Allison Pearson: "I"ve purged the poison of alcohol from my life"

Several readers emailed to say that they shared my fears about having the demon drink lurking in their DNA. One particular headmaster admitted he had watched his alcoholic older brother suffer a heart attack at 50 if he did not act now he could see himself going the exact same way. Several ladies confessed that they knew they were anaesthetising function and family worries with wine each and every evening, but the imagined of losing that safety valve was scary.

So, I believed I had a duty to hold going. I also felt in danger of becoming outed and utterly humiliated if I failed, which is genuinely beneficial when you have as a lot willpower as a mouse in a Cheddar factory. Critics protested that the idea of Dry January was infantile why couldn’t you just reduce back your consuming? But all addictions are infantile a source of childish comfort and escapism. Having the solidarity of so many other folks trying to rouse their inner grownup and say, “No”, was invaluable.

The first week was hell. I expected to truly feel instantaneously better. Instead, I found it hard to get to sleep. Dimly, I was conscious that my nightly wine intake should have been knocking me out. I felt oddly at a loss there was a scritch-scratch of irritation every single evening all around 6.40pm as if a modest rodent have been clawing at my soul. It took a conscious energy to resist the gravitational pull of the fridge in which my drug chills.

Yes, alcohol is a drug, and a strong a single. Maybe it requires providing it up to realise very how strong. I was certainly going through withdrawal signs. Week Two was less difficult. At night, rest came swiftly and the high quality of the rest was considerably far better than normal. No Sauvignon switch to snap me awake at 3am. Avoiding wine and G&ampT should have reduce 250 calories from my daily diet program, or at least it would have accomplished, had I not experimented with to make up for the absent hit of sweetness by polishing off the Christmas chocolates.

About now, I commenced to come to feel distinctly weird. Ahead of doing a radio interview in London, I sat in a café and attempted to operate out what was wrong. Every thing I looked at had a deafening clarity. It was the same sensation when I received get in touch with lenses, aged 16, and felt as if I was seeing the world for the 1st time.

The depression which had squatted on my writing like a malevolent toad had lifted concepts for a new novel tumbled into a notebook. This was not feeling bad, this was feeling good. The poison had left my system and the person formerly identified as Me was back. I felt on for lifestyle in a way I hadn’t for a long time.

Definitely, there is a price to be paid for this kind of smug sobriety? Certainly there is. By far the best challenge of Dry January is socialising. Abstinence does not make the heart grow fonder. It turns you into Jonathan Swift. Observing my fellow people at a notably bibulous dinner, whilst sipping nothing stronger than fizzy elderflower, I felt like Gulliver amongst the Yahoos. If you can keep your head whilst all about are shedding theirs and getting smashed, it is not considerably entertaining. Primarily, I wanted to go property.

It didn’t aid that, by some cosmic joke, my Dry January took spot during the wettest January on record. I failed to go to two parties since what was the level of braving the monsoon to stand close to holding a glass of water for two hours?

“Socialising was hell: I in no way realised I was so dull,” tweeted fellow Dry Januarista Margaret Kemp. “Glum and smug, powered on by self-righteousness. Grim.” I knew just how she felt.

Also on Twitter, the novelist Jill Mansell in contrast Dry January to watching black and white Television versus colour. Surely, I missed the instantaneous vibrancy that alcohol bestows, that blessed state identified by Jane Austen in Emma: “Mr Elton had only drunk wine enough to elevate his spirits, not at all to confuse his intellects.”

Regrettably, for those like me who lack a pleasure Pause button, also often a Saturday evening prospects to this: “A dusty thudding in his head made the scene just before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been utilized as a latrine by some modest creature of the evening, and then as its mausoleum. Throughout the evening, also, he’d somehow been on a cross-nation run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt poor.”

That is the mourning following the night prior to, described with horrible veracity in Fortunate Jim by the devoted drinker Kingsley Amis. I definitely haven’t missed people sluggish Sunday wakenings, the dessicated brain, the not really feeling tip-prime until Tuesday.

