I Quit Sugar: Your Complete 8-Week Detox Program and Cookbook

each year Microsoft Research helps hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available welcome to the Microsoft Research visiting lecture series my name is rich Stokely it's my pleasure today to introduce Sarah Wilson Sarah is a blogger a television host she's a health coach as well and she's here today to talk to us about her book I quit sugar this details her experience weaning herself off sugar spoiler alert she's much happier off the sugar she's also going to tell us how we can do that in our own in our own lives and what we might expect after we pull the sugar plug so please join me in giving a warm welcome to Sarah Wilson hi everyone thank you very much for having me here and hello to everybody watching this online from your work cubicles I'm sorry you can't be in the room with us I quit sugar in January 2011 and back then I was a journalist I guess I still am a journalist I've been a journalist for 21 years and I had a weekend magazine column that I had to write and I was short of a topic I used to write about how to make life better and I jumped out of an aeroplane with Richard Branson I've meditated with the Dalai Lama I've cracked really bad jokes with Edward de Bono and done a bunch of things and I was sort of a topic and I thought oh gosh I should really try quitting sugar just to see what happens I've also got an autoimmune disease and I don't know how many of you in the room either have an autoimmune disease or know somebody I'm betting that pretty much everybody here at least knows somebody with an autoimmune disease I've got one called Hashimoto's which affects the thyroid I've got very very sick at the time well shortly beforehand I was the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and I'd burnt myself out massively I'd collapsed in a heap the doctors had said that I was the worst case of Hashimoto's they'd ever seen they said it's a miracle he's still alive people were prodding me they had turns coming to a sort of you know look at my blood test results and and and observe it as a freak of nature so the endocrinologist the doctors nutritionists all said to me you've got a quick sugar you've got blood sugar issue problems your you know heading towards cholesterol issues pre-diabetes and so on so I had two reasons to quit sugar I also had a very good reason not to quit sugar and that is because when you've got an autoimmune disease your hormones are all out and you're particularly addicted to the blood sugar kind of rollercoaster and I was very addicted for all intents and purposes I looked like a really healthy eater I was one of those seductive sugar addicts I ate dark chocolate I had honey in my chai tea I didn't drink soda or pop as you call it here I didn't eat any kind of candy apart from dark chocolate but again I'd convinced myself that didn't count but it added up to about 26 to 30 teaspoons of sugar a day now to just give you some context you may have read recently that the w-h-o or the World Health Organization has just come out with their draft recommendations to change the daily recommended sugar intake now this is a really big deal the last time they tried to do in 2010 basically every of the sugar Lobby lobbied the Republican senators and essentially George Bush approached the w-h-o and said we're withdrawing I think it was almost 500 million dollars of funding if you try to instigate these new recommendations now they're been very cautious this time and they're putting it up for public recommendation so at the moment up until the 31st so today people can have a say you can go on there and say I support these new recommendations and I highly recommend you do that if you want to get back to your desks and frantically get in your say but essentially what they've done the w-h-o have recommended following sugar intake for children it's three teaspoons a day for women it's six teaspoons a day and for men it's nine teaspoons a day and that's based on I think an 1800 to 2000 calorie diet so we're talking very small amounts the average American and this is a very conservative estimate it's about 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day now I should tell you also that those w-h-o recommendations include fruit juice they include dried fruit and they include other kinds of sugar substitutes as well as honey so yeah pretty frightening points of comparison and in a moment I will actually share with you some indications of how much sugar is in everyday products and everyday healthy products as well so what exactly and so I should say I eventually did quit sugar and I and I did it as an experiment for two weeks so that I had something to write about and I don't know if you know too many journalists but there's nothing like a deadline to make you do something so so that gave me the the good kick up the backside to do it and so I'm actually really grateful for that I'm also grateful for my disease it also forced me to quit sugar I probably wouldn't have done it otherwise to be absolutely honest with you so which doesn't sound very convincing does it when I'm here trying to tell you to quit sugar but um so I quit I gave it two weeks within two weeks I was feeling remarkably different my skin visibly changed it took I lost I'd put on quite a bit of weight about thirty pounds from my autoimmune disease and that's not that much actually for the kind of disease I had a lot of people balloon out and I'll soon lost that weight you know and it just dropped off really naturally without having to put too much effort into it and gradually gradually obviously it's a number of years later but I have been able to get my disease on my TSH levels for those of you are familiar with this terminology to a point where it's it's almost manageable I'm almost off medication from having been on the highest dose possible I'm almost off my medication I'm very careful about saying that because I don't recommend people come off their medication when they quit sugar you really have to monitor it yourself and I've been doing it for a long time now so why is sugar so bad we're hearing so much about it in the Pro I'm sure you've seen dr. robert lustig presentation on youtube you know there's there's countless books coming out I've arrived in America with my with my book you know a lot of people say look is it's just another diet you know we've had Atkins you know no fat yes we eat fat protein carbs what are we meant to eat the issue with fructose or with sugar is this sugar which let's