I tell him, it's it's mayhem here before the before the go buttoners pressed, it's complete mayhem. But now we get ourselves back in order, we straighten up a little bit, We sit straighter at our desk. Tivity and Cook is much to David Gillespie's sheer delight tivity. An Cook is joining us live. It's not a post production editing scenario. You're here in real time, real time.
And if I add the preamble to the show, I won't have a job. So that's disappointing.
Well, if you, yeah, if any of us do, we won't have a job. Because we were sharing a few thoughts on a few things, it probably better that we don't share on a potty. Maybe one day when it's like there's only a week of the world left to live, maybe when you know we're spinning out of control as a planet heading towards some kind of devastating destruction, we'll talk about it. But tonight is that it sounds like the now has to me, Hi, David, are you good?
Good to be here?
I sent and I'm not going to say what it is everyone, but I said, I said, I had an idea, and I sent it to David yesterday, maybe we'd talk about this, And then after I sent it, I went, no, we're not talking about that.
And then we just jumped on before and he goes, you know that thing you sent? No, I went yeah, he goes, we're not talking about that. I went correct. So I'll tell you what we are going to talk about, which you and I haven't spoken about for a long time. Just because well just actually really because I had a conversation, quite a long conversation this morning with somebody about this, and that is I just wanted to revisit the sugar
conversation because I want to see. So you wrote Sweet Poison in two thousand and eight.
Yep, so I wrote it in two thousand and seven, right, My publishers finally got around of putting it out in two that.
So the publisher fucked around for a year, and you wrote it in two thousand and Evan, So that is seventeen year geez, that's a long time ago. So seventeen years ago you were speaking about the you know, the low sugar, reduced sugar, fuck off sugar gospel. You were evangelizing the world. What's the how have we gone over the last well since publication. How have we gone over
the last sixteen years? Are we eating less sugar? Is it just been I just I just googled how many different names for sugar are there and it came up sixty one sixty one different types of sugar. So is there just as much sugar being consumed or have we improved in some way or don't you know?
The answer is we don't know for sure. And the reason for that is quite interesting because the sugar lobby has worked very, very hard to make sure that accurate statistics on sugar usage are not collected, both in the United States and in Australia. So the ABS the RAM Bureau Statistics discontinued its series on sugar consumption in nineteen ninety eight after some intense lobbying, and so we don't
really know how much sugar Australians are consuming. There have been some intermittent surveys, and surveys, as you might guess in nutrition, mostly rubbish. And that's because, believe it or not, people don't tell the truth about how much sugar they're consuming. And even if they know how much sugar they're consuming, they're still not going to tell the truth about it.
So yeah, well, that reminds me of trying to get Australians sugar consumption statistics. I just brought that up trying to I mean, I know this is obvious, we'll come back to sugar in one second, but trying to find statistics on how often people lieally, that's a thing.
Even the ABS acknowledges that in the stuff they do publish and they say that look sugar. Well, not to sugar, but any food intake survey data is very very unreliable, and they've got all sorts of interesting statistics about how very unreliable it is, so you really can't take them
too seriously. You can do some back of the envelope sort of stuff though, just by looking at total consumption of goods sold that we're without explicitly looking at sugar, not breaking it down to that, but sort of looking at things like categories like breakfast, cereals, soft drinks, things like that, So you can do a little bit of
backward calculation on that sort of thing. And I think a conservative measure of it is that the average Australian is putting away about forty t spoons of sugar a day, which is a serious quantity of sugar. But and most people would say, well, you know, maybe Harps is doing that, but I I'm not getting anywhere near forty tea spoons
of sugar. That's if you think about adding forty teaspoons of sugar to your food, most peo would say, I don't add any you know, I threw the sugar pot out years ago, And the reason for that is you don't have to. I mean, you look at a breakfast cereal, you know, like say Sultana brand or Neutral Grain or something like that. It's going to be a quarter to a third sugar. So you have one hundred grams of it. There's you know, twenty five thirty grams of sugar straight away,
and you know, four grams per teaspoon. It's not hard to get to forty tea spoons. In fact, if you do the masks on it and say, okay, I'm going to sit down to a heart foundation to prove breakfast of Sultana brand and a glass of orange juice, and you're at about twenty teaspoons of sugar before you push back from that. So you don't have to go anywhere near a mars bar or a coke. You're already at
half the average Australian consumption of sugar. And when you compare that to say, the early eighteen hundreds, before sugar was able to be mass produced in commercial quantities, we were consuming about two teaspoons per person per day and that mostly came from honey and fresh fruit. Now we haven't changed that much. We're still getting about two teaspoons per person per day from honey and fresh fruit, and we just lay it on an extra thirty eight in sugar added into the food supply.
