I'm dreaming of a...

...fructose-free white Christmas slice!

Oh yes, Christmas time is upon us and this is the time of year to apply the old 'party foods are for [Christmas] parties' advice from Sweet Poison. I don't know why I wanted to try to make White Christmas slice- it's not a traditional treat in our family, but for some reason I always think fondly and slightly yearningly of it around this time of the year. Because it's full of fat (yum, Copha) I haven't made White Christmas for years. I'd toy with the idea of making some, realise that I would only eat far too much of it and turn into a White Christmas-fuelled blimp, and abandon the whole idea. 'If only I could make a low fat White Christmas slice' I would deludedly think to myself whilst chowing down on some of mum's delicious Christmas fruit cake (at a thousand billion calories per slice).

Anyhow,  those crazy days of dieting are behind me, and I'm sticking to the simple plan of eating anything I want minus sugar (specifically fructose). I've lost over 13 kilos, and I'm not afraid of over-indulging because my stomach is now talking to my brain and telling it when to STOP (it speaks in capitals now). So, when mum and I were planning the Christmas menu this year, I said I would make White Christmas as a bit of a treat, and I planned to do it fructose-free.

When turning this plan into reality, I hit a few snags immediately. For those familiar with the slice, besides the Copha it is mostly made of a) sugar, b) rice bubbles, and c) dried fruit. The sugar is no problem- with a few adjustments I can make it with dextrose instead of sugar which has fructuse and glucose. Rice bubbles are out because they are nearly 10% sugar (nearly all of it added), but I have been eating a cereal which is pure puffed brown rice (nothing else added), so I decided this would make a good substitute for rice bubbles.  Simple so far.

But Sweet Poisonites (Poisoners? No, Poisonites) will know that dried fruit is a no no if you want to keep your fructose intake as low as possible. A piece of real fruit will a) contain fructose, b) contain fibre which counteracts what the fructose does in the body, and c) contain enough water to be bulky and fill you up, limiting the amount that you can eat in one go. Dried fruit does the first two, but doesn't fill you up, so you get a bunch of sugar in just a handful of sultanas. The recipe that I worked from had 1/2 cup (80g) of dried fruit- which is about 27g of fructose. Holy crap.

Looks so innocent...

I've avoided dried fruit altogether since starting sugar free, and it's not been a problem. But could I avoid it in White Christmas? Well, it is kind of integral to the slice...so, I decided that, since it's the season to be jolly and all that, I would make the White Christmas low in fructose, with limited dried fruit, diced finely to get the most out of it, dextrose instead of sugar, and rice puffs. As the slice is very rich, it's not difficult to limit yourself to a very small slice, which would mean very very little dried fruit per serve.

That was my first thought. My second thought (which came to me only as I was finishing up the low fructose version) was that this slice would taste pretty good even without the dried fruit. It has coconut and powdered milk as well as the rice puffs, and these make up the bulk of the taste. If I left out the fruit, I could therefore make a no fructose version as well. So, I did both, and here are the recipes for y'all. The no fructose one is first, the low fructose one (with the dried fruit included) is second- there are slightly different quantities to each recipe as I was experimenting a little.



No fructose White Christmas slice
1/2 cup dextrose
1/2 cup powdered milk
1.5 cups puffed rice mine are from the 'health foods' aisle of Coles and are 100% brown rice (puffed). Anything similar will probably work.
1 and 1/3 cups coconut
150g copha


Mix all dried ingredients together.  Melt copha on the stove until it is a clear liquid and then pour over the dry ingredients. Mix together well and press into a foil-lined dish or molds. Put in the fridge for a couple of hours and voila!

Low fructose White Christmas slice
1 & 1/4 cups Rice Puffs
1/2 cup full cream milk powder
1/2 cup dextrose to be honest, you could probably use a bit less- the dried fruit adds quite a bit of sweetness
1/4 cup dried fruit- I used just sultanas and dried apricots, chopped finely to give maximum value with minimum fruit
155g copha

As above, mix the dry ingredients first, add the melted copha. Press into foil-lined dish or mold- a Christmassy one if you've got it- and refrigerate.

I just happened to have a silicone mold with little Christmas trees- tis the season for making tree-shaped food.