call it the same thing as high fructose corn syrup it's the same stuff once it's in your body okay give or take a couple of molecules but essentially it's the same kind of the kite same kind of stuff it's both of them are about 50% fructose and 50% sucrose sorry glucose so every day table sugar or high fructose corn syrup is 50% fructose and it's the fructose that is the problem it's the only molecule on the planet that we are unable to register in our brains as having eaten so when you eat glucose or protein or any kind of food molecule we have a corresponding hormonal in our brain that says ah I've eaten I'm now full and it turns on this of appetite association mechanism and it shuts everything down says I'm full now I don't need to eat for a while so you've probably noticed that you can consume a container this large of either soda or fruit juice or you know some kind of you know sweet beverage we can also eat a whole packet of Oreos in one session we can also eat a huge amount of calories contained in a candy bar and we don't get full you try to eat that much yogurt in one session or even milk in one session you will absolutely struggle to do it and the reason being is that it contains fat it contains a whole bunch of other things and it doesn't contain fructose so our appetite mechanism kicks in it says I'm full I don't want to eat anymore bang done move on to the rest of your day sugar does not possess that mechanism at the same time it's been proven it albeit in studies with rats but this is not the kind of study you can do on small children lock them in a room and give them a hole here um candy and see what happens it's seen as addictive as cocaine and heroin now there's number of studies that have shown that rats actually preferring sugar over you know cocaine and heroin and this is heroin and cocaine addicted rats so I'm very careful with those kind of studies because they haven't been done on humans they're not gold standard but does give you an indication and again anybody who has gone back to the freezer for another scoop of ice cream or another oreo knows how addictive sugar can be and anybody in this room has got sitting there going I really don't want to quit sugar that is the addictive nature of sugar talking to you right now now why would this be the case why would we be evolved where P sophisticated beings we've been around a while now why would we evolve to not have an ops witch and to be addicted to sugar well it makes absolutely absolutely perfect sense ten thousand years ago we know when we were running around the savannas being chased by wildebeest you know we actually there was very very little fructose on the planet there was a few berries quite bitter berries a little bit of honey or that was really hard to get to you had to climb a tree and combat bees and you know climb through bushes and there was really very little on the planet but when we did find it we found that when we ate it it was an instant source of fat so fructose is the only molecule not only is it addictive not only does it not possess an appetite off switch it's the only molecule that goes straight to our liver and is processed in our liver so other energy sources are processed through ourselves and it's a slower process fructose is processed in our liver and it's basically transferred into two fatty fatty acids or liver fat within instance so as you drink your can of coke by the time you put it down it's turned into fat and of course fatty liver of fatty acids and around the liver is the worst kind of fat visceral fat you've probably heard doctors and so on talk about visceral fat it's the fact that gets in and around your organs very hard to lose it's very much linked to heart disease and a whole range of other metabolic diseases so wonderful when you're being chased by a wildebeest or you've got to go and hunt your honey or your berries for a whole day okay we need this energy we were designed not to expend more energy than it takes to go and get our food if you're not I mean so we actually had these pockets of high saturated by highest saturated content you know quantities of fat via fructose that actually gave us that instant energy so of course we evolved to be highly addicted to it to seek it out to be obsessed by it and then to gorge on it to have an abs to be able to find a berry bush and eat it and eat it and eat it and eat it and really really get some good quality quantities of fat into us and that made sense back then of course it makes absolutely no sense now now our bodies our genealogy is exactly the same as it was ten thousand years ago but our diets are dramatically different so I probably don't have to spell out how bad that equation all works out to be we only have to sort of look around the world wherein to see just how sick sugar ease is is in fact making us the final thing that of course with discovering really only in the last thirty to sixty years is that fructose is also causing what are called metabolic diseases they're very much the modern diseases that we all hear about so type-2 diabetes you know everything old Simas I think they're saying that there's about 22 different types of metabolic diseases depends on who you talk to we're talking as I say you know heart disease type 2 diabetes you know a bunch of cancers autoimmune diseases anything to do with inflammation sugar causes inflammation and and essentially there's now very very convincing science linking sugar to pancreatic cancer and I think we're going to see it linked to even more cancers going forward this the peer-reviewed studies deciding to roll in week after week and you're probably seeing them in the press on a regular basis so the next question I get asked is well why aren't we told all of this if this is such terrible news why hasn't some edicts being issued you know from from above well I guess there's been attempts and of course we I was talking to somebody at lunch today those attempts I sort of shouted down by the sugar lobby as as sort of efforts from the nanny state we've we've heard that over and over again and I was sharing at lunch that somebody said to me recently at a conference I was speaking out with with dr. Lustig and a bunch of other actually American scientists and this woman who was speaking she said well look if if if era than any state okay well my nanny she knew what she was talking about and when it comes to diets and dietary thinking I would actually listen to my nanny before I listen to anyone else and I think we've actually got to a point where we actually