The David Gillespie Blog

Walt Disney once said “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”  And that is the point we have arrived at in this series on how to break a sugar addiction.

In the book I tell of the ‘cold turkey’ approach I took.  At the time I wrote that I was basing it on a case study of one. Me.  Now thousands of people of broken the sugar habit and hundreds of them have written to tell me of their experiences.  And none of it has changed my mind.

Every person that has told me of going cold turkey has ultimately managed to kick the habit.  There’s nothing fun about the withdrawal period but it does end.  And once it does they are completely free from the desire to eat sugar ever again.  A plate of Bikkies holds all the attraction of a plate of raw broccoli.

Those that try to ‘eat sugar in moderation’ find the going much harder.  They find the cravings just as strong for months on end.  They feel deprived every time someone else is eating sugar.  They barely lose any weight and they feel pretty awful pretty much all the time.  Sounds like fun doesn’t it?

Addiction works by developing a reward and punishment system.  As soon as you stop taking the addictive substance its euphoric effect begins to decline, creating a mild depression in the process.  It feels like an emptiness (or even a boredom).  It doesn’t hurt but as it accumulates it makes you crave the hit that you know will relieve it.

Eating sugar in moderation is the worst of all worlds.  You’re not eating enough to truly relieve the craving (and so no reward for you).  But you are eating enough to maintain the dopamine response that keeps the addiction circuit alive in your brain.

They don’t get heroin addicts off the ‘gear’ by giving them smaller doses of heroin and you won’t get unaddicted to sugar by eating smaller doses either.  I stand in awe of pharmaceutical companies that have convinced smokers to become addicted to lifelong supplies of their nicotine patches rather than lifelong supplies of cigarettes – that is truly a marketing miracle – But I guess technically they are cured of smoking.

No, the way to become unaddicted to sugar is to start today.  I suggest a last supper of your favourite sugary treat.  Go on.  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.  Really enjoy it, right down to the last morsel.  Enjoy the hit.  Enjoy the pleasure of a full blown addiction response as the dopamine and the endorphins course through your brain.

Now stop.  You will henceforth not touch a food containing sugar.  This will not be fun.  But starting is half the battle.  Hold the line.  There is no moderation.  You have stopped poisoning yourself.  If you can just get past the next few weeks of danger, you will enjoy the health Big Sugar has sucked from your life to date. 

Then.  All of a sudden.  The desire will vanish.  I know it sounds strange, but it just plain goes.  Bang.  Just like that.  And you will never want the stuff again.  It’s hard to make it sound believable until you yourself have experienced it (you have after all spent your life addicted to this substance and known no other reality), but it really does happen.

I know this all comes across a little evangelical – but honestly you are taking the most life changing decision you will ever make – you need a little preaching for that.  Good Luck!

If you’re not from Brisbane (or don’t plan going there just to hear me blather on), then feel free to ignore this post.

When I decided sugar was no longer going to be part of my life, I went cold turkey on it.  Well, actually I didn’t.  I did indeed stop eating (and more particularly in my case, drinking) sugar, but I couldn’t bring myself to pay good money for a bottle of water instead of my traditional Pepsi (or 6) a day.

I switched to Pepsi Max because it was the one that tasted (to me) the most like sugar.  I didn’t make this decision based on science.  I couldn’t find any that conclusively proved that sugar was addictive (this was 2004) let alone that substituting sucralose (the active ingredient in Pepsi Max) was any less addictive. 

I just knew that I had to stop drinking sugar but that I just couldn’t get out of the habit of wanting a sweet drink, so Pepsi Max it was.

What I found was that swigging the Pepsi Max was only partially satisfying.  It did nothing for how dreadful I was feeling – I was in the depths of sugar withdrawal and had the whole works -headaches, hunger and cravings.  But what it did do was satisfy the habit part of my addiction.  I was in the habit of having a sweet drink whenever I spotted a vending machine or when relaxing on a hot day.  The ‘Max took care of the habit part of things. 