It might be coincidence, but more than the past month the papers have been total of stories about the dangers of alcohol, particularly for females. Three small glasses of wine a week significantly minimizes your probabilities of obtaining pregnant, according to a single examine. Females who drink the equivalent of one glass of wine each evening by means of their teenagers and early twenties improve their chance of possessing breast cancer by 1 third, warned an additional. Just a single binge for the duration of pregnancy can harm the little one years later on, with infant boys the worst impacted. (A binge – brace yourselves, girls – is classified as more than two and a half huge glasses of wine, which I consume during an episode of Downton Abbey.)

Half of all alcohol-relevant cancers are due to consuming far more than the suggested limits of 17 common drinks a week for men and eleven for women.

Suzanne Costello, chief executive of Alcohol Action Ireland, stated: “Many people are not conscious that alcohol is classified as a group a single carcinogen. The big amount of alcohol-relevant cancer deaths is one of the many heavy tolls that our harmful romantic relationship with alcohol requires on our society.”

As a nation are we lastly waking up to the substantial charges, each psychological and physical, of that abusive partnership? With my daughter’s generation consuming vodka and rum to get drunk just before they go out clubbing, we’d better.

It’s not all gloom. According to a latest experiment by employees at the New Scientist, giving up alcohol for a month can have wonderful positive aspects. Ranges of both cholesterol and blood glucose showed an incredible improvement. Top quality of rest was far better, pounds had been shed and amounts of concentration soared. “If a person had a wellness merchandise that did all that in one month, they would be raking it in,” marvelled a single consultant.

Effectively, as the clock chimed midnight last night, did I lunge for the corkscrew? Will February see the reinstatement of wine’o’clock? The phrases of a single reader preserve coming back to me. “You will locate that the habit is significantly simpler to reacquire than it was to give up,” he warned. I know.

Alcohol is this kind of a pleasure a matchless social lubricant, it tends to make pals funnier, boredom bearable and cares dissolve like nothing at all else but, for me I’m afraid, it’s pure poison. So, to all of you who made it by way of Dry January and took control of your habit, I increase a glass. Of fizzy elderflower.

Allison Pearson: "I"ve purged the poison of alcohol from my life"

Sweet poison: why sugar is ruining our wellness

But take heart. Around the world, a growing body of expert opinion – the ‘No Sugar’ movement – is leading a global fightback and warning that our sweet habit is completely out of control, leaving a nasty taste in the mouth of the body public. Sugar, whether added to food by you or the manufacturer, is the greatest threat to human health, bar none, they say. And unless we wise up and quit en masse, we don’t just risk personal obesity and disease, but national bankruptcy and collapse as the toll our ill health takes on our countries’ economies threatens to destabilise the modern world.

The movement is led by Robert Lustig, professor of paediatric endocrinology at University of California, San Francisco, author of Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar, numerous scientific and press articles, and presenter of “Sugar: the Bitter Truth”, a YouTube clip viewed more than 3,300,000 times. But ‘No Sugar’ proponents also include Australian writer David Gillespie, author of Sweet Poison and the new Sweet Poison Quit Plan, just out in the UK, as well as actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who reveals in her new cookbook It’s All Good that her family are not permitted to eat any refined carbs (let alone sugar), and even Andy Burnham, the Opposition Health Secretary, who called in January for high-sugar children’s foods such as Frosties and Sugar Puffs to be banned by politicians.

Lustig leads the field with his warning that not all calories are equal, because not all monosaccharides – the simplest forms of sugar, the building blocks of all carbohydrates – are equal.

At a basic level, sucrose, or table sugar (which is made up of equal molecules of the monosaccharides fructose and glucose) is not metabolised in the same way that a carbohydrate such as flour is.

He explains: ”An analysis of 175 countries over the past decade showed that when you look for the cause of type 2 (non-insulin dependent) diabetes, the total number of calories you consume is irrelevant. It’s the specific calories that count. When people ate 150 calories more every day, the rate of diabetes went up 0.1 per cent. But if those 150 calories came from a can of fizzy drink, the rate went up 1.1 per cent. Added sugar is 11 times more potent at causing diabetes than general calories.”

Why is this? Well, look more closely through the microscope, and Lustig (and others) believe it is the fructose molecule in sugar that is to blame.

Lustig explains that instead of helping to sate us, some scientists believe that fructose fools our brains into thinking we are not full, so we overeat. Moreover, excess fructose cannot be converted into energy by the mitochondria inside our cells (which perform this function). “Instead,” he explains, “they turn excess fructose into liver fat. That starts a cascade of insulin resistance (insulin promotes sugar uptake from blood) which leads to chronic metabolic disease, including diabetes and heart disease.”

