Avoiding sugar (sweet poison)

I first read "Sweet Poison" by David Gillespie about 18 months ago and it really changed the way I thought about sugar.  I've been mentioning this to people in blog-land and real life ever since, with the wonderful result that Emma from Craving Fresh has now also read the book and written a thorough and informative review of the book on her blog.

Reading Emma's review made me think about how my husband 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.  I'm not going to repeat all the reasons why you should avoid sugar, refer to Emma's post for the full explanation.  After reading the book and explaining it to my husband, 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 include:

• tomato and BBQ sauce (at 25% sugar, although some of it is fructose from the tomatoes, 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)

Since having a look at the labels of food in our cupboards at home, we've tried harder to find low-sugar alternatives such as:

• 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!)
• my husband bought an attachment for his beer brewing CO2 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)
• no milo, sometimes plain cocoa in milk in winter is nice though :)
• fruit free muesli bars, and sometimes I even make my own
• Vitawheat crackers or any others that have no sugar (read the labels, its bizarre where sugar ends up!)

Unfortunately there is no alternative to chocolate, 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.  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.

In David's second book, "The sweet poison quit plan", 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 (apart from the ice cream recipe).

I hope you had a look at Emma's post for the reasons why you should reduce your sugar consumption, and then use some of these ideas to make some changes to what you eat.  If you're not totally scared by Emma's post then you need to read the book for the full details.  Seriously people, sugar is not good for you!  How do you avoid sugar?

See also my review of David's latest book, Toxic Oil.