Sweet and sour

Trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of dieting boom and bust, in a moment of clarity, father of six David Gillespie cut fructose from his diet. The results were life-changing. His weight-loss experience propelled him to dig deeper into the relationship between sugar and obesity. In his book, Sweet Poison, he unveils the deadly truths of one of the greatest health scourges facing humanity.

‘Fructose was killing me and everyone else as surely as if arsenic were being poured into the water supply,’ Gillespie writes. But for many of us, the idea of cutting sugar from our day-to-days might seem like a drastic move. Straight from the pages of Sweet Poison, here Gillespie outlines a simple roadmap to a fructose-free life.

I have never been very good at reading labels and I don’t advocate it as a pastime unless you really do have nothing better to do. After several years of navigating around fructose in everyday food, I’ve developed some simple rules to live by. Follow these rules and I guarantee you will successfully avoid 99 percent of the fructose in your current diet. If you follow these rules, all the weight-loss equipment you will need is already built into the body you walk around in. You will have no need of calorie-counting guides, food scales, GI tables, carb tables or fat tables. Most importantly, you will not feel like you are on a diet and after a while food tastes better anyway. This will dramatically increase your chances of sticking to this new way of eating, and it will be more likely to become simply a lifetime habit. If you achieve that, you will probably never gain weight again and you will likely have no need of any other diet again. You will disappoint millions of ‘health entrepreneurs’ and destroy thousands of business plans, but you will be the lean, mean machine you were designed to be from the beginning. Here are the rules:

Rule 1: Don’t drink sugar

Rule 2: Don’t snack on sugar

Rule 3: Party foods are for parties

Rule 4: Be careful at breakfast

Rule 5: There is no such thing as good sugar

They sound familiar, don’t they? They are a lot like what every ’50s and ’60s mother told their children about food, but which we all seem to have forgotten (with able assistance from some pretty skilful marketing campaigns).