I remember a lady coming to see me years ago, David, who told me she didn't have any sugar in her diet. And she literally thought that she didn't because she didn't add sugar to anything. And then so I sat down
with her. I had a one and a half hour console with her, and I said, you know what she ate in a typical day, you know, and what she drank, what she consumed in a typical day, And I can't remember exactly, but yeah, it was somewhere around thirty tea spoons, despite the fact that she had no sugar in inverted commas in her diet. And she was like she was completely unaware, you know.
Well, most a lot of people are. I mean people will say to you, look, I understand that there's sugar and coke, but you know I don't drink coke. You so what do you drink? Oh, I have a nice coffee. Well there's more sugar in a nice coffee than there isn't a coke. Yes, you know, Australia's consumption of sugar in liquid form is actually highest in dairy products, not not in soft drinks. Soft drinks are actually in full sugar. Soft drinks are in serious trouble. I mean there's a
massive decline. So you know, I'm going to take credit for that. Since two thousand and seven, there's been a massive decline in soft drink consumption, full sugar, soft drink. And you can see that going to a supermarket. You're not to a supermarket now, and the soft drink aisle is still there, but there's an awful lot of sugar free stuff there and very little of the full stuff.
Yeah. And I mean we've mentioned this once before at least, but people might be blown away to know that something like barbecue sugar Peru barbecue sauce, I should say barbecue sugar. That was faux pa wasn't it. Barbecue is the same thing. Well, it's about fifty two grams per hundred grams. So for say, you know, let's say you've got a two hundred mill cup, so you've got two hundred grams of that source. Then of that about well more than half of the cup
is sugar. So I mean things like that where people think it's essentially even peanut butter, which you think, oh, that's nuts and it's salty, but most peanut butters are somewhere between ten and twenty percent sugar because it's got added sugar. Not all of them are course jams. You go, oh yeah, but jams fruit, But it's still incredibly high. And some of those I won't name names because I don't want it. Well I should name names because they
can't sue me because it's just fucking information. It's not an opinion. But a lot of those smoothie bars and those you know kind of juice kind of bar places that sell you know, these mega energy drinks and stuff which you know them, have got heading towards one hundred grams of sugar in one of their large servings, which is twenty or twenty something teaspoons.
There's no functional difference between a glass of apple juice and a glass of coke. They both have about the same amount of sugar in them, so one has bubbles in it and the other doesn't. But that's about it. So anyone who tells you that a juice of any kind is any kind of health food is delusional if they believe it. But you know, and the manufacturers have
been onto this for a long time. So you know, yogurt produces, for example, you have to put sugar in yogurt to make it palatable to someone who's used to eating sugar. And pretty quickly people got onto the fact that there was more sugar in the average yogurt than in a bowl of ice cream, and so, but it
was being sold as health food. So the manufacturers started saying, ah, we'll put a label on it that says no cane sugar in this yogurt, and there isn't because they're using concentrated fruit juice instead, which is still for it doesn't matter whether the sugar got squeezed out of a piece of sugar cane or got squeezed out of an apple or an orange. It's still sugar.
So whether or not we look like. I guess some of the more common ones or forms, you know, fructose or fructose, glucose, lactose, soucrose, which is just sugar in it. Do they all have a very similar consequence in the body.
No. No, And this is the interesting bit. The only one of the ones you mentioned that's a problem is fructose.
Yeah, I'm going to say that.
