ZAR- Sweet Sweet Sugar

I'm reading a really interesting book at the moment; "The Sweet Poison Quit Plan" by David Gillespie. It is a sequel to his book "Sweet Poison: Why sugar makes us fat". It is an eye-opening read and I'm sure I'll have to read it at least twice to get some of the more scientific points into my head. I'm also sure I'll write further blogs on it but for now I thought I'd let you know about some of the basic points he makes.

Firstly, he talks about the history of sugar and it's introduction into our diets. 200 years ago, sugar was rare and therefore expensive. The only way the average person ate sugar was within seasonal fruits and honey.

In 1910, the first ever packaged chocolate product was for sale (Cadbury's Dairy Milk). Coke and Pepsi were still garage operations with minimum sales but growing fast. Breakfast cereals would not be available for another 14 years and fruit juice was only of the freshly-squeezed-at-home kind. There were very few overweight people and very little heart disease (at least not enough to be regularly diagnosed).

Half a century later, things have changed dramatically. Sugar is everywhere. Coke and Pepsi are huge. Fruit juice is in ready to drink bottles. Chocolate bars are commonplace. Breakfast cereals have gone from cornflakes to many high sugar concoctions. The number of overweight people has doubled and heart disease is endemic.

At this time, in the search for answers, a new profession was born - human nutrition. Amongst the ideas that they had was that, clearly, if you eat fat you will become fat. The populations were encouraged to eat low-fat diets and take up the new sport of jogging. As a consequence, food manufacturers created low-fat everything. Unfortunately, when something is low-fat, it doesn't taste that great so they added sugar to these products. People stopped drinking milk and started drinking low-fat juice and soft drink. Stopped eating cooked breakfast and switched to high sugar cereals. Swapped peanut butter for honey and conserves. The book advocates not avoiding fat but avoiding sugar, infact giving up fructose, except in whole fruit.

Pretty much everything we eat these days contains sugar (which is one half fructose, which Mr Gillespie's book is essentially about). It's the reason why it's so much better to cook from raw and avoid buying convenience food. It is highly addictive and is beginning to show up in large scale trials as a link to heart disease, strokes, fatty liver disease, cancer, polycystic ovary syndrome, infertility, impotence, depression and anxiety.

I could go on and on with these insights but I'll leave you with this. Since we were encouraged to eat low-fat by the nutritionists of the 1960's, the percentage of overweight people has doubled again. We exercise more than we used to but continue to get bigger and bigger. The sugar issue is as much as ignored but it can't go on like that for ever. I'm sure (hopefully) it will become, in the future, as much of an issue as nicotine is in terms of being recognised as a killer. This book has certainly woken me up to what I put into my body sometimes and how addicted I am to it.