And here are the beautiful results:

A trio of  White Christmasses- the trees are low fructose, the squares are no fructose, the hearts are a la normale (for my husband)

A note on Copha- this stuff is sold oil- hydrogenated coconut oil to be exact. They say (pure) coconut oil is incredibly good for us (if you ignore all the nay-sayers who are stuck in the 'saturated fats will kill you quicker than crack' mindset), but the word 'hydrogenated' should alert you to the fact that this stuff is a) way cheaper than pure coconut oil (being a processed, cheaper product) and b) nowhere near as good for you (and potentially quite bad for you). To be honest, if I had pure coconut oil available, I would have tried that instead but alas, I did not. So, keeping in mind that this is a one-off treat (at least for me), I stuck to the Copha. If you happen to try the above with something else instead of the Copha (e.g., pure coconut oil) then please post below to let us know how it went. I imagine it would work fine but perhaps be very very coconutty.

So that's it. Christmas conquered. Well, I also made some peanut brittle- but I'll post the recipe for that seperately- it's a bit of a marathon.

Have a lovely Christmas and New Year everyone, and a big shout out to those doing it sugar free for the first time this year- may it be merry and bright without the need for a sugar high!

What the Iranians can teach us about fructose

Aaah the old 'sorry I've not blogged for ages' blog post. I've been on limited internet for a while due to the whole packing-moving-unpacking thing. And to be honest, I've also felt like I don't have anything new to share. Maybe writing about going sugar-free isn't blog worthy. I mean, it seemed like such a big step, a topic which would keep me writing for ages. But turns out that, once past the initial withdrawal and so on, and after trying a few recipes and finding that glucose is nearly as easy to work with as sucrose, it's not such a big deal. It's actually really easy. I've lost nearly 8kg so far, and it keeps going slowly down.

But then again, I do love to write, and so I find myself back here. I was inspired tonight by a study which David Gillespie posted to the Sweet Poison Facebook group. The original study is here. In a nutshell this study showed that high levels of fructose in the diet of men and women in Tehran, Iran was associated with an increased risk of metabolic syndrome, including higher body mass index and abdominal obesity.

Yeah, so? you might be saying. Isn't that the point of this blog, that fructose is bad, bad, bad, and that there is research to prove it? Well, yes, of course. But remember that most of the previous published research in this field has been in rats. And it's easy to dismiss this- a rat is (by definition) not a human. And while there have been other studies on people which showed that the rats were on the right track, they were limited, and open to criticism, for example that they fed people an unrealistic amount of fructose. A 2010 review of research published in the same journal as the new one concluded that "No fully relevant data account for a direct link between moderate dietary fructose intake and health risk markers".

So what we have now is one of the first human (ie, non rat) studies to show strong links between dietary fructose (the fructose that actual humans actually ate as part of their actual normal everyday diet) and metabolic syndrome, independent of age, physical activity, energy intake, dietary intake of other nutrients (eg fat) and BMI (all of which the researchers controlled for in their analysis).

The levels of fructose that this study suggest leads to problems seem quite high: >50g per day. At first glance it may seem like most of us are ok- surely I don't eat more than 50g fructose (100g sucrose), you might say. That's a heck of a lot of sugar. Visualise 22 teaspoons if you can, because that's how much it is. But consider that the average intake of fructose in this study was around 50g. So around half those studied (normal, everyday people) were eating over 50g per day. In their usual diet. And in case you think this only applies to Tehranian Iranians, US figures suggest that on average, Americans eat 55g of fructose per day- again, meaning that around half eat more than this. The data for Aussies is sketchy. In 1995 an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey showed that 20% of Australian energy intake came from sugar (in processed foods, fruit and veg, honey and other sweeteners). 20% of energy intake for a male aged 31-50 is between 104g and 185g per day (in fructose terms, 52-92.5g per day). More current figures are sparse to nonexistent because the ABS no longer conducts this particular survey, but a study being conducted with staff at the Epworth hospital (the SWEET study) may provide more answers (if and when it is published- will be looking out for that one). Preliminary data collected from participants showed that they ate 17 teaspoons per day in added sugars alone. Add in your fruit and veg (these are counted in the fructose total, even if they are healthy!) and I'll bet we are close to averaging the magic (in a bad way) 22 teaspoons.