So the rest of them metabolized to glucose. And when a sugar is metabolized to glucose, that's not a problem for us because evolution has set us up to have glucose as our primary source of energy. So we have enormously complex systems to manage our intake of glucose and to manage our intake of anything that can be converted to glucose because it's our primary energy source. So when
we've had enough of that, we stop eating. Because fructose is relatively really rare in our environment, we don't do that. We have no biochemical breaks on fructose. It's something that is metabolized immediately to fat in our liver and stored immediately. It was a bonus in evolutionary times coming across a piece of ripe fruit that could deliver you a fructose hit was a bonus. You didn't want your body shutting down your ability to consume it because you were going
to get one shot at this thing. You wanted our eat as much of it as you possibly could, and you wanted it stored as body fat as soon as possible. So we have no evolutionary controls on fructose, but we have controls on every other sugar we consume. And that's
the trick. That's the problem with fructose. If we've gone from an environment where it was really really rare and a real advantage to have no control over it, to an environment where it's been added to every single part of our food supply because it's addictive as well, and food manufacturers know that food with sugar added sells a lot better than food without sugar, so it's added into
our entire food supply. So we've gone from an environment where we almost never encountered it, and when we did, it was it to our advantage to tear down on it, to an environment where it is in everything and it is subverting our appetite control system. It is addictive, and it gets in and turns to fat and then also destroys our ability to control how much of everything else
we eat as well. So the net result of this is you put this stuff in the food supply of any animal in any lab or any human in society, and they get fat. It's not magic, not woo woo. It's just plain biochemical fact.
So are you are you anti fruit advocate, low fruit advocate?
What do you? Well, you've got to think about your evolved environment. When do we have fruit? Fruit was nature's dessert. It was rare, and we had it whenever we could get it, but that wasn't frequent. So my attitude to fruit is fruit should not be a primary part of your diet. But if you get access to it every now and then and treat yourself, why not treat it like what it is, nature's dessert. And by the way, when you stop eating sugar or fruit starts tasting very
very sweet. And so when I say to you, treat it like nature's dessert, it'll feel like nature's dessert because it'll be just about the only intensely sweet thing you eat.
Is there such a thing as a sugar addiction or is that just a term? I know you're very dantic about addictions.
Very pantic about addiction. It's a very real thing. So we know that fractose spikes cortisol, which spikes don't mean which is the pathway you need for addiction. So it is a real chemical addiction. We have the word chocoholic in our language because chocolate is addictive. I don't know if you've eaten cocoa powder without sugar added to it, but it tastes roughly like dirt, So no one's getting addicted to that in a hurry. Put a ton of
sugar in it, you've got a different proposition altogether. Yes, we're addicted to sugar. You can tell if you're addicted to sugar, like a lot of people say to me, ah, I'm not addicted to sugar. That's a lot of rubbish. But the test for that is, well, then don't consume it and see what happens. Like, just don't consume stop
for eating sugar and see what happens. And everybody who does that tells describes exactly the withdrawal pathway of anyone dropping any other addictive substance, which is that they go through a couple of weeks intense cravings and then they can walk away from it.
And some of my friends have had headaches, like.
Yeah, there are headaches associated with yeah yeah, yeah generally yeah.
Yeah, and crankiness and tiredness and headaches. And I'm like, wow, you sound like you're coming off bloody heroin or something.
I mean, it's not as bad as heroin, but it is breaking an addiction, just like any other addiction. It's interesting. When I first put Sweet Poison out, I was contacted by a bloke who ran one of the first sort of alcohol addiction centers in the Northern Territory, and he said that he found like he read Sweet Poison, and
he got in touch with me. He said one of the things he found in running that center was that if you were going to try and break someone of alcohol addiction, the first thing you had to do was break them with the sugar addiction or you had no chance. So he would make them break sugar addiction for the first two weeks, then he would start on alcohol, and he said he was much more successful with that than if you just let them maintain the sugar addiction.
It's so interesting. Tip do you reckon you're a sugar addict? Okay, okay? Do you want any help with that? Or is you're just a happy sugar addict. A happy sugar addict.
And I don't lie about how much sugar I eat, David, I'd tell all of the truth. I eat all of the sugar.
But you do think because you have you ever Sorry, David, you have a real healthy diet. I do I do other than chocolate.
Yes, yeap, which is still an addiction. But the rest of my diet is great. There's no silly sugars hiding in, you know, pretend not sweet food.
Yeah, so you're not having ninety nine percent fat free mayonnaise which is twenty percent sugar, or no, you're not having a barbecue sauce which is fifty two percent sugar.
Definitely not.
But the other thing to bear in mind too, and this is worth knowing if you've got a high energy lifestyle, So if you're doing something that requires significant amounts of energy, So if you're if you're burning you know, three three and a half thousand calories a day because we're either you know, doing intense labor, or you're working out a lot, or you know, doing marathon sports, et cetera like that that people who are in that situation never get to
a point where fractose accumulates to fat in the liver. Because the fractose actually helps them because it's metabolized instantly without any control. It's actually a very very fast way of delivering energy to the body. Now, this is a good thing if you are a marathon athlete. So a lot of them take you know, fractose gels and so on, and there's good science as to why that's a not bad for them and be actually a good source of
energy for them. But it turns into a problem if you're not running marathons every day, So if you're not massively consuming calories and needing that extracts boost, then it's turning to fat in your body. So for ninety nine percent of the population it's a bad thing. But for people who are you know, ultra athletes who are pushing their bodies to the extreme, it's actually a good thing.