I could still have my sweet drink as per my habit.  It was nowhere near as satisfying, but it was enough to get me through withdrawal.  The habit kept going, but it didn’t make me consume fructose.  After the withdrawal period ended, the habit itself slowly died.  The ‘Max started tasting more and more metallic as my previously fructose-blasted taste buds returned to working order.  After about two months, I just switched to water when I was thirsty.  And by then, the water was actually more refreshing than the (by then) strange tasting ‘Max.

So for me at least, I didn’t trade one addiction for another.  The substitute was not addictive, despite what some particularly excitable websites maintained.  But gee, it would have been nice to have some science to point to before suggesting my experiment was able to be generalised. 

A great little experiment would be to get a group of people and remove their tongues (so you could be certain it wasn’t the sweet taste that was stimulating the dopamine response).  Then give them unlimited access to solutions which were either sugar or sucralose based and note if they developed a preference for either (while measuring the dopamine levels).

Well the good news is that some researchers at Duke University in North Carolina have done just that.  Ok they chickened out on the tongue removing thing and preferred mice over men, but they did manage to obtain a breed of mice that were genetically unable to taste anything.  And guess what – they did in fact develop an addiction to the sugar solution but not the sucralose solution, even though (to them), they both tasted like water.

For me this study confirms that you can safely substitute (at least one) artificial sweetener(s) for sugar to help overcome habit driven access to sugar (see Part 4).  Reassuringly, this backs up my own experience.  But with the good news comes a caution.  Not all artificial sweeteners are created equal.  

Some of them follow exactly the same metabolic pathways as fructose and are therefore likely to be just as addictive.  Some may not be addictive but do damage in other ways.  In fact I can’t rule any out of the ones in this category altogether but there are some which I can definitely say should be avoided.

To help navigate the minefield, I’ve prepared some lists (as always, these are qualified by the weasel words to the effect that this is what I think the science supports at the moment, but it may be subject to new news):

Not addictive and not damaging (but also not sweet until you have broken your addiction):

• Dextrose
• Glucose

Probably not addictive but possibly damaging in other ways (your best bet for substitution to break habits if glucose tastes bland to you):

• Acesulphame potassium (#950)
• Alitame (#956)
• Aspartame (#951)
• Aspartame-acesuphame (#962)
• Cyclamates (#952)
• Erythritol (#968)
• Neotame (#961)
• Saccharin (#954)
• Stevia (#960)
• Sucralose (#955)
• Thaumatin (#957)
• Xylitol (#967)

Probably not addictive but definitely damaging in other ways (see post on inulins):

• Inulin
• Litesse
• Maltodextrin
• Maltodextrose
• Polydextrose
• Wheat dextrin

Likely to be just as addictive as sugar (and therefore to be completely avoided):

• Agave Syrup
• Corn Syrup
• Fructose
• Fruit Juice Extract
• Fruit Sugar
• Golden Syrup
• High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Honey
• Isomalt (#953)
• Lactitol (#966)
• Maltitol (#965)
• Mannitol (#421)
• Maple Syrup
• Molasses
• Sorbitol (#420)
• And, of course, Sucrose

Next Week – How to start withdrawal.

In 1932, May Donoghue made legal history. She didn’t mean to. All she wanted was a nice drink of Ginger Beer on a warm August night. Unfortunately her chosen refreshment at the Wellmeadow Cafe in Paisley, Scotland came with a free decomposed snail.

The snail enhanced beverage was manufactured by David Stevenson of Paisley. Snails were not a normal part of his range of aerated waters. And Mrs Donoghue came over quite ill, requiring immediate medical attention. She sought £500 restitution and the case of Donoghue (a pauper) v Stevenson eventually found itself before the House of Lords.

