but you get the idea).

So, don’t feel deprived. You are not giving up anything. You are simply stopping a dangerous and harmful addiction. It really is that simple to break an addiction. If you have the right attitude, staying sugar-free becomes a lot easier than you could possibly imagine.

A critical step in breaking your sugar addiction is identifying the habits associated with the addiction. For me, watching TV was a means of relaxation, and it still is. But my sugar addiction had infiltrated that pleasurable experience and made it its own. Sugar had become an integral part of the relaxation process.

The pleasure I gained from watching TV was directly associated, in my mind, with the dopamine hit I got from the sugar. It’s possible to disassociate the two activities, but you won’t do it by abstaining from both using willpower. The trouble with addictions is that they frequently attach themselves to otherwise-pleasurable experiences and it becomes impossible to distinguish the two.

Those habits will really test your resolve because of the strong association, and in some cases the strong peer group pressure (such as at birthday parties, Easter and Christmas) to conform. In many instances, the only rational way to deal with the problem is to avoid the habitual events associated with consuming sugar until you break the addiction.

So, if you are in the habit of relaxing in front of the TV with a chocolate at the end of the day, stop watching TV and find some other way to relax in the evening for the next month. Or you could continue your TV habit but replace the chocolate with nuts, for example.

This step is all about giving you the shopping strategies you need to prevent too much fructose from contaminating your food supply. You are going to need some shelf space for all your fructose-free food, so the first thing you need to do is throw out all the food in your pantry and fridge that is too high in fructose.

Chocolate of any description must be sent to a happier hunting ground. The same goes for anything you picked up in the confectionery aisle at the supermarket. Sweet biscuits are slightly less bad than confectionery. To make your cupboards truly fructosefree, all the sweet biscuits should go in the bin.

The only drinks you should have in your cupboard or fridge are unflavoured water and unflavoured milk. If you prefer your water with bubbles, then by all means have unflavoured mineral water or soda water. Alcoholic drinks are okay for the recovering sugarholic as long as they don’t taste sweet and they are not mixed with other drinks that contain sugar.

You can keep the dry wines, beers and spirits, but you need to toss out the dessert wines, ports, sweet sherries, liqueurs and mixers (unless they are diet mixers). If you see honey or sultanas in the name of a cereal, it’s usually a good idea to check the sugar content carefully. Don’t be fooled by the branding of new ranges of flavoured oat cereals, either. Unlike their unflavoured cousins, they are usually extremely high in sugar.

Walt Disney once said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” And that is the point at which we have arrived on our mission to break your sugar addiction. There’s nothing fun about the withdrawal period, but it does end. And once it does, you’ll be completely free from the desire to eat sugar ever again. A plate of bikkies will hold all the attraction of a plate of raw broccoli.

If you are going cold turkey, have one last supper of your favourite sugary treat. Get that Mars Bar or that can of Coke. Sit down and consciously enjoy the very last time in your life that you will eat (or drink) sugar. If you can just get past the next few weeks of danger, you will enjoy the health that sugar has sucked from your life to date. Then, all of a sudden, your desire for sugar will vanish. I know it sounds strange, but it just plain goes. Bang! And you will never want the stuff again.

Re-stock and live your life

Once you start the withdrawal, you’ll need to re-stock your now-bare cupboard.

Fruit: Whole fruits do contain fructose (the addictive and harmful half of sugar) – in some cases, very large amounts. But they also contain a fairly large amount of fibre and water.

Vegetables: There is no such thing as a bad vegetable. All vegetables contain some level of fructose, but it is an insignificant amount and is vastly overwhelmed by the fibre content.

Nuts: Like vegetables, there’s no such thing as a bad nut. Some have more fructose than others, but even the worst of them, from a fructose perspective, have huge amounts of fibre.

Meat: Meat does not contain any sugar, so knock yourself out. The only possible word of caution is around some of the fancy marinated meats. The marinade is usually very high in sugar and this type of product should generally be avoided.

Eggs, yoghurt, milk and cream: Only choose the tartest of European and natural yoghurts and avoid flavoured milk or whipped cream that you buy in a can.

Cheese: Cheese will have sugar on the ingredients list, but it is all lactose, so there’s no need for concern.

Bread: All breads contain some sugar. All of the standard unflavoured white breads lie somewhere between 0.5 and four per cent sugar (two per cent fructose). Multigrain and brown (wholemeal and rye) breads are low-sugar and have approximately twice as much fibre.

 

This is an edited extract from The Sweet Poison Quit Plan by David Gillespie (Viking).
Originally published in Body+Soul

Buy David’s Books

By | Books, Cookbook, Education, Recipes, Sugar, Sweet Poison, Vegetable Oils | 6 Comments

All of David’s books are available from this site. And each book purchased is personally signed by David. If you buy multiple copies of books you will receive multi-buy discounts and keep an eye out for sugar themed or oil themed bundles which also offer great discounts.

All of the books are also available electronically (obviously those aren’t signed).

In addiction to the books there is a great range of electronic resources (such as guides to the sugar content of common foods) available in the Resource Store.

The Books

 Free Schools Cover Small
Free Schools

David Gillespie has six kids. When it came time to select high schools, he thought it worth doing some investigation to assess the level of advantage his kids would enjoy if he spent the required $1.3 million to send them all to private schools.

Shockingly, the answer was: none whatsoever.

Buy Now Find out more
 bk_sweet_poison_cookbook
The Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook

Ex-lawyer and ex-sugarholic, David Gillespie, revolutionised the lives and eating habits of thousands of Australians with his bestsellers on the dangers of sugar, Sweet Poison and The Sweet Poison Quit Plan. To help get us unhooked from sugar, David with the help of wife Lizzie, gave us recipes for sweet foods made with dextrose-pure glucose, a healthy alternative to table sugar. Here, David has worked with a chef to develop more delicious fructose-free recipes.

All proceeds from the sale of this book are donated to charity

Buy Now Find out more
 bk_toxic_oil
Toxic Oil

“‘Vegetable’ oil makes you exceedingly vulnerable to cancer. Every extra mouthful of vegetable oil you consume takes you one step closer to a deadly (and irreversible) outcome.”With these words David Gillespie begins his follow-up to the bestseller Big Fat Lies: How the diet industry is making you sick, fat & poor. In Big Fat Lies he analysed the latest scientific evidence to show us that vegetable oils, specifically seed oils, are dangerous to our health, despite that fact that they are recommended by government health agencies.

Buy Now Find out more
bk_big_fat_lies
Big Fat Lies

In Big Fat Lies David explodes the myths about diet, exercise and vitamin supplements, examining the latest scientific evidence and exposing the role the multibillion-dollar food, health and diet industries have played in promoting the health messages we follow or feel guilty about not following.

Buy Now Find out more
bk_quit_plan
The Sweet Poison Quit Plan

Packed with reader anecdotes and lists to help you organise your sugar-free life, this book presents one of the most accessible and achievable strategies around for losing weight and avoiding some of the more pernicious lifestyle diseases that are increasingly associated with excessive sugar consumption. Gillespie is an informed and entertaining writer who makes his subject fascinating, and inspires with his passion and logic.

Buy Now Find out more
bk_sweet_poison
Sweet Poison

The #1 Bestseller, Sweet Poison exposes one of the great health scourges of our time and offers a wealth of practical and accessible information on how to avoid fructose, increase your enjoyment of food and lose weight.

Buy Now Find out more