Look online and you’ll see fructose described as “fruit sugar” – it’s the nutrient that nature put into apples and pears to entice humans (and birds) to eat them. So do we stop eating fruit in order to go sugar-free? It’s not that easy. Fruit is sweetened by fructose but it doesn’t contain very much, although you still shouldn’t eat very sweet fruit like grapes and melon to excess.

The problem lies in sources of sweetness like corn syrup, agave or maple syrup and honey, which contain a higher percentage of fructose than fruit, especially if they have been processed, meaning additional fructose is added in. Some agave nectars, for example, can be 92 per cent fructose, eight per cent glucose.

The food industry loves these sweeteners, especially high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), as they make every type of food more palatable – from soup to bagels, ketchup to bread. In the United States, HFCS is especially popular following governmental production quotas of domestic sugar, subsidies of US corn, and an import tariff on foreign sugar, making HFCS super cheap. As a liquid, it is also easier to blend and transport. In particular, it is used in low-fat foods (which would otherwise taste, says Lustig, “like cardboard”). His theory goes a long way to explaining why the low-fat diets which rose to popularity in the Seventies have coincided with a rise in obesity and related illnesses.

So before you can think about giving these sweeteners up, you have to turn label detective – and find them.

Thousands of miles away, nodding in agreement, is David Gillespie, a Brisbane-based lawyer turned researcher whose Sweet Poison books chart his own decision to stop eating sugar, resulting in him losing six stone without dieting in a year. He explains: “You are breaking an addiction, so you need to stop consuming all sources of the addictive substance. They are all hard to give up because they are addictive – but they are all easy to give up once you understand what you are doing and why.”

He adds: “Your palate adjusts significantly and quickly when you delete sugar. You can suddenly experience a whole range of flavours that either you didn’t know existed before or were muted by the presence of sugar. One thing people often remark on after they’ve been off sugar for a month or so is that suddenly they can smell it. They can tell you where the confectionery aisle or the breakfast cereal aisle is in a strange supermarket by smell alone.” What worries Gillespie, though, is not the candy by the checkout – but the fructose lurking in your ready-meal. “Very few of us are making conscious decisions about the sugar we eat,” he says. “The average Briton is consuming more than a kilo – 238 teaspoonfuls – a week, but I bet they’d be flummoxed accounting for more than a few teaspoons of that. Sugar is deeply and thoroughly embedded in our food supply.”

He’s right. We’re buying fewer bags of granulated sugar. And Defra statistics show that we’re consuming fewer calories from “free sugars” such as table sugar, honey and sugars found naturally in fruit juices – although at 13.9 per cent that is still higher than the recommended 11 per cent we should be aiming for – than in previous years.

Even the actual number of calories we consume has fallen: Defra figures show that there has been a long-term downward trend in energy intake since 1964, with average energy intake per person 28 per cent lower in 2010 than in 1974.

Yet, obesity rates continue to rise: currently 26 per cent of Britons are obese, half of us are overweight. This is a mighty problem: direct costs caused by obesity are now estimated to be £5.1billion per year. Obesity is associated with cardiovascular risk and with cancer, disability during old age, decreased life expectancy and serious chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and hypertension.

Like Lustig, Gillespie sees our inate weight problem as connected to the rise in consumption of hidden sugar. Unlike Lustig, Gillespie’s ideas were inspired personally, from looking down at a belly that was expanding year on merciless year, regardless of what trendy diet he tried.

“In 2002, my wife Lizzie and I had four kids under the age of nine,” he explains, “when I reached my maximum weight of 20 stone [127kg].” (Gillespie is 5ft 9in.) “I felt lethargic and unwell most of the time. When Lizzie announced our fifth child was to be twins, I had to do something.”

Gillespie began reading John Yudkin’s book Pure, White and Deadly, published in 1972, which also showed that consumption of sugar and refined sweeteners is closely associated with long-term disease.

Fascinated, Gillespie soaked up research papers which connected fructose (in particular) to fatty liver disease, to appetite stimulation, and to gout, diabetes, memory loss and, of course, obesity. He was shocked to learn “how many of our organs sugar systematically destroys without symptoms until it is too late. First the liver, then the pancreas, then the kidneys, and ultimately the heart.”