If Ms Donoghue’s beverage were served in a clear glass bottle, a legal rule called caveat emptor (buyer beware) would have kicked into to save Mr Stevenson. But her bottle was opaque and it was impossible to see the snail before drinking the putrefied contents. The result was the birth of new legal principle derived from the Golden Rule (love thy neighbour as you love yourself – the rule is common to most religions). Their Lordships said ‘You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour.’

Clearly the amount of care that the average punter is owed is dependent on how much he knows versus how much the vendor of the product or service knows (or should know).

As we meander through the local shops, we don’t expect most of the people we encounter on the other side of the cash register to hold any particular expertise in health and medicine. Because of this they are unlikely to owe us a duty of care. If I purchase more aspirin than I need in the supermarket, it’s up to me to read the label and if unsure, seek medical advice. Suing Coles, Woolworths or their employees wouldn’t get me very far.

There is however one shop where we rightly have a different expectation. Pharmacies have increasingly set themselves up as drive-by medicos, where we can get the drugs without having to put on a backless gown and engage the stirrups. We like the convenience of access to professional expertise without having to reach for the medicare card.

Our expectations are higher for pharmacists and rightly so. They are not spotty teens barely qualified to drive a checkout. They are university trained, highly skilled professionals. When they tell us we need to take drug X to cure our cold, we believe them without question. In return for our trust, they owe us a duty of care. They owe us a duty to be fully informed about the latest research on everything they offer. They owe us a duty not to sell us any bum steers. Because it is much easier for them to sell us steers of any kind.

In the olden days, the only thing a pharmacist sold you was the stuff your doctor told him to sell you. The only duty the pharmacist owed was not to get the amount wrong (and act as an informal double check on the doctor). When the franchise was extended to over the counter medicines the duty was to ensure we understood what we were buying and how to use it safely. That’s why you get twenty questions when you try to buy aspirin at the chemist.

Now pharmacies are looking more and more like a supermarket. They sell all manner of allied products. Clearly their duty of care for toilet paper or shampoo is no higher than their supermarket rivals. But what about products which are specifically targeted at our health? Is it different when a pharmacist recommends a product to help us lose weight? Of course it is. That is exactly why weightloss products are sold in pharmacies. They sell much better with the implied (or in some case actual) endorsement of a trained health professional.

These “nutritionally balanced” powdered drinks are intended to replace two meals a day for people wanting to carry a few less spare tyres. The shakes can generally only be purchased from pharmacies and some only after a ‘consultation’ with a ‘weight-loss professional’. But there are very few pharmacies which don’t sell shakes of some description with or without the consultation.

The shakes are usually about half fructose, a low GI sweetener. Those in the know have been quietly distancing themselves from fructose for a while now. In 2002 the American Diabetes Association (ADA) reversed its previous advice to diabetics that they should consume fructose. And just last week, a compelling study surfaced in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The UC Davis team persuaded 33 overweight and obese people to try a 10 week diet which was either 25% fructose or 25% glucose. The people on the fructose diet ended up with increased (1.5kg) tummy fat, higher fatty triglycerides (which leads to heart disease) and 20% higher insulin resistance (which leads to Type II Diabetes). None of this happened to the group on glucose.

In other words, Australian pharmacists are leveraging our trust in them to sell a weight-loss ‘solution’ based on feeding overweight people a substance that research shows will make them obese, give them heart disease and encourage diabetes. If that’s not a powdered snail in a packet, I don’t know what is. 

I can hear the class action lawyers warming their briefs already.

Most things in cars are pretty standard. The accelerator is always on the right, the brake on the left. The headlights tend to be at the front and the brake lights at the rear. But the one place that car designers have been let off the leash is in the ‘let’s put the indicator lever somewhere exciting’ department.

This is a Necker Cube. It’s interesting because almost all of us can see it two different ways. When I first look at it, I see a cube whose front face is bottom left. But if I stare at it long enough, it flips to the top right. You might see it the other way round. Either way, you will be able to see it in either orientation, given enough time.