do need government intervention on this very very modest matter problem is of course there's a web of and I won't say I won't say conspiracy or anything like that I actually think there's there's very good reason why we've been led to believe that sugar is fine and fairly innocuous you know okay empty calories but you know a bit of sweet stuffs not going to hurt anyone everything in moderation you know I hear that all the time it goes back to the 1960s basically there was heart disease was on the up and up and I think Eisenhower I think I've got the right era had a heart attack and so you know the search was on for what was the cause of heart disease as well as as a B C D levels that were starting to increase and there was one scientist here in the u.s. called Ancel keys and there was another scientist in the UK both working on this very matter over in the UK the science had found that sugar was the problem over here saturated fat was found to be the problem now the study that was done back in 1960s Ancel keys was the guy that invented the army ration packs he was the beloved scientist within the government because he was a bit of a hero for inventing these these ration packs and he was quite immediate heart for for back then he knew how to get a headline you know and he managed to do this study on 22 countries around the world problem was that linked obesity and heart disease I should say and saturated fat consumption now fantastic except for the fact that he decided to only release the results seven of the 22 countries and of course he cherry-picked the seven countries that showed a connection between saturated fat and heart disease and so back then before you know we had Bing or Google you know people just accepted it the FDA took on board that advice and developed the food pyramid we all grew up I think everybody in the rooms old enough to have grown up with the food pyramid that food pyramid then travelled around the world I grew up with food pyramid in Australia it's gone throughout the world and as you know at the bottom it's got carbs and if you had a look at the picture that they draw this doughnuts and muffins and and so on nobody distinguishes what kind of carbs so we're talking sugar then you've got protein and then of course you've got that tiny little segment at the top which is fat and and we were very much advised not to eat saturated fat many of us grew up being told margarine was the way to go the various Health Organization's took all of this on then we got subsidised sugar and then subsidized corn syrup and so then we had excess amounts and basically it became a very cheap product they became vested interests in ensuring that the food that we eat contains sugar and of course corn syrup and around and around it went and to the point where now if you have a look at the dietitians I think Association of America I think that's correct title is in Australia to the DIA I think it says dia here as well if you have a look at the the various heart foundations and so on have a look at their sponsorship pages you will be absolutely horrified or perhaps not to find that their major sponsors their main sponsors are coca-cola Nestle Kellogg's and so on basically big sugar so we've got these organizations we've got nutritionists we've got a whole range of people invested in this idea that saturated fat is bad now there is a link between saturated fat and sugar and the link is this when you take such rated fat out of the product you've got to put something else back in to make it taste good and also to put to replace that fullness of mouth texture okay so what is everyone been putting back in for the last 40 or 50 60 years sugar so the low fat industry is incomplete cahoots with the sugar industry so if you go and compare low-fat and a full fat version of something you'll find that the main difference is that the the low-fat version is absolutely drenched in sugar so much so that you end up getting this ridiculous scenario where the full fat version is way less fattening once it's in our body on a plate yes you add up the calories and the full fat version will probably come out as more fattening but when we eat it and I kind of think we all know that that's the important bit right we don't sit there with it on a plate we eat and stuff once it's in our bodies and it's a completely different equation and basically the fat gets metabolized we burn it off we burn it off slowly it's it triggers association the appetite hormones we break things down when it's a full fat version it's got all the enzymes that help you break down that particular food when you take fat out often all the enzymes come out so you actually are not metabolizing the food properly and yes you get full so you don't need as much and I think last week I think was it last week your speaker was speaking about the whole calories in calories out Jonathan Bale oh is that right I don't think some of you might have come up to his presentation and and from what I know of his book he very much dispelled for that whole calorie myth when we eat food it has a very different you know we're not that simple if it was the calories in calories out that makes you fat I mean life would be a lot simpler but unfortunately that's not the way we work so that's why we're not being told so we've got to work it out for ourselves and we're going to make the change ourselves and you know my book is called by quit sugar it's not called you must quit sugar or everyone go and quit sugar it's I quit sugar I gave it a go and I tried it all out and this is how it worked and this is what might work for you I've got a question at the back did you want to ask it now or at the end it's relevant now again I'm sure he's a little bit like you're spent on that one added sugars and Patrick tools are you finding an apple if I'm eating a banana we're in for it right so does that come with fruit all subjects yeah not burrito Katie potatoes whole bunch of fibers okay so the question is is what about whole fruit I think this you know is is that does that contain sugar is that can included in these sugar sort of recommendations well very good question because I'm about to get to all that right now so if you want to wait five minutes I'll take all of that off but very good question so I get asked often what are some things that you can do to cut back on sugar so there's a couple things you can do and this is where I think I get to your point the first thing you can do is not drink your sugar in any form whatsoever so if you don't want to quit sugar