I can't help but feel that this new study means that David Gillespie and others sounding the warning on fructose like Dr Robert Lustig should take some time out this week to give themselves a little pat on the back and maybe just send a little 'told you so' email to the nay-sayers who have insisted that fructose is fine and dandy like sugar candy. Like the university professors interviewed for this article reassuring the public that sugar is no threat, and that the National Health and Medical Research Council draft nutrition guidelines are being ridiculous for daring to suggest that Australians limit added sugars.

The bottom line is that we (most of us) eat a LOT of sugar. And we can now be more confident that this sugar may be doing us, the humans, and not just the rats, a lot of harm. 

Fructose free must-haves

In general, creating fructose free meals is pretty easy. It’s just a matter of checking food labels carefully, even on things like, say, canned tomatoes, pizza bases and pita bread, things which reason says should not have sugar but which the manufacturers, in their wisdom, have poured a couple of spoonfuls into. The good news is that for many things, you can find a brand that offers the product without the sugar. And voila, fructose free dinner is served.

There are some particular things which I've found handy to have around now that I'm avoiding fructose. Some of these are to replace sugar, and some are to replace the snacks/treats I used to eat. So, today I wanted to share my top cupboard must-haves for fructose-free eating. 

Rice malt syrup

This fructose free syrup is a little like honey in consistency, and doesn’t taste like rice at all- hurray! I use it on toast sometimes, or even on Weetbix instead of honey. 

Fructose-free milo

This is an amazing recipe recreation by The Colonel over at the Sweet Poison forum. It was a cinch to make once I sourced the ingredients, and I made a big old container full ready for a lovely hot drink whenever the mood strikes. Delicious and completely fructose free. Thanks Colonel!

Dextrose and glucose syrup

These are the sugar-substitute staples for fructose free baking. I’ve used these for chocolate, coconut cake and caramels so far, and there are more to come. But if you can’t be bothered waiting for me to experiment with treats you can check out the Sweet Poison forum for recipe ideas.  For those from the USA, you might want to check out nofructose.org where Bill is experimenting with fructose-free recipes using US ingredients.

Citric acid

This is a bit of an odd one, but lately I’ve found that I love a glass of water with just a sprinkle of citric acid in it- a bit like having a slice of lemon in water. It adds just a bit of sourness, as if I’m having a cordial drink but without the sweetness. With my tastebuds now unused to much sweetness, I really like the sourness. I don’t think it would be wise to overdose on this, since it is an acid and might do strange things to the tummy, but since I don’t drink soft drinks, juice or cordial anymore, it makes a nice change from plain water. You could easily add a sprinkle of dextrose as well to make it more like a lemon-y cordial.

Peanut butter

I’ve always loved peanut butter but I used to use it very rarely because of the fat. I would use jam- ie, fruit boiled with sugar- in preference to peanut butter. Now I’m making friends with fat and enjoying the delicious creaminess of smooth peanut butter (no added sugar variety, obviously).

Smiths Crinkle Cut Cheese and Onion chips

Flavourings in chips, savoury snack biscuits and so on are usually a sugar minefield, so at first I was limited to plain potato chips if I wanted a snack. I quickly got bored of these and scanned the flavoured chips in desperation. Surely I could find one without sugar?? Nope, no good. Until I looked more closely at the Cheese and Onion flavoured Smiths Crinkle Cut Chips. The ingredients list includes dextrose but no other sugars. And dextrose is just glucose, so it’s fine from a fructose perspective. And as luck would have it, cheese and onion is one of my favourite flavours. So, huzzah!

Of course over-indulging on any of the above will send me back to my now-abandoned fat pants, but the good thing is that without the fructose, I don’t over-indulge. Huzzah again! 

It’s always good to get new things to add to the repertoire, so I’d love to hear from you- what are your favourite fructose free finds or cupboard staples?

Free your chocolate

When I wrote my last post, I planned to take a few days break while I visited family in Tasmania. I thought I should come back to my blog on Monday next week, and maybe do a post reflecting on the fact that I’m staring down the barrel of a sugar-free (and therefore chocolate free) Easter. I’d talk about how my very supportive husband decided that we should have Easter cheeses instead of Easter chocolate, and how I felt this was a very ‘off the grid’ thing to do, and that I decided to call it Cheester.