Chemical addiction is something that is still not completely understood by medical researchers.  What they do know is that certain stimulants such as amphetamine, caffeine, cocaine, nicotine and now fructose stimulate the release of dopamine in our brains. 

But anything you do from which you gain pleasure will stimulate a dopamine response.  I enjoy gardening (not really, but I was looking for a vertical activity so as to keep my G rating), but I’m not addicted to it.  A lack of exposure to garden beds doesn’t cause me to become depressed or moody.  I don’t feel the urge to break into parked cars to steal change so I can buy compost.  I don’t carry a shovel in case I come across an unloved garden.

No, addiction is not about enjoyment.  Ask any smoker whether their first cigarette was enjoyable.  They’ll tell you they almost choked.  Ask any alcoholic if their first drink was enjoyable.  They’ll tell you it was repellent (unless they learnt to drink using wine sprizzers at Schoolies week).

Very recent research on the mechanics of addiction suggests that addictive substances do more than stimulate dopamine response.  They actually change your brain.  These drugs take over our brain’s learning function.  When we learn or practice something we strengthen the links between neurons.  These strengthened links help us remember and apply knowledge.

When you repeatedly feed rats cocaine, it appears to hijack this function.  Links are created and thickened which reinforce the behaviour of taking the drug.  They become hard-wired to seek out that behaviour.  This may be the crucial difference between merely enjoying something (like gardening) and being addicted to it.  Even worse, the research suggests that as the addiction links in our brain strengthen, we no longer even get the dopamine response.  So we keep doing it but can’t even pretend its fun.  I guess crack addicts don’t really look much like they’re having fun and come to think of it neither do smokers nor people who’ve pigged out on sugar.

I don’t remember my first taste of sugar and neither do you.  It is the only highly addictive drug that we feed to babies way before they’re capable of remembering anything.  By the time any of us are conscious of sugar, we are already well and truly addicted.  Our brains have been hard-coded to seek out sugar as surely as the cocaine addict is wired to seek out things to sniff (preferably in nice neat lines).

An addicted person is wired to think that the only way they can feel normal is when they have access to the addictive substance.  When it’s not available, they feel as though something is missing.  Their brain reacts by going into mild depression or even severe depression if the abstinence is prolonged.

Any sugar addict (that is anybody) will tell you that sugar makes them feel better.  The reality is that they are suffering a mild downer caused by the time since the last hit of sugar.  Taking more sugar simply lifts them back to how an unaddicted person feels all the time.  This vicious cycle of mild pleasure followed by mild withdrawal which in turn is relieved by mild pleasure is the simple mechanism of addiction.  It is the same no matter which is the poison of choice, from cocaine to sugar.  Just because it’s sold in supermarkets rather than back alleys doesn’t make it any less addictive or dangerous.

Anyone who’s read Sweet Poison fully understands the downside of their sugar addiction.  There is no upside and there is downside by the truckload, from obesity to cancer and everything in between.  But simply telling an addict that ugly things will happen to them will have no effect whatsoever.  It’s why people still merrily buy cigarette packets plastered with photos of diseased lungs and amputated limbs.  They know they will eventually pay the price, but right here right now all that matters is the gnawing neuron driven need to push back the downer and feel good again.

Sugar addicts are in exactly the same position except that (for now) they can get their fix without having to see the gangrenous outcome of Type II Diabetes.  Most diets ask us to exercise willpower, and just like willpower based methods of quitting smoking, they don’t work.  If they did, there wouldn’t be a diet industry.  You cannot overcome an addiction by feeling like you are depriving yourself of something.  That’s how the addiction works.  It makes you feel deprived.  If you add to that by consciously feeling deprived then you are in fact feeding the addiction.  Asking you to exercise willpower is a recipe for disaster because it tells you to feel deprived every minute that you do not have access to sugar.  It is doomed to failure.

Believe it or not, the power to stopping addiction is to firstly understand what it is, secondly know that it will end and thirdly think about it the right way.

Thinking about it in the right way is the key to successfully stopping an addiction … and that dear reader is the subject of next week’s post.

