book real food sugar

Sweet Poison - book review

by Liz Beavis

When I first read Sweet Poison (Affiliate link) by David Gillespie it really changed the way I thought about sugar.  Since then, Pete and I have changed our eating habits to reduce our sugar intake and how its now just become normal for us to avoid sugar, so I thought I'd share some tips. 

 


After reading the book and explaining it to Pete, we started really looking at all the sugar in the foods that we consume.  We already didn't like to eat processed foods, so there weren't any biscuits or lollies in the house, but there were a few other products that surprised us with their sugar content.

Sneaky high sugar foods

  • tomato and BBQ sauce (at 25% sugar, although some of it is fructose from the tomatoes, but sugar is also an ingredient)
  • fruit juice and soft drinks
  • milo
  • muesli bars with dried fruit
  • some crackers
  • chocolate (not so much of a surprise really)

Finding low-sugar alternatives

  • home-made tomato relish (or in our case, bought from the market by someone else who made it at home), at least its chunky and has some fibre, its not as sweet so its better than supermarket tomato sauce (also the colour of tomato sauce seems so unnatural now!)
  • Pete bought an attachment for his beer brewing carbon dioxide bottle and now makes his own mineral water using a softdrink bottle of chilled rainwater, to which we sometimes add a splash of cordial (lime has the lowest sugar content, but choose natural colours only) - you can also use a sodastream
  • no milo, sometimes plain cocoa in milk in winter is nice though :)
  • fruit free muesli bars or nut bars, and sometimes I even make my own\
  • Plain crackers (read the labels, its bizarre where sugar ends up!)
Unfortunately there is no sugar-free alternative to chocolate (apart from artificial sweeteners, no thank you), and that's been the hardest thing for me to give up.  That's why I can't say that we eat NO sugar, I still eat a bit of chocolate, but now that I'm aware of the effects of sugar on my body I have an incentive to reduce that as far as possible (I doubt I'll ever give it up completely, but if I only buy 85% cocoa, the sugar is lower and I don't eat as much of it).  
I do also occasionally use sugar in cooking, such as "sweet and sour sauce" or if I make a desert, however this is not an everyday use and I tend to reduce the sugar content by around half.  Cooking from scratch means that I can control how much sugar I include and often I will halve the sugar in a recipe and we can't really taste the difference.

Sweet Poison Quit Plan

In David's second book, The Sweet Poison Quit Plan (affiliate link) there are lots of recipes for baking and sweets based on glucose rather than sucrose sugar.  Personally I don't miss sweets so much, just the chocolate.  If you don't give up sugar completely, its not a good idea to consume extra glucose, so I haven't tried any of the recipes yet.
For more book recommendations see by book review page.

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