Well, two days into visiting mum and dad, and I’ve thrown all those ideas out the window because I just made delcious, fructose free chocolate from scratch! Now THAT’s off the grid. Thought I'd better write down what I did before I forgot the details. Here is a sneak peek for those who can't be bothered scrolling:

(For those thinking “huh? There are a range of ‘sugar free’ chocolates available from every health food store you care to name, not to mention the health food aisle at the supermarket”, here’s a quick run-down on why I’m making this from scratch. Basically commercial sugar-free chocs (and most sugar-free sweets as well) contain maltitol (or a similar sweetener) which is a sugar substitute. Although these are not the same as cane sugar, many of them act like cane sugar when they enter the body. For example, maltitol becomes glucose and fructose just like sugar. So no, I can’t have those if I want to stay off fructose. Also where’s the fun in that? I’ve never made chocolate before, I feel like Nigella Lawson right now.)

The idea for making chocolate started back in Melbourne when I found some blocks of 100% cacao in Jones the Grocers. The blocks are by Willy’s World Class Cacao and Chocolates from the UK. I had watched a TV series about Willy who is a passionate chocoholic who wanted to make and sell these 100% cacao as a gourmet cooking ingredient. He sources the cacao beans from places like Venezuela and Madagascar. You can order the blocks online and have them shipped from the UK, but Jones the Grocer stocks them in Australia, so I happily purchased two 180g blocks of the Madagascan black 100% cacao (at $20 a pop) and took one with me to Tasmania to present to mum and dad who are also trying to be fructose free.

For anyone who hasn’t tried 100% cacao before, let me tell you it is strong, bitter stuff. It tastes like the very essence of chocolate, minus the sugar and cream.

Mum and I decided to try making some (edible) chocolate from this, and with the help of a friendly local health food store (who not only gave us a recipe but supplied us with the right ingredients), we were able to do this pretty simply. The recipe handout is credited to Roar Vanilla. It called for cacao powder and agave syrup (which has a lot of fructose), so we had to experiment a little. We also added soy lecithin as an emulsifier which I'll explain further below.

But without further ado, here is our version, adapted from theirs, which is 100% fructose free, very simple, and delicious. 

Fructose-free chocolate

• 80 grams cacao butter, chopped finely (we sourced ours from the health food store)
• 40 grams chopped/grated 100% cacao
• 3 Tablespoons dextrose syrup (see below)
• 3 x rock salt crystals (we used Himalayan salt- long story but mum wanted some anyway so we happened to have it. I’m sure normal salt would do!) You can leave salt out altogether if you choose
• 1 tsp lecithin granules soaked in 1 Tbs boiling water (health food store had these but we also saw them at the supermarket health food section)

Dextrose syrup:

Stir 100g boiling water and 230g dextrose in a saucepan on the stove until the dextrose is dissolved completely. It should go from being a white liquid to a crystal clear one (see pics). You could halve this recipe as you don’t need much (I used 3 tablespoons) but it seemed easier to do all the stirring in this quantity than a smaller one.

When dextrose is dissolved and syrup is clear, take off the heat and place to one side.

Note: Dextrose is glucose, so you may be able to just use glucose syrup from the baking section of the supermarket instead of making the above. Glucose syrup is much thicker than the syrup described above, so I’m not 100% sure it would work the same- if you try it, let me know how it goes!

To make the chocolate:
Place at least 2cm of water in a pot and put a bowl on the top to make a bain-marie. Don’t let the bowl touch the water.  Heat the pot until the water boils, then remove from the heat.

Add cacao butter to the bowl.Stir until melted. It melts pretty quickly into a clear but yellowish oily liquid

I'm melting...

Add salt crystals (optional)- these will dissolve during the next steps.

Add 3 tablespoons of the dextrose syrup. You can add more if you wish- depends on how sweet you want it to be.

Add 2 teaspoons of the watery-lecithiny mixture (see pic of what our lecithin mixture looked like- ours was not fully dissolved in the hot water but the lecithin granules were soft and pretty quickly broke down further in the chocolate mixture).

