More on what sugar is

My last post was about table sugar, sucrose. Here's some fuller information.

Scientists call caster sugar, raw sugar, brown sugar, white sugar etc 'sucrose'. It's made up of two simple 'sugars' (which is what the group of compounds are called) - glucose and fructose. Your body sees and treats these differently. In 5g of sucrose (table sugar), your body sees 2.5g glucose and 2.5g fructose, which it reacts to in different ways.

There's also galactose. In milk, you have lactose, which is the 'sugar' in milk. It's made up of half glucose and half galactose.

Most fruits have some sucrose, some fructose and some glucose. To our digestive systems though, the sucrose is just a bunch of more fructose and glucose as...remember...sucrose is half glucose and half fructose.

Glucose is a very important sugar to humans (essential for our body functions) and it's in most food. Galactose is in small quanitities, being mainly in dairy products. Fructose is pretty rare in nature as it's mainly just found in fruit.

It's the fructose part of sugar that the 'Sweet Poison' book is about. The above is summarised from Chapter 1 of Gillespie's book. I'm up to Chapter 7, titled, "Honey without bees". The first 6 have been:

1. Starting out
2. Theories of fatness
3. How we turn food into energy
4. Using stored energy
5. Fat makes you fat...or does it?
6. Biochemistry 101

It took him two years to lose his 40kgs. It's a way of life. No crash diet where you faint or anything.

Stewart's teeth feel cleaner!

I found that I used to get flatulence sometimes. (How embarrassing!)  I always thought it was the milk in chocolate that did it as I don't eat/drink a lot of dairy and have teas black etc However, since doing this, far less. Not that it was a major problem but this is most pleasing! Must've been sugar!

If you get varicose veins, haemorrhoids, fissures etc and things like that...I read on the internet last year that a doctor claims that these problems could be pretty much wiped out if people would lose weight. He claims that obesity is the cause of a lot of these problems. Of course, it'd depend if you just temporarily got them after having a baby etc He means the chronic, ongoing issues. I don't want things like that so I'm all in to try and avoid them.