straight away it's all just too much if you've got a gnarly white-knuckled resistance to the whole idea there are a few really basic things that you may be doing that you know you can probably start to eliminate and it'll probably make a very big difference so don't drink your sugar so fruit juice a glass of coca-cola it's just a standard glass sort of the same amount contained in in a can is around about 9 to 10 teaspoons of sugar a glass of apple juice whether it comes from a carton or whether it's been freshly squeezed by Buddhist monks using organic apples on the side of a mountaintop in Burma it doesn't matter right it's the same stuff when we're talking sugar glass by glass of contain exactly the same amount of sugar about 9 to 10 teaspoons so if you're somebody who's skipping breakfast and going to one of those juice bars you know and getting a kale apple pear peach and spirulina whatever it is I'm betting your sugar consumption is way over your daily sugar recommended sugar consumption and that is a really scary thing so if you can cut out juice never drink juice drink water milk tea coffee all the rest go and while I mentioned milk milk is sweet it does contain sugar it contains lactose okay lactose is not the same as fructose we can a lot of people have evolved especially you know in Western cultures to actually metabolize lactose so it's if you've got a lactose-intolerant intolerance there's a different story but from the fructose point of view it's it contains absolutely no fructose milk is fantastic stuff if you can tolerate it so fruit juice the next one is low-fat products I mentioned at a moment ago when they take fat out a lot of manufacturers put fat back in so go and have compare your mayonnaise low fat full fat go and have a look at the sugar content and you'll see what I mean probably the worst culprit and again it's a breakfast food is yogurt so if you're looking at a small carton of yogurt you know or standard serve for a low-fat plain unsweetened yogurt okay no added sugar you're talking about six teaspoons of sugar now how can they whack on a label it says natural and you know no added sugar well they disguise it and they put it in the form of things like inulin which is essentially a sugar once it's broken down in the body but it can be classified as a fiber or a prebiotic you know we know this wording from the side of the planet don't we so low-fat yogurt in particular is absolutely drenched with sugar now if you want to go into the detail of how to read a label I've got that in my book bear in mind it's probably going to become hopefully outdated very soon because the FDA is about to change their labeling laws which is fantastic news because American label nutritional labels are you need a degree in science or maybe to work at Microsoft to be able to read them and calculate how much sugar you're actually eating but as a just a top line thing eat the full fat version people you know it's the best way to go it contains the enzymes that break down the food it will satiate you so you eat less of it it will contain the nutrients that you need so you're not actually eating empty calories and it means it doesn't contain the added sugar the final thing that you can do is avoid sources so people say to me well you know I ate out quite a bit I used to be a restaurant reviewer I still very heavily involved in the food industry and I eat out quite quite a bit so you know how do I do that well the best thing to do is to avoid sources so when you go to I don't know your food court over here Microsoft or even you know if you're choosing between restaurants you know I went over to the food court and had lunch over there today I chose fish pork vegetables with no goobie sources goobie sources the goob that's sugar okay barbecue sauce tomato sauce 50% sugar contains more sugar than chocolate topping chocolate ice cream topping when you go to a Thai restaurant you know you can have in one serve up to half a cup of sugar and you know that's why it tastes so good if you're going out for dinner choose Indian over tie and just request that there's no sugar but it's generally sweetened with coconut products and coconuts fantastic stuff very low in fructose and beautiful sweetener and in a beautiful source of fat this is a piece of trivia for you I often asked what's my big sort of go-to thing to eat when I've got a sugar craving you know this is when everyone is pre-cut and I did them gotta have to get the name of it not daybreak good Wow what's that good day thank you this morning and I left the coconut oil with with Margaret because she was like what's the trick what do I do what could I do when I did get that hankering and I think a lot of women in the room men as well know that feeling after lunch when you slept I'm not feeling full I'm needing something sweet you know and you hold out to about three o'clock and then you go and have your muffin or you or your candy bar my trick is to eat a tablespoon or two of pure coconut oil pure saturated fat it's sweet I mix it with cacao sometimes it's got a beautiful sweet flavor you have it and a few people in the room I have tried it because I was speaking earlier it you eat it and all of a sudden you just go ahh and then you can get in with the rest of your day and you can get through to dinner without needing to eat another thing now it's a medium chain fatty acid the only other and it contains an acid called lauric acid the only other substance on the planet that contains lauric acid is breast milk mother's breast milk it is incredible for you if you are needing to lose a little bit of weight it is the secret weapon it works in credence II your face your face is just not working press with the idea of eating a spoonful of coconut oil but seriously it is it what was that 1 to 2 yeah 1 to 2 and if you like you can mix it with some cacao powder and to make it into a chocolaty snack I make my chocolate recipes basically coconut oil cacao and and a little bit of brown rice syrup as a sweetener or I personally don't use the sweetener anymore I just don't need it my taste buds have changed quite a lot but cope with it I put my pumpkin you know my sweet potato I cooked chicken any it's it's it's got a really high smoke point it's one of the safest oils to cook with you know Indian cooking they they know what they're on about it's fantastic and fantastic for inflammation as well so if you've got any kind of chronic illness it is wonderful stuff anyway I'm not paid by the coconut oil industry by the way so sources yes Indian food