That's why we see Tour de France riders, I mean, apart from their gels, they often have a banana, yeah or two, and we see a lot of yeah, like you said, endurance athletes runners writers Michael Phelps allegedly used to when he was in full training and winning whatever he won seventeen gold medals or something. Over his career averaged ten thousand calories a day. Well.
And the problem for those athletes is that's great when they're doing it. It's when they stop doing it and then don't drop those habits so frequently. I mean, there's two more stories than you could poke a stick out of high performance athletes who put on huge amounts of weight once they were hire. And that's because they've spent their whole lives being able to consume anything they like and have zero IILL effects, and then suddenly they haven't. They don't know how to eat to avoid that.
And neither of you two think of a very well he's not well. He was a very well known athlete to me and my homies. He retired from a particular sport, professional sport. He blew out to him obviously self described fatty. Got hit. Don't get mad at me. That's what he's called himself. He got huge, he put on about forty kilos, retired from the sport. In fact, I can think of
two ones. An Olympic swimmer, but this guy retired from the sport, then hated his life, felt like shit, started training, lost all the weight and came back and became world champion.
Wow.
Yeah, so his name is Mark Okalupo. Yeah, yeah, world chi champion. And also I think Jeff Fhugel the swimmer, put on.
About a swimmer that was all he was thinking of.
Yeah, yeah, he put on about forty k's as well. But yeah, I think you're right David. Like it's that there is a big I mean, and not just with sugar and food, but psychological emotional adjustment for athletes when they have to live in this this operating, very specific operating system, high intensity. It's all about sleep and energy and recovery and intake and micros and macros and training cycles and periodization. And now you don't do that anymore.
But you've been eating a certain way for fifteen or twenty years, right.
Yeah, And you've also been able to obtain a benefit from, say, sucking down a front coast shell, and it's been an important part of your regime. And unless you're really clued into the biochemistry, you wouldn't understand that that's much much more than the galleries it says on the packet. You know, if you just take a lightweight view of nutrition and
just look at calories rather than what they are. Then that can be really dangerous because fractose calories are not the same as glucose calories, just the same as alcohol calories are not the same as glucose calories. If you just go by the calories, you're being seriously misled about what your bo he's doing with the substance.
Yeah, exactly, not all calories are equal. Speaking of athletes, to f you're the athlete on the show, when you fight, you do you have to suck down to a weight or have you had to?
I generally didn't have to worry about that a lot. I sat at Wayne my last fight. I was close, very close to the weight, so I had to make sure I came in under to Wayne. But I never had to drop I never really had to drop weight to fight.
I saw a photo of you the other day, or two side by side photos, because we know how shy you are about putting out pictures of yourself. But if I was jacked, i'd probably do the same. But they were side by side photos, and I can't remember, but one was like maybe fifty four or five kilos and one was sixty two or something.
Yeah, I think there was eight kilos different fifty fifty six, fifty four or fifty six.
Yeah, there was like a lot of weight difference a on a relatively small body, but you were pretty much just as lean in both of them. Like one of them you looked like, with respect the hulk compared to the Compared to the other one, you looked almost like a bodybuilder, and then the other one you look like an endurance athlete. Did that? Did that shock you when you saw those side by side photos?
It did?
It did?
That's what spurred me to put it up because I remember doing it years ago when I was not ripped, when I'd had time off, and I was just and I might have put a couple of kilos on, but I was similar and or actually I think I didn't put weight on. I just changed body compositions. That was exactly We're the same weight, but one was ripped and lean and one was just normal. And I just think it's fascinating because everyone's obsessed with the scales.
Yeah, well, I mean that's that's a problem in itself, isn't it, Especially when you know, like I can get on the scales in the morning at eighty four, drink a liter of water, and literally thirty seconds later on eighty.
Five, well what is a leader of water way?
Exactly? That's what I'm saying. Well, that was my point, David. It's like, oh.
Good, I'm glad, yeah, glad, I'm keeping up with you now.