If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email or RSS.

Persistent imbibers of this blog will dimly remember me making a bit of a fuss about an ad that Kerry Armstrong did for Coke late last year. In the ad, Kerry was concerned that we might believe that Coke:

• Makes you fat;
• Rots your teeth; and
• Is packed with Caffeine.

So she got busy busting these outrageous myths. In response I suggested that I couldn’t swallow the line that a food whose only constituent (besides water) is sugar is entirely good for you. I even went so far as to suggest that (gasp) Coke might be sugar-coating the truth somewhat.

It seems the folks over at the ACCC were just as worried, saying yesterday “After seeing the Myth Busting campaign the ACCC was immediately concerned about the misleading messages it was likely to send to consumers”.

The ACCC flew into action, and a mere 6 months later have given Coke a good strong talking to. They said “Coke’s messages were totally unacceptable, creating an impression which is likely to mislead that Coca-Cola cannot contribute to weight gain, obesity and tooth decay. They also had the potential to mislead parents about the potential consequences of consuming Coca Cola.“

Oh, but it wasn’t just a tongue lashing. Coke also received sound beating with a feather. They must also:

• publish a corrective advertisement in; The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Courier Mail, Adelaide Advertiser, The West Australian, and the Hobart Mercury
• publish a corrective advertisement for a period of 28 days on http://www.makeeverydropmatter.com.au
• publish for six months on http://www.makeeverydropmatter.com.au the correct levels of caffeine for Coca-Cola, Diet Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola Zero and compare this with the levels of caffeine in the same amounts of tea brewed from leaf or teabag and instant coffee, and
• implement a trade practices law compliance review.

I’m sure you’d agree that a pounding like that will make Coke (and the rest of Big Sugar) quake at the mere thought of trying that sort of thing on again. Coke have just been found to have run ads patently stating that ‘black was white’ and the best our regulators can come up with it that they run an ad along the lines ‘actually we got that a bit wrong and it turns out black is, after all, black’.

Six months after the fact, I’d be surprised if anyone (well, except me) even remembers the ad, let alone takes in the fact that some porky pies might have been told. No the damage was well and truly done in October. The public was told that Coke is not bad for you after all and for a fair number of them, I’ll wager the message stuck.

Some will suggest that I’m being less than kind to the ACCC. At least they did something. But it all looks too much like a win-win outcome to me. Coke wins by getting the ad through in the first place and achieving all the impact it planned for. And the ACCC wins by looking like a regulator of misleading advertising. The only loser is the punter who came away believing there was nothing wrong with drinking Coke or feeding it to his kids (at least till he sees the ‘corrective advertisement’, I’m sure).

An interesting postscript to this little saga is that the industry funded Advertising Standards Bureau had no problems at all with the ads when it determined complaints about them last year.  I guess that’s the difference between a regulator and a self-regulator.

If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email or RSS.

Giving up smoking is dead easy.  I bet that got some ex-smokers’ attention. 

A smoker is addicted to nicotine.  Nicotine is found in cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, nicorettes and insecticide.  It’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to come across by accident.  In fact anyone consuming it, is doing so very much on purpose. 

If you decide that you no longer wish to be addicted to nicotine, there is a very short list of things you should stop doing:

1. Do not put cigarette in mouth.
2. If you discover a cigarette in your mouth do not light it.
3. Do not drink insecticide.

There.  Done.  Now you just need to wait about three weeks for the addiction to pass. Easy.

A Sugarer (the collective noun for people addicted to Sugar – and yes I did just make that up) has a much more daunting task ahead of them.

The active ingredient (from an addiction point of view) in sugar is fructose.  Thanks to the marvels of modern food production, fructose is now embedded in almost every single food item on the supermarket shelf.  Imagine how hard it would be stop smoking if everything you ate or drank contained the addictive ingredient.

