Sweet poison, p.1
Sweet Poison, page 1
SWEET POISON
DAVID GILLESPIE is a recovering corporate lawyer, co-founder of a successful software company and consultant to the IT industry. He is also a father of six young children (including one set of twins). With such a lot of extra time on his hands, and 40 extra kilos on his waistline, he set out to investigate why he, like so many in his generation, was fat. He deciphered the latest medical findings on diet and weight gain and what he found was chilling. Being fat was the least of his problems. He needed to stop poisoning himself.
Praise for Sweet Poison
‘What’s impressive about Sweet Poison is that Gillespie turns complex research on what happens to food inside our body and its relation to weight gain into a good read.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘Comprehensive, thought provoking and highly readable.’
The Age
‘Eye-opening.’
Woman’s Day
‘David Gillespie’s groundbreaking book on the dangers of a high sugar intake could well revolutionise the way you diet.’
A Current Affair
‘Sweet Poison is a worthy and impassioned effort by an Australian dad to share his surprising discoveries with struggling dieters and provoke further debate about the obesity epidemic.’
Australian Bookseller & Publisher
‘I’ve lost 11kg without being on a diet. It’s good to know this book is non-fiction.’
Steve Irons MP, Member of the Parliamentary Inquiry into Obesity
SWEET POISON
WHY SUGAR MAKES US FAT
DAVID GILLESPIE
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
For Lizzie, Anthony, James, Gwendolen, Adam, Elizabeth and Finlayson.
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2008
Copyright © David Gillespie 2008
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-74-228486-6
Contents
Introduction
Part 1: Why is sugar making you fat?
1 Starting out
2 Theories of fatness
3 How we turn food into energy
4 Using stored energy
5 Fat makes you fat … or does it?
6 Biochemistry 101
7 Honey without bees
8 Porridge in the arteries
9 More killers
Part 2: What can you do?
10 What about exercise?
11 A recipe for cold turkey
12 So is this a diet?
13 Alternatives to fructose
14 It’s all about money
Notes
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I still remember the day Lizzie told me. She had a stunned, almost fearful expression on her face and was unsure of herself in a way I had rarely seen in my wife of 13 years. Our fifth and assumedly last child had just been turned into twins with a wave of the ultrasound wand. In about eight months, we were to become parents of six children under nine years of age. I was about 40kg overweight, and had struggled with my weight for as long as I could remember (except for a brief period during university when I managed to snare Lizzie). I had tried most things, from reducing fat in my diet to not eating to regularly attending the gym and walking the dog. Sometimes I had had limited success (a few kilograms here and there), but it was mostly small backward steps on my ever-accelerating journey to obesity and beyond.
With the weight came lethargy and sleeping problems. As any parent could attest, getting enough sleep and having the energy to get through the day is difficult at the best of times, let alone when you’re starting out in the red. I was going to have to be a dad to twin babies and four other young children and I couldn’t see myself managing it carrying 40 extra kilos, feeling lethargic and not sleeping.
At the time, the Atkins diet was beginning to take off, with all manner of people touting it as a miracle diet. My uncle had recently undergone heart surgery and was now on Atkins. He had lost a vast amount of weight and was tucking into bacon and eggs every morning for breakfast. This looked like a diet I could really enjoy. I immediately cut out all carbs and, lo and behold, I started losing weight like never before (although I suspect it was because I found it almost impossible to find any food I wanted to eat that did not contain carbohydrates). I spent a couple of weeks feeling like I was starving to death. The weight was coming off but the willpower required to stay on the diet was overwhelming (not to mention the nasty side effects that eliminating fibre from my diet was having). I started to look for alternatives. At first low-GI diets seemed appealing, because they at least allowed you to eat some carbohydrates, but almost no foods were labelled with GI indicators and the maths involved in calculating it myself was beyond me. When chocolate spreads advertised their low-GI levels, I knew that if a food that was half sugar and half fat could earn a low-GI label, the GI calculation was probably almost meaningless for dieters.
I had been reading a lot about Charles Darwin’s life and his works on evolution. Darwin’s theories held that all characteristics of modern animals were survival responses developed slowly over millennia. As a result, we (and all animals) are woefully inadequate at dealing with sudden changes in the environment. After reading about these theories, it had occurred to me that my weight gain, and that of most other people in our society, could not possibly be down to a lack of willpower alone (since willpower, or the lack of it, would be an evolved characteristic that could not suddenly have changed in just a few hundred years). In a desperate attempt to find a way to keep up the weight loss without having to stay on the carb-free diet, I started to read up on human metabolism. I quickly came to the conclusion that I would have to learn a whole new vocabulary to understand most of what was being written. However, I was beginning to get the vague feeling that many in the medical profession took for granted a fact that was a complete mystery to the rest of us.
