Week Two: No Sugar

 (Not so) sweet and innocent...

The evils of sugar seem to be in the press a lot at the moment and I’ve jumped aboard this bandwagon by reading Sweet Poison by David Gillespie.  I’m only half way through (it’s not a quick read although he does try his best to make it accessible), but so far am quite convinced that my being overweight is (at least) partially to do with the amount of sugar I eat.   

There are three main sugars; glucose, fructose and galactose.  In a nutshell it seems that the human body doesn’t ‘recognise’ the calories in fructose.  Fructose is turned into fatty acids which in turn latch tightly to your hips but fructose somehow bypasses the internal consumption control mechanisms which render the calories in fructose largely invisible. This means that if we eat anything with fructose in, such as fruit juice, a significant percentage of calories will be undetected (but not unused) by the body.  

We consume those calories without noticing and then carry on to consume the same again and over the course of a day, depending on how much fructose we eat, can end up eating way more calories than we realise.  An example given in the book talks about a glass of apple juice containing around 34g of fructose, to consume 34g of fructose you would have to eat four large apples.  Now this is possible but you are unlikely to sit down and have a meal after eating four apples but you will if you have drunk the juice.

There is other evidence in the book that fructose contributes to more than just obesity; for example strokes, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and potentially some cancers.  Scary stuff.  For me though it’s my weight which is bothering me.  Since our wedding it has slowly but surely crept on and depressingly I’m now a good three stones heavier than I was when we got married.  Diet and exercise regimes do work for me but I have to be ultra strict and follow them to the letter which works until I get fed up, go crazy and eat a weeks worth of calories in one sitting.   If I do stick it out, as soon as I eat ‘normally’ again the weight piles back on.  Perhaps I’m deluding myself but I don’t actually think I overeat.  I’m prepared to (read - would like to) believe that it’s less down to the volume of food I eat and more due to the type of food I eat.  

Now I didn’t think I actually ate that much sugar.  I don’t take it in tea, I don’t really eat biscuits or cakes (not daily at least) and we don’t buy ready meals or drink fizzy juice but when we started to look at ingredient lists we were astounded at how many products have added sugar with no noticeable difference in taste.  Full fat mayo has added sugar for example, isn’t that unexpected?  Weetabix and bran flakes, cereals I thought were healthy options, are full of sugar.  Bread and flavoured yoghurts are full of sugar as are jars of sauces.  Going no sugar was going to have the unexpected side effect of making up cook meals pretty much from scratch every night.

Reading other short kindle books on the subject it seems that people have physical withdrawal symptoms: headaches, irritability, widely oscillating blood sugar and so on as the body gets used to a more stable energy intake.  I’m bracing myself for a grumpy few days ahead.....