Sugars are made up of a combination of fructose, glucose and/or lactose. Your standard table sugar is half glucose, half fructose. Other sweeteners like honey, agave and high fructose corn syrup can be more than 50% fructose.

When we say sugar free we mean we don’t use sucrose (commonly known as “sugar”), nor honey, agave, maple syrup, golden syrup or molasses. They all contain high levels of fructose. At The Sugar Breakup quitting sugar means quitting as much fructose as possible from your life.

Why would you want to quit Fructose?

Your body isn’t designed to eat large amounts of fructose; it’s not useful to your body as it passes from your stomach to your blood stream. Every part of your body refuses to use it and it gets dumped in your liver.

What happens to all that fructose sitting in your liver?

Unless you are an elite athlete fructose gets converted and stored directly as fat, your body can’t use it in any other way. Excess fat has been linked to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, a possible increased risk of heart disease, type II diabetes, and dementia.

Quit sugar because it is addictive

You know you want it and to quit traditional sugars is hard both emotionally and physically. But do you know why? Sugar is addictive.

Sugar has been shown to be addictive because you’ll exhibit the four signs of classic addiction:

1. Craving
2. Sensitisation
3. Binging
4. Withdrawal

Sugar is capable of lighting up the reward centre in your brain called the nucleus accumbens. You need to eat more and more fructose to achieve the reward effect in your brain.

Quit sugar because it is being added to food everywhere

It’s actually scary how much sugar is added to food. Have a look at the labels on the products you buy. Is sugar listed as the first ingredient? Is it in the first couple of ingredients?  Some manufacturers are actually breaking the sugar up into different titles such as sugar, fructose, glucose, corn syrup, agave, honey, molasses etc. to make it look less scary.

From cereals to yoghurt, stir-fry sauce to pasta sauce, sugar is increasingly added to everyday food that many of us wouldn’t even consider a sugar based treat.

In the US in 1990 an average diet had about 4 teaspoons of sugar a day. In 2012 this number is now closer to 22 teaspoons a day. The American Heart Association are now recommending that you decrease your sugar consumption to 6 teaspoons a day for women and 9 teaspoons for men.

More about Sugar

• 
  

  National Geographic

  Sugar Love, a not so sweet story

  Clarksdale, a storied delta town that gave us the golden age of the Delta blues, its cotton fields and flatlands rolling to the river, its Victorian mansions still beautiful, is at the center of a colossal American health crisis.

• 
  

  Sugar Stacks

  Visualise Sugar intake

  Would you eat a stack of 16 sugar cubes? A label can tell you there are 39 grams of sugar in your soda, but what does that much sugar really look like?

• 
  

  Melbourne The Age

  Sweet assassin

  Two years ago, ex-MasterChef presenter, writer and former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine Sarah Wilson went cold turkey. It was an experiment for a weekend magazine column, to see how “quitting” might improve her physical and emotional well-being.

• 
  

  ABC Catalyst

  Toxic Sugar Video

  We’re often blamed for eating too much and not exercising enough. But some of the world’s top experts refute this stereotype. Professor Robert Lustig says, “Did all of a sudden the entire world just become a bunch of gluttons and sloths? All at the same time? I mean, get real.”

• 
  

  UCTV California

  Sugar The Bitter Truth Video

  Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin.

• 
  

  MSN Healthy Living

  Sugar – it’s not so sweet

  Powerful infograph on Sugar – via MSN Healthy Living.

• 
  

  Australian Natural Health Magazine

  Not so sweet

  We don’t so much consider, that refined sugars are present in large amounts in many of the foods we consume on a daily basis. Liz Nowosad looks a little deeper into the implications of high sugar levels on our health.

• 
  

  Nerd Fitness

  Everything you need to know about Sugar

  When you consume fruit juices like orange juice, apple juice, or cranberry juice, the juice is squeezed, giving you all of the juice but very little of the fiber or nutrients that get left behind in the process. For this reason, many fruit juices should probably be called “sugar water.”

•