Giving up fructose is far harder than giving up nicotine.  You still have an addiction to fight but before you even get that far you’ve got to pick your way through a minefield of fructose filled foods.  But there are some big food groups that anyone giving up fructose should absolutely avoid.  They are:

1. Confectionary and Bikkies (I know you knew that already but just in case you forgot)
2. Flavoured drinks (Not just softdrinks.  This includes juice and flavoured milk)
3. Breakfast cereals
4. Condiments (For example BBQ sauce has more sugar than chocolate sauce)
5. Muesli Bars
6. Yoghurts

Avoid those foods and you will have skipped 90% of the fructose you are likely to encounter in a day. Obviously there are exceptions.  For example you can eat natural yoghurt (but you’d better get used to the sour taste) and you can eat porridge and most other unflavoured oat cereals.  But it’s better to avoid the whole category to start with and then fine tune your selections once you become a little more experienced as a fructophobe (yep, another made up word).

Next Week (Part 2 – Why Willpower is not required)

If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email or RSS.

Isn’t it nice when people with lots of the folding stuff come over all luvy-duvy and start doing nice little things for you? First Kevin wants to buy you a plasma TV and then decides you need another. Then the Reserve Bank decides you’re paying too much on the mortgage and drops the rate. Now McDonalds arrives on the doorstep bearing gifts.

No, Macca’s isn’t offering to drop by and take the garbage out on Monday night, but they are a bit concerned about how little Johnny is going at school. In fact they’re so worried about the state of maths education, they’ve decided to pay for some tutoring on the side.

McDonald’s announced last week that it would be extending the reach of the free online maths tutor it provides as an employment perk for its teenage staff. Now the three teenagers who don’t already work at Macca’s will get their skills sharpened up. The program will be available to all Australian secondary school students and paid for by McDonald’s. Julia Gillard thinks its great idea. And why wouldn’t she? That’s one less thing she has to pay for out of the Federal Education Budget.

Some less than trusting souls got a bit hot and bothered about McDonald’s pulling a swifty here. They suggested that this was all about them getting advertising on the cheap. If that really was the plan then Macca’s needs to seriously reconsider its marketing strategy, because it’s neither cheap nor likely to be particularly effective as an adverting vehicle. The only credit they get is a one liner on the math’s tutor’s home page saying Macca’s paid the bill. And for that, they’ve paid millions. What a bargain!

No, this is about making us (and more importantly, our government) feel good about people who dispense junk food to children. And it’s part of a very definite trend in food marketing. Cadbury wants to assure us the cocoa in their chocolate was not picked by child labour. Nestle likes to help kids learn cricket. Pepsico and Kellogg’s have pumped $400m into the UK Government’s Change4Life program aimed at getting kids exercising. And the Australian Food and Grocery Council, (the lobby group for them all) wants us to believe its members won’t advertise junk food to children (except as part of a healthy lifestyle – whatever that means).

Now that’s a lot of green to be chucking around in the hope you’d get the warm and fuzzies about Big Sugar. But this is a long game and these folks have played close attention to what befell Big Tobacco. When the government could no longer pretend that ciggy’s didn’t kill you, out came the laws and the taxes and the negative ads. And it became an awful lot harder (but not impossible) to make an honest living selling durries.

Big Tobacco didn’t have a leg to stand on. But Big Sugar plans to have a bit more leverage when the inevitable occurs. One day the research on the truly deadly nature of sugar will seep into the public conscience and being a member of the Big Sugar club will be about as popular as the proverbial banker at the barbie (you remember those St George ads don’t you?). When that day comes, Big Sugar wants to have some ‘discussion points’. Things like, how exactly are you going to fund that math’s program you’ve become so dependent on? And what about junior sport? Who’s going to pay for that? And, and … stay tuned for more ‘gifts from Big Sugar’.

I think we should be carefully counting the fillings in the mouth of this gift horse. Let’s stop playing games (sponsored by Milo) and start doing something about the 60kg of sugar the average Australian consumes each year.

If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email or RSS.