Study after study seemed to be pointing to the inescapable conclusion that the fructose part of sugar was fat-inducing in animals, and probably in humans as well. Worse still, it seemed to be complicit in making us want to eat more food in general. Although I found many studies within the medical fraternity backing this line of thought, documents written for the rest of us were almost impossible to find. Those that did exist were, more often than not, rants against sugar in general without any explanation as to why it was bad for us. I immediately changed from eliminating carbs to just eliminating foods with added sugar – at last I could eat bread again. It was impossible to remove all sugar because everything seems to contain it, so I set myself a limit of no more than 10g of sugar in a meal (about the amount of fructose in an apple). This simply meant I no longer ate sweets and biscuits or drank juice and soft drink. The weight loss continued, but the diet was a lot easier to stick to. After a few months, I was so used to not having sugar that it took no willpower at all to refuse it. In fact, on the few occasions I did try chocolates, they tasted unbearably sweet.
I’ve now lost the 40kg and, more importantly, no longer worry about weight gain at all. I know that I can eat when I feel hungry and stop eating when I feel full and I will not put on weight. I can eat whatever I like whenever I feel like eating, as long as it does not include sugar. I have no urge to eat when I’m not hungry, I no longer feel lethargic or sleep deprived (other than as would be expected for a father of six), and no unnecessary exercise was involved at all. By far the greatest benefit has been the ability to trust my own body to let me know when to eat and when not to. It’s a feeling I’ve never experienced before.
People obviously noticed the change in my appearance and energy levels, and asked me what I had done. ‘I stopped eating sugar’ seemed too trite and forwarding them medical journal articles just a little bit over the top, so I decided the story of the sweet poison had to be written in language we all could understand.
PART 1
WHY IS SUGAR MAKING YOU FAT?
1. STARTING OUT
One of the first articles I came across during my ‘net-education’ was a book written over 40 years ago with the catchy title The Saccharine Disease. This quaintly written 129-page book, authored by Surgeon-Captain Cleave of Her Majesty’s Navy in 1966, caught my eye because it contained a theory that there was a strong link between evolution and diet. This matched up with some of the thoughts I had been having after reading about Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution.
The good doctor was saying that the human body, having evolved in an environment of a largely wholegrain, vegetable and (occasional) meat diet, was ill-equipped to deal with the highly processed sugar and refined flour diet of the twentieth century. Dr Cleave had decided, after a lifetime of treating sick sailors (he was 60 when he wrote the book), that a huge number of modern diseases were directly caused by the over-consumption of sugar and refined flour. He blamed sugar and flour for the headline diseases like obesity, coronary disease and diabetes. But he also threw in peptic ulcer, constipation, haemorrhoids and varicose veins, as well as appendicitis, gallstones, urinary tract infection, inflammation of the large intestine and, of course, dental cavities, among others.
This book was clearly written with a medically trained audience in mind, so I don’t recommend it for a relaxing read in front of the fire. I’m certainly no doctor and I came across this book at the very beginning of my reading, so most of its analysis went straight over my head. There was, however, one graph – that’s right, I went straight for the pictures – that really got me interested in the theory behind Dr Cleave’s ‘saccharine disease’. Chapter 2 contained a graph that showed that sugar consumption in England had risen eightfold between 1815 and 1955. The average inhabitant of the British Isles was consuming just 15lb (about 7kg) of sugar in 1817. By 1955, their intake was almost 110lb (50kg). The steady upward march had only been briefly interrupted by the intervention of the two world wars.
The Surgeon-Captain was convinced that this rise in sugar consumption, along with a similar trend in the consumption of refined white flour, was entirely responsible for the raft of illnesses that he collectively dubbed ‘the saccharine disease’. Dr Cleave had noticed that all of the diseases he was including were virtually nonexistent prior to 1900 and he simply put two and two together. The diseases were increasing at about the same rate as the consumption of sugar and refined flour. According to him, it was the concentration (by refinement) that was the problem with both sugar and flour. When sugar is refined from cane or sugar beet, 99 per cent of the original food (mostly the fibre) is removed, leaving only the sugar syrup. Similarly, by the time white flour is created, 90 per cent of the bran has been removed. The thinking was that by removing the fibre, we were making food much easier to digest. Sugar and flour would be reduced to glucose by the body and, without the fibre to slow things down, the glucose would hit our bloodstream very quickly. Dr Cleave felt this would ‘upset the evolutionary adaptation in the pancreas [where it] is held … to cause the disease’.
