David Gillespie was 40kg overweight, lethargic, sleep-deprived and to top it all off, a father of four, with twins on the way. He knew he needed to lose weight fast, but he had run out of diets - everything had failed.
After doing some reading on evolution, David cut sugar from his diet - specifically fructose. He immediately started to lose weight, and more significantly, David kept it off.
Slim, trim and fired up, David set out to look at the connection between sugar, our soaring obesity rates and some of the more worrying diseases of the twenty-first century - and he discovered some startling facts in the process.
David decided to write a book entitled
Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat to unload all the myths and dangers of eating large amounts of sugar.
According to David, study after study points to the inescapable conclusion that the fructose form of sugar which is found in many natural fodds including fruit is fat-inducing in animals, and probably in humans as well.
David's book traces the steps of human history to discover why we didn't eat large amounts of sugar in the past and what we can do to reduce our sugar consumption in the present.
The book is available at all good bookstores now and retails for $29.95.
For more information visit Penguin Books
OR VISIT www.sweetpoison.com.au
Some interesting facts about sugar
Sugar was once such a rare resource that nature decided we didn't need an off-switch - in other words, we can keep eating sugar without feeling full.
In the space of 150 years, we have gone from eating no added sugar to more than a kilogram a week.
You would need to run seven kilometres every day of your life just to not put on weight as a result of eating that much sugar.
Two decades ago 1 in 14 adult Australians were obese; that figure is now 1 in 5.
The 'natural' sugar in one glass of unsweetened fruit juice per day for a year is enough to add just over 2.5 kilos to your waistline.
Drinking a can of fruit juice has the same amount of sugar as eating four apples.
If we take 20 grams of peanut butter - the full fat version is 8 percent sugar and 126 calories and the low fat version is 13 percent sugar and 111 calories - a lot more sugar, but not a lot less calories.
200 grams of full cream yoghurt is 15 percent sugar and 210 calories, but the low fat version is 17 percent sugar and 180 calories.
A scoop of full cream ice-cream has 24 percent sugar and 81 calories while the low fat version has more sugar and not a lot less calories.
The more sugar we eat, the more we want. Food manufacturers exploit our sugar addiction by lacing it through 'non-sweet' products, such as bread, sauces, soups and cereals.