Lecithin is an emulsifier, and we wanted it to help the syrup and cacao butter to mix better- which on our observation it seemed to. The original recipe did not have this step at all, so you could leave it out if you prefer, but I’ve left it in because we think that it helped the texture of our chocs.

Add half of the 100% cacao, stir until it melts into the mixture, and then add the second half and do the same.

Ours had a bit of a foamy look on the surface as you can see. I think on reflection this was the lecithin and perhaps I should have left it to dissolve further. However, it didn’t affect the texture (which was entirely smooth) or taste of the final chocs.

The liquid at this point was very thin, much thinner than I was expecting to be honest.  

Pour into molds or ice trays.

Ours made 36 chocs- 16 in the heart mold and 16 in the ice cube  tray.

Put in the freezer or fridge to set. Ours went in the fridge and by about ½ hour they were set enough to pop out of the mold and eat. Here they are again.

My babies. I'm so proud.

As it doesn't have any cream or milk, it obviously makes a pretty dark chocolate which we estimate tastes about the same as 80% dark chocolate. Mum pronounced it ‘as good as Lindt’. The texture is chocolate heaven- it melts so deliciously in the mouth. When I do it again, I’ll experiment with adding some chopped hazelnuts or similar to the chocolate in the last step. Yum!

I guess the only other thing worth posting is the cost. The cacao 100% bar was $20 and we used 40g so $4.44 worth. The cacao butter was $19 for 250g and we used 80g, so $6.08 worth.  So the main ingredients cost $10.52 for 36 chocs.  Up to you whether you think it is worth it- I loved doing it and will enjoy experimenting with different versions.

If you do try this, be sure to let me know, below. I’d love to hear how you go, especially if you experiment with any modifications.

So that’s it. A long post, but a pretty easy recipe in the end, and the result was fabulous. I’ll be making more of these at home for Easter, although we might keep the cheese idea as well. J

Fat versus fiction

I hope my research-y posts aren’t boring anyone that reads this. I’m finding it really fascinating to look into some of these things for myself- I think it’s the first time I’ve thought about nutrition in detail, even though I’ve thought about food, a lot. Feel free to post comments if you have any. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I posted last about sugar and weight gain, but I can’t ignore the fat we eat when thinking about weight. I have always thought fat had more to do with weight problems than sugar. So, I use low fat milk, eat low fat cheese, ignore the crispy skin on my roast chicken and the delicious crackling on my roast pork. I limit gravy, fatty sauces, and fried foods. I choose the low fat tomato-y pasta sauce when we eat out, instead of the creamy sauce- I don’t think I’ve ever ordered the carbonara. I usually avoid things like potato chips for snacks, choosing lollies instead. Of course I sometimes eat high fat things (delicious camembert cheese springs to mind), but not without feeling guilty. But despite living this low fat lifestyle (with a few slip ups), I’m overweight. Boo. What to do about it? (Ignoring the obvious exercise question for the moment). Should I reduce the fat in my diet even more?

Doctors, nutritionists and the government have told us for many years that fat maketh the man (and woman) fat. We have been encouraged to keep our fat intake low, and as a result of this have increased our carbohydrate intake. After all, we need to get energy from somewhere, so we should ‘eat more breads and cereals’ as Norm learned in the Life Be In It ads of the 1980s (which you can revisit here if you like, thank you YouTube!) In case you think things have changed, here is Nutrition Australia’s current healthy food pyramid. Fats are in the top teeny part, and we are supposed to use even ‘low fat’ spreads sparingly. Although sugars share the top tiny portion (ie, we are supposed to keep our intake low), a study in 1994 showed that Australians who had the lowest fat diets had the highest intake of refined and natural sugars, not to mention alcohol. Oops. This won't surprise any of you who have already realised that most (if not all) foods manufactured to be ‘low fat’ have more sugar than their full-fat brothers. The sugar is added to make us think they taste nice, isn’t that great? As sugar has about half the calories per gram than fat, they can take out say 1 gram of fat and replace it with up to 2 grams of sugar without affecting the calorie content. So, a low fat meal is often a high sugar meal. Sneaky bastards.

