Sweet poison

It looks like David Gillespie has a new best seller. I was just in my local bookshop, and there was a huge stack of the new Sweet Poison Quit Plan Cookbook. In it, you can several dozen recipes, mostly for baking and desserts, that will help us "enjoy delicious sugar-free baking". The only problem? The recipes are actually full of sugar. Sure, there is no table sugar (sucrose), but half a cup of dextrose (otherwise known as glucose) will still spike your blood sugar.

The new cookbook is a follow-up to Gillespie's "Sweet Poison" and "Sweet Poison Quit Plan", in which he explains that exercise won't make you thin, and cutting out fat won't make you thin, both of which are reasonable claims. He goes on to point out that an increas in sugar consumption parallels our obesity epidemic, also true, but that's when he departs form mainstream nutrition advice... He argues that the problems with sugar are all to do with fructose, which hooks up with glucose to form a sucrose (table sugar) molecule. Definately, fructose is something we could all afford to cut down on, and Gillespie has done us a service in helping people decrease the sugar in thier diets. But the idea that glucose is a completely safe alternative, and we should limit our fruit intake but then have glucose brownies? Seems unlikely. In fact, a recent meta-analysis looked at the effect of fructose on obesity and found that as long as the participants ate the same amount of energy, fructose was not associated with weight gain. It did cause weight gain when it was added to the diet, but that's exactly what you expect if you eat more energy. Of course, that meta-analysis was only able to include data on a few hundred people, and it would be great to see more trials on the health effects of different sugars. But for now, cutting out fructose in preference to glucose is really only supported by a few rat studies.