could often be a lot better than Thai food you know Greek foods fantastic you know it's grilled meats it's salads it's vegetables anything where you can see what the thing if you can point to the ingredients and you know what they are then it's progeria k gu b sources avoid them so getting back to the fruit question I've said fruit juice is bad I'll also add to that dried fruit dried fruit works out to be around about 60 to 70 percent sugar and that's why breakfast cereals you know the healthy breakfast cereals contain just in one cup about 5 to 6 teaspoons of sugar and it's you know predominantly from the dried fruit those are its natural well my response to that is also is arsenic and petroleum does it mean women to eat it now granted fruit whole fruit contains wonderful fiber and it contains lots of minerals and vitamins and yes it does contain a lot of fructose so an apple will contain around about 3 teaspoons of sugar a banana 3 to 4 teaspoons depending on obviously on the size of the piece of fruit you can choose low fructose fruit and that's what I tend to eat so berries are fantastic strawberries blueberries blackberries and so on I'm kiwi fruit is fantastic it's low in fructose as well grapefruit is okay your stone fruits a medium your worst culprits and you probably not going to be surprised pineapple bananas and grapes and watermelon okay really high in sugar and you know I don't know about you but most people donate just to note a small handful of grapes people can eat this many grapes and you're eating vast quantities of sugar so whole fruit is fantastic stuff and if you are getting your sugar intake from whole fruit then you know what that's the best thing you can do for your health and I have absolutely no problem with it the fiber slows down the passage of the sugar onto your liver you know the water also slows it down and ensures that everything's metabolize well but if you're eating a fruit salad with three or four pieces of fruit in it you are consuming double the amount of sugar that you're meant to in one day so just bear that in mind I personally I towards vegetables I find vegetables contain more minerals it's more bang for your buck you know and that's just how I go about things so some of the other questions I get asked and I'll cross over to your own questions in a moment but I'm guessing that some of you might be wondering about alcohol well I've got good news good news and bad news the good news is that in wine for instance on a really keen red wine drinker it's the sugar that ferments to become alcohol so very little fructose is left in red wine white wine not so much champagne or sparkling either Voyage it's still got quite high quantities your white spirits your dry spirits are no fructose so they're a better option beer is maltose again it's not fructose so I'm absolutely not advocating going out and getting sloshed instead of having dessert and dr. Lustig has a really good saying a glass of wine treat it as dessert so a glass of one or two glasses of wine a night is absolutely fantastic for metabolism and so on and in fact Lustig in his latest book outlines science which is not absolutely proven but that does point to the fact that the health benefits of red wine it actually sends your body into a slight shock it gets your body activated and your blood sugar levels kind of fired up and it means that when you eat your meal you actually metabolize it in a far safer way so one maybe two if you're if you're a bigger person glasses of wine it is great when you have the spirits mix it with soda or you know soda water or seltzer or whatever it is that you you want to call it not tonic water tonic water is just as sugary almost as sugar is as coca-cola so yes that's the answer on alcohol again remember alcohol taxes your liver so if your livers going through a rough time really go easy on the alcohol and then sweetness people often want to know what sweeteners I use and in my book I outline the details in a lot of detail I looked into it for a number of years and you know looked at the science looked at what was happening overseas there's a number of artificial sweeteners that are allowed in Australia and in the US which are banned in Japan and the EU Splendor I think is one of them I avoid all of those anything ending in oh L sorbitol maltitol and so on avoid okay it's a sugar alcohol and what that means is that it's it's very hard to digest I don't know if you've noticed when you have chewing gum it can make you a little bit gassy that's basically because your stomach is just going I don't know what to do with this I'm just going to it's like it doesn't have the choppers to break down the molecules so it just got passes it to the large intestine the large intestine basically has to use all kinds of bacteria to try to break it down and it variably produces a fair bit of wind so not good anatomic apart from anything else so avoid anything India Noel and a lot of sugar-free products have multi toll be really aware of it there exceptions xylitol if anyone who goes to health food shops you might have noticed xylitol being sold it's deemed relatively safe it's fairly processed not the best option now the two sweetener and the other exception is Ruth atoll which is generally mixed with stevia and I know many of you would have heard of stevia because it's starting to get a lot of traction stevia is the plant it's related to the mint plant and it's some little bit of a bitter taste it's mixed with your ether tal to kind of turn it into a granule like sugar so it can be used one for one like normal table sugar and it also gets a rid of that sort of bitter taste to a certain extent so I think here the most popular one is trivia and I think equal also make a stevia and in fact I found one this morning it's in my other jacket pocket it's a stevia mixed with dextrose and dextrose is glucose and I mentioned another exception to the OS rule dextrose glucose we can metabolize them so I think this particular one is mixed with dextrose which is I hadn't seen before so stevia fantastic its natural it albeit processed but it's it's it's quite a good substitute and the other one that I really like to use and it's relatively unheard of here is brown rice syrup it's essentially a slow-releasing carbohydrate it's 20 percent moisture 80 percent so the concoction of of glucose and maltose and it breaks down quite slowly in the body so it's not that huge dumped into the system I use it like honey I bake with it I drizzle a little bit of it every now and then on some