As a former fat-a-phobe (phobic of fatty food, that is) I’ve come to realise that unlike sugar, fat is not an ‘empty’ source of calories. Fat is necessary for the body because:
• It provides essential fatty acids
• It helps us to absorb vitamins such as A, E and K which are fat-soluble
• Our nerve fibres are insulated by fat, and fat helps to transmit nerve messages
• Our cells all include some fat, which helps to transport nutrients from cell to cell
• It helps our bodies to recognise when we have had enough to eat.

This isn’t all that fat does either. Fat is essential. Given the list above, a low fat diet starts to look a bit, well, stupid. Or, if that’s too harsh, then at least short-sighted, since we decrease one of the things that helps us to feel full and stop eating. On the other hand, there is evidence (for example, this study) showing that the fructose in sugar actually decreases our body’s ability to recognise when we are full by interfering with a hormone called leptin. So, fat says stop, but sugar says 'more'. I’ll look into that one in more detail later.

What about ‘bad’ fats- ie, saturated fats- surely I should at least be avoiding those? The Australian Heart Foundation suggest on their website that Australian’s decrease their intake of saturated fats because they lead to an increased risk of heart attacks and stroke. This has been the mantra of nutrition experts since about the 1960s, but is directly contradicted by a review published in the world’s top nutrition journal in January of last year which showed  that “there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD [coronary heart disease, which can lead to heart attacks] or CVD [cardiovascular disease which can lead to strokes]”. This finding came from a meta analysis of research, which is a combination of the studies in an area so that instead of say 10 smallish studies with say 10 participants each you combine the data to get the results for all 100 participants. This meta analysis included 21 studies spanning 29 years and had 347,747 participants. One of the co-authors,when interviewed by the Boston Globe put it this way: 'There is no evidence that cheese causes heart disease'. Hurrah!

So, I have started to make my peace with fat. It's been trying to do me some good, and I've been willfully misunderstanding it and trying to avoid it all this time. I’m having full-fat milk again, I think for the first time in my adult life, and I am loving it. It’s delicious! (Just as an aside, back in the day I remember this being called full cream milk- is it just me, or have we started to give it a much more negative sounding name- full fat??). I’ve completely stopped looking at the fat content of food before eating it. I feel like a rebel just saying that.

David Gillespie’s experience and that of others who have quit sugar using Sweet Poison has been that they get full easier and they stay full longer. They report that they feel the ‘fullness’ in a much more potent way than before. This might be something to do with letting fat do it’s job of letting us know when we’ve had enough, unhampered by sugar sneakily turning off the ‘I’m full’ button and triggering the ‘more please’ switch.

Well, I’m not there yet, so I’m off to eat some cheese, but it will definitely be minus the guilt :)

Mostly harmless?

I know my last post was long, sorry. I’m new to blogging :)

Ok, so sugar is addictive. Check. Is it bad though? Since I was initially impressed with the idea of going sugar free because I need to lose some weight, I want to look at whether sugar can be implicated in being overweight. This would definitely tip the scales (ha ha) toward sugar being bad, in my opinion.

Here’s what I used to think about how sugar affected my weight. To gain weight, you just need to eat more calories than you use (and to lose weight, you do the opposite, obviously). Sugar provides energy (adds calories), and because they are ‘empty’ calories (sugar doesn’t provide any other micronutrients that the body needs), by eating those jelly babies I am using up my precious daily allowance of calories on something that doesn’t have any nutritional value. Such was my understanding, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong, it’s just incomplete.

Sugar is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. These two parts aren’t processed in the same way by the body, and they don’t result in the same outcomes in terms of our weight. Research has shown that if you increase people's calorie intake with fructose, you get visceral adiposity- that’s a big tummy- which is a strong and well-validated indicator of risk for chronic diseases including cancers, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. This is why the Australian Government are trying to get you to Measure Up. (Just out of curiosity, I checked what the Measure Up site suggested I do about reducing abdominal fat- they suggest eating less. Thanks). You don’t get this dangerous fat when you increase the calorie intake with glucose instead of fructose. It’s not just about the calories.