The solution was obvious to Cleave. Just add bran to everything you eat. Legend has it that while serving as the ship’s doctor aboard the battleship King George V during World War II, he would have large sacks of bran brought on board to ‘prescribe’ to the crew. I think he could have counted himself lucky that the worst nickname he acquired as a result was ‘the bran man’.
I was intrigued by the enormous growth in sugar consumption shown in the graph. Sugar consumption was clearly growing at an extraordinary rate and some of Dr Cleave’s other graphs showed that diabetes and other diseases were growing at similar rates. But I was less convinced by his argument that adding bran to your diet to counteract the excess sugar and flour was the secret to avoiding so many diseases. I needed to understand more about the chemistry involved in digestion before I was prepared to start pouring bran on my chocolate ice-cream. This, unfortunately, would involve my getting very close to some subjects that I had avoided since I almost failed Biology and Chemistry in high school. But I am one of those people who can’t leave a problem alone until I am convinced I have worked out a logically consistent argument for how the whole system works. And Dr Cleave’s clogged-up pancreas wasn’t doing it for me.
By the time you get to the end of this book, you’ll figure out (as I did) that Dr Cleave wasn’t too far from the mark. All right, it’s called ‘metabolic syndrome’ rather than ‘the saccharine disease’, and it’s a part of sugar that’s the problem, not refined flour and sugar. But the pancreas does play a role and fibre is part of the prevention. He got close to the right answer from his observations, but (as with most things in life) the details were significantly more complex than I am sure he ever imagined.
There is no shortage of ‘educational’ resources about human digestion on the internet. After reading a few of the more ‘interesting’ theories about digestion and how it works, I decided to stick to sites that doctors seemed to regard as authoritative: mostly medical journals, or sites run by people who publish articles in medical journals. Unfortunately, all of these articles appeared to have been written on the presumption that I had completed six years of medical school and practised gastroenterology (the study of the human digestive system) and endocrinology (the study of the human hormone-producing organs) for at least 20 years. I had a steep learning curve ahead of me and it took me a long time to get up to speed, looking up every second word on Wikipedia along the way. I won’t bore you with the detail of all the false starts and blind alleys, but here is what I discovered (in English rather than Latin and Greek).
The sugar that Dr Cleave was talking about is common table sugar, the white (or brown) stuff some of us add to our cup of tea in the morning to make it a bit more pleasurable to drink. It’s the same sugar that, in Australia and the United Kingdom, is added to most foods that require sweetening. In the United States they use a cheaper substance called high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) for sweetening processed food. HFCS is, for all practical purposes, identical to sugar, despite what some of the more excitable websites would have you believe. But more on that later …
It seems cocoa, tea and coffee merchants were in fact almost single-handedly responsible for introducing sugar into the English (and hence the western) diet. As anyone who has tried even ‘80 per cent cocoa’ dark chocolate will attest, cocoa is a pretty bitter pill to swallow without sugar. But add some of the sweet stuff and suddenly you have a product that flies off the shelves. The same goes for tea and coffee, so the only way the merchants bringing these new foods into the western world could convince people to drink their newly introduced bitter beverages in the sixteenth century was to suggest the addition of the newly discovered sweetener, cane sugar.
Sometimes it’s called caster sugar or raw sugar or brown sugar or white sugar, but it’s all the same stuff. It’s what most of us think of when asked to describe sugar. Scientists call table sugar (and all its variants) ‘sucrose’. The group of compounds with chemical properties like table sugar are generically called ‘sugars’ by chemists and nutritionists. This makes it all pretty confusing since what ordinary people call sugar and what scientists and nutritionists call sugar are in fact two different (but overlapping) things.
Sucrose (table sugar) is a double sugar (disaccharide – Latin for two sugars). This simply means that it is made up of two ‘simple sugars’ – glucose and fructose – joined together at the molecular level. Just as this is starting to sound confusing, it turns out that our digestive system doesn’t bother remembering complex names either. To your digestive system there is no such thing as sucrose. When you eat a teaspoon (5g) of sucrose, your body ‘sees’ 2.5g of glucose and 2.5g of fructose.
There are only three important simple sugars: glucose, fructose and galactose. All of the other ‘sugars’ you are likely to encounter in daily life are simply combinations of these three. For example, the ‘sugar’ you see on the label of a carton of milk is lactose. Lactose is half glucose and half galactose. Maltose, the sugar in beer, is two molecules of glucose joined together in an unusual way.