things and it's available in most health food shops it's going to become more readily available I feel and it's really interesting when of Paltrow put out her cookbook a while back and use maple syrup and agave and blah blah blah and agave as I mentioned I think I mentioned it 70 to 90 percent fructose it is one of the worst things that you can do do not touch agar bay apart from the fact also that it's really processed and there's you know all kinds of political and ethical issues with it as well but she's now in her second book she had a she has a very famous brown a brownie a chocolate brownie recipe and in her first book it's made with maple syrup and agave and in her second book and I flatter myself to think that I might have had something to do with it she actually does contribute a recipe to my book but she uses brown rice syrup so there's a few more chefs starting to use this yes Oh a good question what about coconut palm sugar sometimes there's also coconut nectar as well and coconut blossom nectar it is essentially palm sugar and which is about 35 to 45 percent fructose and it's not as sweet so a lot more is used and that's what's often used in Thai food is the palm sugars and large amounts of it so a lot of health food shops and vegan places and raw food places use it and they love to say it so it's natural so I was asking on petroleum but um yeah it's it's not as high but you do tend to people to tend to add more of it so it works out much the same so yeah brown rice syrup I I think it's great stuff it's quite affordable it's about the same price as honey I've gradually reduced and reduced and reduced the amounts that I need which is a really good idea because any sweetener now there's released some studies that have shown that even just the sweet taste can continue a sugar addiction so the more that we can get off into artificial sweeteners and these sugar substitutes the better I do confess to having a number of dessert recipes in my book but I do flag that they're to be treated as treats you know even though they're sugar-free they need to be eaten as treats so that's sort of my overview I try not to get too preachy but sometimes can't help it because um I'm behind a pulpit and I have a microphone and an O and a really an audience so um any questions I can see a hand up at the back monk fruit right through regular granules okay so the first question is monk fruit it's a relatively new sweetener and good on you for hearing about it it's some African fruit that's really ugly looking and it's been used as a sweetener and I think it's been used in a very similar way to stevia it needs to be mixed with your ether tal to be sort of granulated and to be palatable they're still experimenting with it I'm not seeing it being used by manufacturers yet coca-cola and Pepsi and so on are all experimenting with stevia at moment and I'm hearing all kinds of rumors about Pepsi trying to buy out all stevia crops around the world that kind of thing I'm not hearing it about the the ugly and humble monk fruit yet but you keep an eye out for it in Australia we can get it as a granulated sort of substitute but I haven't found great results with it yet but I'd say the science will start to improve second thing was the dried fruit thing dried fruit is basically you take all the moisture out you're left with a very concentrated Maalik you know nodule of sugar so around about 70% sugar so it's I really if you can eat if you can treat each you know sort of a dried apricot as if you know if you have two halves you know two pieces of dried apricot that's as much as you eat then that's fantastic I don't know too many people that only eat two halves of a drive dried apricot you're generally a handful you consume in about five pieces of fruit so avoid dried fruit absolutely yes what about things like race and other greens pasta bread cups starchy carbs and yet I get asked this all the time you know where does that all fit in okay so I'm the no I'm the quit sugar girl I focus on that message asked me personally you know about carbs or and I should said to that thing I say work on one thing at a time so if you're trying to get some sugar out of your diet work on processed sugar and obvious sugars and then if you know if you do it for a couple months and you start to see results you may find benefits from cut you know cutting back on your starchy carbs now the science does show that these starchy carbs break down pretty fast into essentially sugar and has the same very similar metabolic effects and we're seeing a lot of people you're the Paleo diet and all that kind of thing there's a lot of credence I think there's also a lot of nutters attached to some of these movements and I distance myself a little bit from it ask me personally yes I minimal carbs because I just find I find them hard to digest the toxins as well the argument I make is that a lot of these grains contain toxins you know cows have hoofs various animals have horns to defend themselves grains have tough husks which are very which contains toxins so that's why I love him get bloated when they legumes and various grains it's if you're somebody who's preparing your grains really well that can make a difference generally most people don't so yeah I tend to avoid them the low nutritional value they contain toxins and so pace a load on your digestion and we just all have weak digestive systems now and there are much better things to eat when I you know I sort of see them as a bit of a waste of my saliva glands okay so I'll give you a nice little snapshot thing people ask me what's the best bread to eat sourdough even some commercial sourdoughs that you get from Safeway or whatever will still be better than a lot of your whole grains whole grain bread forget it it's you know it's a very long story if you want to read about it read Michael Pollan's cooked the fantastic book and it does go into quite some details to the whole whole grain I'd prefer to eat white bread to whole grain to be honest in terms of the toxic load on my stomach and digestibility provides very little nutritional benefit that you know really but sourdough the the yeast it's an alive culture it actually helps break down the gluten and it also breaks down any sugar so that's the best way to go yes what can you share on milk versus some milk versus behind that now whole milk so milk fat versus semi or whatever skim milk always eat the whole food our grandmother's our great-grandmother's they you know they knew what they were talking about now essentially I eat when