Fructose is processed by the liver. The liver sends fat to the tum and triglycerides (fat again) into the blood (triglycerides are implicated in coronary artery disease- hurray, more to worry about!).  Let’s see what this does to rats. An Editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition summarises years of research nicely: 

experimental studies in animals have shown that fructose can induce most features of the metabolic syndrome, including insulin resistance, elevated triglycerides, abdominal obesity, elevated blood pressure, inflammation, oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction, microvascular disease, hyperuricemia, glomerular hypertension and renal injury, and fatty liver. These effects are not seen in animals pair-fed glucose or starch, which suggests that the mechanism is not mediated by excessive caloric intake.

Ouch. So, fructose makes rats not just fat, but really, really unhealthy. And this is not because it ‘adds’ calories. Yes, those calories (if not used) will be stored as fat whether the rat eats glucose, starch or fructose, but you don’t see the cascading, overwhelmingly bad outcomes, some of which directly impact on weight, for glucose or starch.

There is a growing body (ha ha) of research to suggest that fructose leads to these outcomes in humans as well as rats, including the study I mention above. It is messy, though. Some researchers flat out deny that there is evidence for a link between fructose and the types of symptoms (including weight gain) that are evident in rats. Others say things like “there is compelling evidence that very high fructose intake can have deleterious metabolic effects in humans as in rodents”  (emphasis added). Finally, there are people like Dr Robert Lustig who used to work for the American Heart Foundation (including co-authoring their sugar guidelines) and who now unequivocally believes that sugar is the main culprit behind overweight and other problems. This is a good summary of what he thinks.

They can’t all be right. We obviously have more to learn. David Gillespie (in the Sweet Poison Quit Plan) says that there are over 3000 studies which confirm that sugar makes you fat (I haven’t counted them myself but I’ll take his word). Some of these are on rats or other non-human subjects, but there are many on humans as well.

This isn’t the end of the story about sugar and weight by any means, but I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll put my hand up and say that I believe that sugar is more- maybe way more- than an empty calorie. I don’t pretend to know exactly what it does, but 8 days in, I feel fantastic and very positive about having cut it out of my life. I've lost over a kilo already. 

So, if sugar is an empty calorie, then my body won’t miss it: I never needed the Party Mix (I just thought I did). And, if it’s more sinister than that, then I’m much better off without it.

Of mice and men

Well I’ve started week 2 of quitting sugar (as of today). So, I thought I’d better try and understand more about why I am ‘quitting sugar’ and not simply ‘cutting back on the old Allens Party Mix’. You quit something that you are addicted to, so by talking about quitting, I’m suggesting (I’m not the first) that sugar is addictive. I think the language we (or I?) use to talk about sugar is interesting. A sugar fix. Sugar cravings. Sweet relief. Ok that last one is not talking about sugar, but I’m sure it can apply. Here’s what I have come to realise about sugar cravings: They are real.

Simply, eating sugar creates a chemical response in the brain which is similar to a fix from an addictive drug. In fact, in a review of research (including their own) into sugar, fat and the possibility of food addiction, Drs Avena, Rada, and Hoebel revealed that sugar bingeing leads rats to show “behaviors and neurochemical changes that are characteristic of drug abuse” (p. 626). Drug abuse, yes. I feel sick. Without going into too much detail about receptors, dopamine and other stuff which, tell the truth, I don’t fully understand myself, the Drs Three suggest that the observed brain chemistry when sugar is withdrawn is scarily similar to the brain chemistry of withdrawal from morphine, nicotine, and alcohol.  (They don’t say scarily, I added that).

Their paper goes on to describe the behaviours observed in laboratory rats when they were first given sugar ‘fixes’ and then had their food taken away for 24 hours. These behaviours included: teeth chattering, hand (well, paw) tremor, and signs of anxiety. Well, you might argue that this was just because they were hungry - they hadn’t eaten for 24 hours, remember. I’d be a bit shaky too. The interesting thing is if you let a rat binge on fat instead of sugar, and then withdraw food for 24 hours, it does not show these behaviours. Sugar is addictive. Fat is not. At least to rats.

