Sugar-Free Eating by Dr Stephen Hudson BDS, MSc, PGD Med law

I can still see the look of shock on my patient’s face when I informed her that I didn’t eat or drink sugar: ‘What, at all?’
It was like some alien concept to her, but seeing as how sugar is one of the major causes of our patients’ dental ills, a dentist staying off sugar should hardly be revolutionary. And yet whenever I go on a dental course, there’s sugar everywhere: chocolates, mints, biscuits, orange juice, pastries. And perhaps what’s even worse is that we as a profession seem to gorge ourselves on the little treats arranged for us by the caterers.

Most dentists I know have mouths full of metal and composite. Are we just hypocrites, or is there something more going on?
Many of us have reached the age where the weight has started to pile on and no matter what we try, it just doesn’t go away. People start new diets and exercise regimes and for the first few weeks they seem to make progress. But then they notice that their cravings start up and the weight stops falling. It gets harder and harder to stick to the strict regimes of the diet, and then they find themselves suddenly standing in front of an open refrigerator desperate for something, anything.

A month later, the weight is back. For some, life seems to be a constant yo-yo battle. Despite their best intentions, the diets just don’t last. Eventually they give up and go back to their old ways, only to find that they put on more weight than when they started the diet.

People try the ‘no-carb’ diet. They try the ‘eat only yellow foods’ diet, and the ‘juicing’ diet. They try eating nothing but cereal and cutting out the saturated fats in the ‘low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet’. And yet multiple studies show that 90 percent of people who go on a diet end up quitting that diet after a few months.

And 70 percent of people who start a diet actually end up putting more weight on.

To put it in technical terms: Diets suck!
Let’s face it—if diets worked like everybody claims, there would hardly be any overweight people in the world. But the major flaw in almost every diet is down to two simple facts.

• First, Diets restrict caloric intake, which triggers the body’s hunger mechanism. It doesn’t matter how much willpower you have—few people can beat such a basic human instinct. (I certainly couldn’t!) How can you defy your body’s strongest survival instinct?
• Second, diets don’t re-create how humans are supposed to eat. You’re not supposed to eat food that looks and tastes like cardboard. You’re not supposed to restrict your calorific intake. Nature doesn’t work like that.

I was that person in my late 30s. I’d always been thin, and then—boom!—this spare tyre appeared and I was like, ‘What the ...?’ Some would say I was eating too much, but it turned out that it was what I was eating. I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth, but there were still massive amounts of sugar in my diet that I wasn’t aware of.

So I removed sugar from my diet. With the exception of the occasional piece of fruit, I eliminated fructose from the food I stuck in my gob. Fructose is the part of the sucrose molecule your body actually doesn’t really need. And fructose is part of the problem because when you consume it, the body treats it virtually the same as ethanol.

To me the consumption of sugar is a massive problem—one that bugs the heck out of me. I’d sprout my sugar-free mantra to my patients and some of them listened, but most of them carried on getting holes and passed their dietary habits onto their children, where the cycle repeated itself.

It bugged me so much, in fact, that I really started researching it. Someone I know said that nobody can eat a diet without refined carbohydrates, so me being me, I went out and proved that I could.

In a couple of hours, I was able to find recipes, three meals a day for 30 days, that were free of fructose with the exception of the odd piece of fruit.

And then I thought, ‘Hang on, people need to know this. Because people are confused right now.’

So I wrote a book about it.
For years, people were told to eat a certain way, only to learn later that it was based on flawed science. They read one article that told them one thing, then picked up the next magazine and found an article that contradicted what they’d just read. How is anybody supposed to know what to do in all the confusion?

I’m told that people aren’t interested in ‘the truth’.

I’m told that people want fairy-stories, lies and deceit because these things bring them comfort as much as the food that is slowly poisoning them.

I’m told that if only people would ‘eat less and move more’, they would become slim, trim (Photoshopped) superhumans like the ones we see adorning the covers of fitness magazines.

And you know what?

I don’t believe a word of it.
I think you’re like me. I think people want to wake up to the truth; I think people want to know what’s been done to them over the past 60 years—the lies and misinformation that has been spread in the name of profit.

Diets, on the whole don’t work.
What works is changing your lifestyle. What works is realising there is one food substance responsible for most of the obesity (and the health-related problems that come with obesity) and it isn’t saturated fats ... unless those saturated fats are consumed in the same meal with sugar. If you can take one thing away from this article, it’s don’t eat fats with sugars. But I get into all this in my book; there’s only so much that can be packed into a 1,000-word article.