you are pig farmers when they want to fatten their pigs they feed them skim milk because it's basically got a much higher sugar load not because it's added but because when you take out the other bits and pieces what you're left with is sugary water okay so keep that in mind it's fast more fattening I know it's it can put it doesn't seem to make sense but have a look around at everybody eating low-fat products and have a look around at how many of them are not losing weight the the other thing is is when you take out fat you take out a lot of the wonderful enzymes so the lactase is the enzyme that breaks down the lactose a lot of people I know who thought that they were milk intolerant started drinking full fat milk as an experiment and found they had no problems because they're actually drinking the enzyme that helps break down the lactose don't mess with your food never eat an egg white omelet oh my goodness it's probably one of those things you can do egg white is really hard to digest you need the enzymes that are contained in the egg yolk to break it down you also need the fat that's eaten contained in the egg yolk to actually absorb the proteins I mean its mother nature knew what she was doing we just tamper and get fat and sick yes I go back to what you said beginning and understand what is the link between autoimmune winning children yeah and you mentioned that you went off your bed because I understand it it's just like you have to supplement your parents in the case of thyroid okay so you obviously know um yeah yeah are you saying that you can no longer need to supplement oh no no I was careful to say that I through diet over a very long period of time I have been able to reduce the amount of medication I take and I've been able to modulate my health so the question was the link between autoimmune disease and sugar consumption and also whether quitting sugar has seen me come off my meds I'm still I still take Tyre oxen and I may have to take it for the rest of my life and that's fine I mean me the modern medicine is required when you when you have a complete deficiency so I take a small amount so I've reduced it from 250 micrograms down to 25 a day and that works for me now you know and I find that because my blood sugar levels are stable or my hormones have kicked in you know I've basically restored a lot of the damage and doctors sort of go wow how did you do that so um and I'm not I'm not unusual there's a number of people you know I know in my orbit who've done the same thing through food they met you manage your illness rather than it managing you so the connection between autoimmune and sugar at its most basic level sugar in flames okay autoimmune or autoimmune diseases are a inflammatory disease and the other thing taxi gut sugar basically destroys your gut you've probably heard of leaky gut and essentially most people with an autoimmune disease have a leaky gut and what happens is toxins and foods and gluten in the case of thyroid in particular gluten passes through into your bloodstream the antibodies come out as they need to an attack now you probably scratched yourself and got a scab it gets inflamed gets red and it pushes to the surface that's what our immune system does or a splint off it'll you know push it to the surface and do its work and heal it's fantastic what happens when you've got an autoimmune disease it gets confused and it goes hey let's just kind of go out and attacks morgan's while we're here and in my case the gluten molecule is very similar-looking the receptor to the thyroid receptors on our cells every pretty much every cell in our body has a thyroid receptor and so when we eat gluten it brings out the antibodies and the antibodies go away let's go in attack and so it goes around and has a bit of a party on my thyroid so and that's what happens with all inflammatory diseases so that's a couple of the connections then you introduce the insulin you introduce the hormonal imbalances and it's just this cluster I was going to say the rude version of that word but the cluster of stuff yeah um how much time have I got left I haven't been keeping an eye on time oh there is the time I've got how much more oh I've got another ten minutes of questions I think I saw a hand up over there yeah yep that's you um if you want to work sugar you like going don't you order PR yeah yeah how to quit sugar cold turkey or otherwise well a lot of people say moderation and I say you can unfortunately sugar is the only molecule on the planet where you just can't do moderation we're not designed it's the only it is literally the only thing on the planet where we cannot do moderation with it so yes I do suggest cold turkey my eight-week program and it's I don't like doing the salesy salesy thing but I did research it with addiction theorists and so on and worked outs are the best kind of way to do it so it's an easy enough for one week and then it's cold turkey it's replacing sugar with fats essentially you're switching your body from a kind of if you can imagine your metabolism is like a fire and you when you eat sugar and cheat carbohydrates you're throwing like karo and paper onto the fire and it'll keep burning but you're going to have to attend to that fire all day when you throw on proteins and fats it's like putting a log on the fire you put it on your eat it five six hours it's slowly Lee burns and five or six hours you could replace things and you're ready for your next meal so and that takes about six weeks to adjust you know that appetite mechanism so I recommend an eight-week process and you know four six of those weeks it's absolutely no no sugar no sweetener II that no rice no brown rice syrup or stevia and the final week you introduce fruit and things like that back in so it's no fruit for that six weeks which people go oh but you know I live I live to tell the tale I lived for six weeks for that fruit yes and I've got another question here I saw you okay so green smoothies versus green juices so green juices is the difference being and you squeeze and keep and don't include the fiber a green smoothie if it's actually made in the proper way blended where you don't actually chuck any other stuff out it's a much better option because you're getting the whole fruit you gain the fire but you're getting everything in there I actually have a real thing with food wastage I campaign against it in Australia and so I have a problem with juicing for that reason as well but green smoothies if you're going to go for a green smoothie go for one that has