You may be surprised by how much of the evidence about food’s effects on the body generally comes from animal models, rather than human experiments. No, not from slim, tall rats who look good in clothes, but from animals used in laboratory experiments as ‘models’ of what would happen in humans. This happens a lot, particularly when the research is too new or dangerous to try on humans, and/or where humans are too complicated or too prone to do their own thing, to really get a clean result. For example, if you wanted to do the above experiment (feeding sugar vs feeding fat and then withdrawing it and observing the effects) on humans, you would have to get ethical permission (this may be difficult, given that you’d have to argue that fat/ sugar bingeing wasn’t going to harm the participants), and then ensure that the participants actually ate the food, and only that food, so that you were sure that the effect (e.g., the withdrawal) was due to that food, and not to something else they ate.  You would probably also want to monitor their environment and things that they did, in case these things affected the results. Complicated, no?

You could try to answer the same question in another way: perhaps with two groups of people, one group who already have a high fat diet, another group who already have a high sugar diet. But you couldn’t discount the effect of the other foods they eat, their health and food history, their environment, and whether or not there were differences (e.g., psychological) between the groups- maybe more of those who chose to eat a lot of sugar already have more ‘addictive personalities’ and therefore are likely to show more signs of withdrawal . It’s just easier with rats, trust me. I’m not going to engage in the animal welfare debate here- I’m sorry, I’m just not. But I think we should all give our rodent friends some thanks, because without them, we would know very very little about how food (not to mention drugs and other chemicals) affect the body.  

If the animal model is good, the results will approximate what would happen if we did the same experiment with humans. Sometimes (as in the development of new medicines) researchers will then conduct a human trial. With food, as demonstrated above, it’s more complex than this, but some researchers have tried other ways to understand the effect of food directly on humans. For example, scanning the brains of people who are obese has shown that there are observable changes to their brain anatomy, similar in type and amount to what has been seen in the brains of people with drug addictions. While this particular research (find it here) doesn’t prove a sugar addiction, it does show that something addictive, or very similar to addiction is going on for these people. 

However, I should point out that in a review of the literature on fructose, these Kiwis argued that while there is evidence for a link between sugar and addiction, there is a need for more research. They state that “In humans, carbohydrade craving has often been reported in obese people, although a full withdrawal syndrome has not been described”. I think David Gillespie and others who have followed the Sweet Poison Quit Plan would disagree- they have described it- but of course, until it is in the medical literature in a well-validated form (and even probably then) sugar as an addictive substance, rather than a rather yummy and mostly harmless sweetener will remain controversial.

What does this mean for you or me? (Selfishly, I’m more concerned about me at the moment). Well, I think that sugar is (very probably) addictive, and that if I take sugar out of my diet for more than a short amount of time, I am likely to experience withdrawal symptoms. God help me: I am a stay at home mum with a 1 year old to take care of, shaking hands ain’t going to be fun (on the other hand, withdrawal when having to go to work would not be fun either, so I won’t complain, promise). I mentioned in my first post that I have withdrawn from nicotine before, so when I stopped sugar (1 week ago today!) I knew to some extent what to expect when. I expected to want want WANT it. I expected to be antsy, needing distraction, unable to focus. I expected headaches, a funny feeling behind the eyes. I expected to be a bit snappy (or a lot snappy).

Maybe this is one of those times when expecting the worst has been for the best. I’ve not experienced much of the above, at least not to the level that I expected it. Reading the forums on the Sweet Poison and How Much Sugar websites shows me that there are varied experiences with the withdrawal phase, which seems to last about a month. My worst times this week have been when I inadvertently ate some sugar in food and felt horrible (and with all the symptoms above) afterwards- once I didn’t even realise I had eaten the sugar until I felt yuck and then checked the label on what I had eaten.

But overall, so far (touch wood) I seem to be having a fairly easy run. Maybe my practice with cigarettes has been helpful? (so perhaps I should smoke again, to reinforce my fantastic quitting abilities??) (Just kidding mum!). I think my experience has also been helped by my conviction that this is the right thing for me to do. I’m not eating sugar because I don’t want to eat sugar, so the neurochemicals can do their worst, I’m not listening (la la la). I’ll probably have to revisit the addiction topic later though, at least to update you on whether things change over the next few weeks, but also because as my hilarious remark above proves, just because one is not currently chemically addicted to something (like cigarettes) doesn’t mean that one is free from them either. I always want a cigarette and perhaps I always will. I don’t know if it will be the same for sugar. Hope not.

Overall, I believe that the rats are on the right track with this. We should listen to them more, maybe.