Kick your sugar habit

Maximise health and downgrade disease risk by kicking your sugar habit

Are you high? Before you say no, consider what you’ve put in your mouth lately. If it includes anything from cereal or raisin toast to yoghurt or tomato sauce, there’s a decent chance you’re riding a sugar rush right now.

Don’t feel bad – just about everyone is buzzed. Research** shows we’re scarfing an average of 28.5 teaspoons a day – way more than we should. And since 80 per cent of your RDI has already been added to your diet by food manufacturers, chances are you’re sugar-wired most of the time.

Sweet treats are bad news because they typically deliver a load of kilojoules with little to no nutrition. A more troubling fact: as our consumption of sugar rises, so do the numbers on our scales. It’s difficult to say accurately what percentage of our daily kilojoule intake comes from sugar, as the most recent statistics are from 1995 (Australia abolished its national nutrition surveys under the Howard government, although there is a new National Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey Program in the works).

Though there is no denying the escalating obesity statistics in Australia and New Zealand, there is some controversy in nutrition circles over whether sugar is to blame.

Dr Alan Barclay, media spokesperson for the Dietitians Association of Australia and chief scientific officer of the Glycemic Index Foundation believes that it’s the over-consumption of all foods that’s making Australia fat.

In the other camp, David Gillespie, author of Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes us Fat and The Sweet Poison Quit Plan points the finger squarely at the sweet stuff.

“Sugar makes you fat,” Gillespie says. “It is directly converted into fat by your liver. It also destroys your appetite control signals – while you’re eating it you can never really tell when you’re full.”

Now brace yourself for two more nasty newsflashes: (1) Eating sugar can stoke your appetite rather than satisfy it; and (2) Sugar can become addictive – no surprise to those of us who have a daily Snickers craving so strong we might be tempted to hurl an office chair at the vending machine if we ever ran out of change.

But don’t despair, Fantail lovers: there is light at the end of this caramel-coated tunnel. With a little determination, you can train yourself to stop craving sugar.

SWEET AND VICIOUS

The newest threat to our waistlines actually has been centuries in the making. In fact, we can pinpoint exactly when the Aussie sugar time bomb started ticking: 1788, the year sugar first sailed in with the First Fleet.

Manufacturers now use the tastebud-pleasing stuff to flavour a huge variety of products, including foods that wouldn’t normally contain sugar and that you probably wouldn’t describe as sweet, like the sesame seed bun on a McDonald’s hamburger, or the pad thai from your favourite Thai takeaway.

So even if you vigilantly shun the sugar bowl and never let a piece of chocolate or a lolly cross your lips, you could still be eating a diet loaded with sugar from stealth sources. And where does it all end up? Yep, right in that jiggly jelly roll hanging over your jeans.

Even when you’re perfectly aware that your favourite brand of peanut butter is spiked with sugar, buying the unsweetened kind can feel like a major sacrifice of taste and texture. And that’s just peanut butter – think of all the other sweet indulgences that are hard to resist: a muffin on the way to work, a handful of M&Ms, the lolly-flavoured cocktail in the sugar-rimmed glass at happy hour.

There’s a reason you keep coming back for more: you’ve got a habit.

In a 2005 study, a group of Princeton University, US, researchers led by professor of psychology and neuroscience Dr Bart Hoebel, found that eating sugar triggers the release of opioids – neurotransmitters that activate the brain’s pleasure receptors. Addictive drugs, including morphine, target the same opioid receptors.

“Sugar stimulates receptors to activate the same pathways that are stimulated directly by drugs such as heroin or morphine,” Dr Hoebel says.

When this phenomenon was studied in lab rats, Dr Hoebel’s students found that after 21 days on a high-sugar liquid diet, one group (whose feeding was delayed by 12 hours) showed signs of withdrawal, including anxiety, teeth chattering and depression.

While no human trials have been conducted yet, researchers hypothesise that sugary drinks, especially those consumed on an empty stomach, are similarly addictive for some individuals. So if you regularly replace breakfast with a sweet coffee, you could be setting yourself up for a sugar addiction.

THE REPLACEMENTS

How hooked you get on sugar may depend on what kind you eat. Fructose – natural sugar found in fruit and certain vegetables – doesn’t make you immediately feel as if you need another sugar hit again, mainly because the fibre and other nutrients in those foods slow down the digestive process and help keep your blood sugar level stable.

And if getting too many kilojoules is what worries you, reaching for a Coke Zero isn’t the solution: artificial sweeteners may be almost as bad for you. In 2004, a study published in the International Journal of Obesity found that rats ate more after consuming an artificially sweetened drink than they did after sipping sugar water.

Researchers speculate that kilojoule-free artificial sweeteners act like stomach teasers: as you swallow diet soft drink, your body anticipates the arrival of kilojoules. When they don’t show up, your body sends you looking elsewhere for them, often in snack form.

A 2005 study by researchers from the University of Texas, US, found that people who drank a can of diet soft drink per day had a 37 per cent greater incidence of obesity. And because artificial sweeteners are often many times sweeter than sugar, stirring a teaspoonful into your daily coffee may mean that when you do use real sugar, it doesn’t taste sweet enough, making you reach for extra.