very little fruit in it I personally don't need the fruit in it I'll throw one or two frozen strawberries in and blend it up with you know some cucumber celery and so on but yeah I think green green smoothies are fine it's green juices that are the problem because they don't have any of the fiber yes so um another thing that we've been taught to do is graze every two to three hours yeah I noticed you just said 5 to 6 hours so I don't know if you were being literal yes I am being absolutely ritual um so the whole idea of grazing and 18 5 to 6 meals a day was invented literally in the 1990s so it was kind of invented by a nutritionist because we're all having blood sugar issues we were so addicted to sugar that we need to keep the Corolla coaster going so you speak you know two generations previously they at three meals a day if you go to Europe they don't snack they have breakfast lunch and dinner in fact in many countries it's lunch and dinner you know they'll sort of have a something very small for breakfast and it's lunch and dinner but they sit down and ate a proper meal I know it sounds ridiculous but I think one of the big problems in the West we don't eat enough we don't eat enough at lunch in particular so people have these like little kind of a sushi roll and then like you know a little lesson at all that or a little salad you know hold the dressing and then they go eat a whopping great piece of banana you know muffin in the afternoon and then they go and eat something else before dinner they pre eat and then they go and have their dinner and then they have something after dinner throw a log on the fire and get on with the rest of your life and stop thinking about food it's what I say so I ate three meals a day but I - one - two tablespoons of butter or oil on everything vitamins a e K and D which is your essential vitamins and minerals especially leafy greens are not absorbable without fat they're fat soluble vitamins and there we are eating these you know eating them without without fat you know the French our grandparents they will put butter on the vegetables for that reason so yeah I am I'm very much against in fact on my eight-week program online I have an online program if you want menu plans and shopping lists and the whole thing recipes for the whole eight weeks at I quit sugar calm you I actually it's it's no snacking from week 7 onwards yeah so I eat my snacks with my lunch that's why I say so at the end of lunch I have my like coconut chocolate thing yeah so that's the way I do it and I just I like that that much height that much food for lunch you know and then I'm done so yeah anyway there's a lot you'll read a lot more about all of this because the science is rolling in and showing that you know it's not good for us to keep not give our stomachs arrest I've got room for one more I'll do these - sorry yeah on a typical day what would you eat that means what way typically okay so for breakfast I will eat some of these recipes are in the book I'll eat some spinach and frozen peas it sounds ridiculous I cook all my vegetables and I encourage this in the book is to cook up your vegetables when you first buy them so I'll go and buy my broccoli in my kale I cut steamed them all up and put them into Ziploc containers I'm single I live on my own so it's a way my freezers full of these individual serves so I grab one of those put some frozen peas in it I take it to work I throw throw me in Bowl two eggs and maybe some cheese stir it up put in the microwave I don't have a problem with microwaves if it gets real food into me and that's my breakfast I'll have a green smoothie and I'll eat it with a handful of nuts I will make a big smoothie with basically cacao like a chocolate smoothie with cacao and milk and yogurt and chia seeds and and so on for lunch I do love slow cooking so I make these big batches of slow cooked meat with vegetables and freeze them in batches so I at the office i defrost it and I just take in as a key and handful of beans and steam that up with it so it's vegetables and meat I have these mishmash meals and I've got some recipes in there where I just kind of one pan wanders just cook up a hold of edge Tibbals I use sausage you know it's a really easy a good quality sausage I just cut that up and cook it up dinner it's sort of much the same thing or I'm out for dinner so at a restaurant I'll order I Greek food Aida love the cheese I can re you know I'll eat some fish and vegetables so yeah that's that's and like coconut oil yeah Oh at the back yes so me - sounds great how I feel for kids so deeply grown sorry yeah it is harder I guess sounds salesy in Australia we're very awkward about doing hard sell we almost pretend we've got nothing to sell in fact you know we almost tell people not to I don't don't over in my book you know but maybe I should feel confident here saying I've got a book called I quit sugar kids cookbook which is available online it's an e-book and so it's got kids recipes it's got advice for how to deal with kids a couple of really quick pointers I'm sure many of you here are parents don't stigmatize sugar so my big thing is don't talk about not eating sugar just have really great food in your house that just happens to not contain sugar don't get hung up about kids parties if I go to a party and eat a holly sugar just kind of you could as soon as you stigmatize it you know you know when you see a wet paint don't touch sign all you want to do is touch it you know tell kids not to eat sugar that it's going to become obsessed so I think kids eat just like adults if they start to eat less and less sugar they'll go to the party have a couple of sips of soda and feel sick and that generally is what happens I think is keep it as natural as possible cut out the fruit juice the dried fruit in the in your granola bars and all of that kind of thing I'm just make swaps without making a big deal of it and get your kids cooking and get your kids shopping so if you want to start to educate your kids at that age take them shopping with you and tell them to go and find the mayonnaise with the least amount of sugar or the yogurt with the least amount of sugar and then they're responsible so their table tips and good luck alright well I think that's all I've got time for I'm going to sign some books so if you've got any specific questions come and come and ask me you

Channel: Microsoft Research

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Length: 56min 24sec (3384 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 04 2016