I'll tell you what. You're the tipsy athlete, You're the journeus. Fucking keep up, will you. I was going to say to you, I was reading somewhere with your book that they were promoting it. David Gillespie lost six Stone. I'm like, well, this must be the British public version.
I didn't know what that was either.
I'm like six Stone, who wrote this?
Yeah, no, so that it was released in Britain as well. So this book, which I thought wasn't controversial at all, you know, saying you know what, maybe it's not a good idea to eat sugar. And the only reason I'd written it is because I grew up in a time when you know, ninety nine percent fat free marshmallows were health food really, you know, because there was no fat in them, so they were good. And it had just become a revelation to me that maybe sugar wasn't a
good idea. And then I saw the biochemistry that said it definitely wasn't a good idea, and so decided not to eat it, and you know, I lost forty kilos. But the thing about it was, I thought, well, this is a relatively uncontroversial, fairly obvious thing to say. And the book came out and the publisher pretty much agreed with me, and they thought, you know, this is going to be boring as and it's going to sell about
three copies. And then everyone started jumping all over it and taking shots at me, you know, the like Heart Foundation and the Dietitians Association and of course any which made me suspect that perhaps so on the take from the sugar industry not how dare I suggest that?
But it just.
It astounded me, the controversy that it caused. And how dare you say that sugar makes people fat? And I thought, well, I thought that was obvious.
And how dare you be scientific and analytical and research based? This is this is what I found before it's in front of me, it says. Sweet Poison, published in two thousand and eight, is widely credited with starting the current Australian wave of anti sugar sentiment. It's like how dare you start that waver sugar sentiment like you what are you doing?
I mean profits left right?
All right? Before we go just quickly Olympics thoughts, what's what's taken your.
I thought that, well, I almost tried to find three seconds of preparation I do before it's talking to you, Craig. I tried to find an article that i'd briefly seen the other day about I think it was Dean Boxell saying that he wanted his swimmers off the social media during the Olympics, and I thought, you know, that makes sense because it isn't as obvious as it at first appears as to why that's a good idea. But I thought, maybe just explain a bit about why it's a good idea.
The thing about social media, and this is I think I've told you before. I was brought down by one of the NRL clubs to talk to their players about this as well. The thing about playing players on social media is it's not just the distraction thing and that they're looking at their phones rather than getting on with their teammates and so on. There's actually some much more insidious things occurring there, which is social media rewards. People
with cotocin hits for their own personal endeavors. So the rewards from social media are when you post something, you want to see the likes on whatever it is you've posted. You know, you want to see the views, You want to see the likes, you know, all that sort of thing.
So if you're getting your oxytocin hits from that, and therefore your dopamine hits from that, what you're actually getting is your personal performance and your personal image is becomes the critical thing to you rather than the team and the team performance and your you know, all of that sort of thing, which which any athletic director wants. He wants the team working together, he wants everybody focused on
everybody doing well, not individuals. The other aspect to it is that it seriously because, as we've talked about many many times before, getting all those dopamine hits, which is just the same as getting them from cocaine, it makes you anxious and makes you depressed and makes it hard for you to sleep, and those are all terrible things for an athlete, particularly the bit about not being able to sleep. So it takes the focus of the athlete away from the thing they're supposed to be focused on.
It takes a mix master to their brain and it means they can't sleep. And so it's a very very good point being made by the coach there to say get off the social media the whole time. Now people are saying, oh, that's because he doesn't want to see people bagging out his athletes, et cetera. Well, I'm sure that's part of it, but there are some deep biochemical reasons why it's a very good idea as well.
Yes, and also, like I think from I mean obviously what you said, but also from a psychological and emotional point of view, when somebody looks for a number and the number is lower, you know, they want ten x and they get it two x response, but they had a ten x hope or expectation, and now they're disappointed, and now they're you know, now they're sad, or now they're anxious, or now they think, fuck, I need to
do a better post. I need to I'm guilty of that, not too much these days, but I remember putting up things and not getting the response I thought it would get, and I've taken it down and put up something else, you know, and then I know, little social media junkie mate. It's always good to chat to you. I know you're one of the rare guests that I don't have to say. How do people find you, follow you, connect with you because you're not interested in any of that, because you
actually don't like people. Oh that's not fair.
I love you, I love talking to you.
All Right, we'll say goodbye, affair, but as always we appreciate you. Thanks mate, See you later.