50 names for sugar

Like the devil, sugar goes by many name
1. Brown rice syrup 2. Cane juice 3. Caramel 4. Carob syrup 5. Chocolate syrup 6. Cinnamon sugar 7. Coarse sugar 8. Coconut sugar 9. Corn syrup 10. Corn syrup solids 11. Date syrup 12. Demerara 13. Dextran 14. Dextrose 15. Diastatic malt 16. Diatase 17. Disaccharide 18. Erythritol 19. Ethyl maltol 20. Fructose 21. Fruit juice concentrate 22. Fruit syrup 23. Galactose 24. Glucose 25. Glucose solids 26. Glycerol 27. Golden brown sugar 28. Golden caster sugar 29. Golden icing sugar 30. Golden sugar 31. Golden syrup 32. Granulated sugar 33. Grape sugar 34. Grape sweetener 35. High-fructose corn syrup 36. High-maltose corn syrup 37. Honey 38. Invert sugar 39. Lactose 40. Levulose 41. Malt 42. Malt extract 43. Maltose 44. Mannitol 45. Molasses 46. Monosaccharide 47. Refiner’s syrup 48. Rice extract 49. Sorbitol 50. Sucrose

STOP THE DOMINO EFFECT

Here comes the hard-to-swallow truth: the only way to curb a sugar habit is to cut back. Drastically. It’ll be tough in the beginning, but your body will crave sugar less as it regains its insulin sensitivity.

In order to extract your sweet tooth, you first need to know how much sugar you’re actually eating. Take note of sugar’s pseudonyms. Read labels for a week and jot down how much sugar you’re taking in – you’ll probably find that it far exceeds what you think. Current Australian guidelines (which haven’t been revised for almost 30 years) recommend that only 10-12 per cent of your daily energy intake (that’s around 12 teaspoons for women) should come from sugar. Most of us are eating at least double that.

You’ll also realise that many products touted as healthy are still high in sugar. There are no laws regulating the use of the words “all natural” on food packaging, so manufacturers can label their products with abandon. Even if sweeteners do come from all-natural ingredients, they can be highly concentrated.

Once you know how much sugar you’re eating, you can control your intake. Here are the pros’ tips:

Eat breakfast

“Ninety per cent of sugar addicts skip breakfast,” says Kathleen DesMaisons, author of Potatoes Not Prozac. When you eat breakfast, you prevent the drop in blood sugar that makes you crave sugar later.

Pick fruit

Satisfy your sweet tooth with apples, bananas and berries, which temper natural sugar with fibre and antioxidants. Dried fruit and 100 per cent fruit juices will also do in a pinch, but they don’t have nearly as much fibre and are more concentrated sources of kJs, so limit yourself to a quarter cup or less of dried fruit or one cup of 100 per cent juice a day.

Indulge right after dinner

Late-night ice cream fixes give you a pure, unadulterated sugar rush. Have a small scoop soon after dinner instead and you’ll reduce (though not counter) the insulin-spiking effect.

Cut out “overt” sugars

Tackle the worst offenders first: sucrose-laden treats like lollies, frappuccinos, ice cream and soft drinks. If you drink a sugary soft drink every day, try having one every other day, then once a week, then not at all.

Enter sugar rehab

Like any addict, you’ll need to detox before you can fully recover. According to Gillespie, how you’ll feel when you stop eating sugar depends on how much you were consuming to begin with. You may have intense sugar cravings for a few days, get a headache, feel irritable (much like any other addict stopping their drug of choice, really).

But after a few days you’ll feel like a whole new person. Plus, after you’ve recovered, you’ll find that a little sugar goes a much longer way.

DIARY OF AN (EX)SUGAR ADDICT: RENEE CHILDS 27, ONLINE EDITOR

DAY 1
Giving up sugar for a month sounded like a great idea. Then I realised that the muesli bar I was eating at that very moment was chock-full of the stuff and that I’d have to give up wine. Was I mad?

DAY 5
A sign of sugar withdrawal: a headache. It’s a stressful day at work, and normally I would reach for chocolate. Instead I sip green tea and eat some grapes and power through the afternoon.

DAY 9
Drinks with mates. I stick with soda water – until we head to a cocktail party. After I read the long list of choices, I find a sugar-free option: Bloody Mary. I have two and feel quite saintly.

DAY 14
I’ve been dreading today – lunch with family to celebrate a birthday. Usually this involves lots of wine and (gulp)cake. I manage to survive the lunch, refusing even a teensy sliver of cake. Sniff.

DAY 20
After ordering a toasted sambo on rye, I start to freak out– what if rye bread has sugar? I realise how much I’ve changed my thinking and how much more aware I am about the sugar content of food.

DAY 23
I’m slimming down! I also have less of an appetite after meals. My 3pm slumps have gone and I’m satisfied with an apple instead of ice cream. I never thought this day would come...

*Additional reporting: Amber Adams & Tara Ali
**FIGURE BASED ON APPARENT ANNUAL INDIVIDUAL