The more he learnt, the more Gillespie was determined to do something about his own eating habits. “I stopped eating sugar and immediately started losing weight – without adjusting anything else about how I lived.”

For Gillespie, the weight started dropping straight away, but the sense of addiction took a little longer to go: “At the two-four week mark I noticed I was no longer craving food and in particular I could leave things which I would have found difficult to bypass before.

“But I wasn’t feeling deprived. I ate what I wanted and as long as it didn’t contain sugar, the weight kept coming off. I had stumbled upon a way of fixing what had obviously been a broken appetite control system up to that point in my life.”

But there were setbacks: “I discovered the addictive power of sugar early in the process. I was out at a fundraiser and was served up a chocolate cake. I’d been off sugar for about a month and I didn’t want to waste it, so I ate it. I figured I’d be all right, but how wrong I was.

“The next day I had constant cravings for sugar and the gnawing desire to eat and drink everything available – clearly I’d crossed a threshold and needed to go through sugar withdrawal again. I did, and two weeks later was once again able to walk past chocolate without feeling any particular longing.”

His family were not left behind. “The kids didn’t like it,” he says, “but eventually they got used to it and their palates adjusted. Now they are pretty pleased with teeth that don’t have cavities, rarely getting colds and feeling energetic, with none of the highs and lows that come with sugar eating.”

That mood roller-coaster is one of the reasons Gwyneth Paltrow, in a blog entry on her website Goop, gives for quitting sugar: “Sugar gives you an initial high, then you crash, then you crave more, so you consume more sugar. It’s this series of highs and lows that provoke unnecessary stress on your adrenals. You get anxious, moody (sugar is a mood-altering drug) and eventually you feel exhausted.”

So is it time for everyone to accept a life of total abstinence? Not so fast, says the British Dietetic Association (BDA). “Sugar is not bad for you as part of a balanced diet,” says dietitian Sylvia Turner. “It has an important role in providing flavour and texture to foods. Just remember, sugar contains calories but few nutrients, so eating too much added sugar and sugary food and drinks instead of other healthy foods can make your diet less nutritious.”

She adds: “Some research suggests that sugary drinks make it harder for us to regulate the overall amount of calories eaten and a regular intake may be a factor contributing to obesity in children.”

And not all scientists agree with Lustig: a US study published last summer in the journal Diabetes Care suggested that fructose could have a positive role to play in the regulation of blood sugar in type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetes. Even so, Gillespie points out: “The public have taken to the ‘No Sugar’ movement. In Australia, hundreds of thousands of people have successfully quit sugar.”

And once the decision is made, it can be stuck to. “It’s no particular feat of willpower,” he promises. “I just make sure I don’t inadvertently consume fructose and the rest takes care of itself. My weight stays the same and I eat and exercise normally (not like a person on a diet). I am no more tempted to eat sugar again than a smoker who has successfully quit for 10 years would be tempted to light up again.”

Are you addicted to sugar?

1. Do you struggle to walk past a sugary treat without taking ‘just one’?

2. Do you have routines around sugar consumption – for example, always having pudding, or needing a piece of chocolate to relax in front of the television?

3. Are there times when you feel as if you cannot go on without a sugar hit?

4. If you are forced to go without sugar for 24 hours, do you develop headaches and mood swings?

If you answered ‘yes’ to one of the questions above, you are addicted.

Case study: Richard Dehn, 59, a retailer on Merseyside

I did my degree in hotel management and catering, and I’ve run a corner shop for more than 30 years. I’ve always been aware of the dangers of sugar and I remember reading a book about it called Pure, White and Deadly by John Yudkin, about five years before I started working at the shop.

I’ve got a very addictive nature and although I’ve managed to completely keep away from the other addictive and dangerous products we sell – alcohol and tobacco – for more than 20 years, I’ve always had a problem with sugar.

I’m lucky enough to be married to a superb cook, Sue, who has always prepared meals from natural ingredients, so I don’t eat ready-meals and I’ve never taken sugar in my tea and coffee. It’s really the hidden, refined sugar in other products that has been my downfall.

I think the main difficulty is that we work quite long hours, and it’s the easiest thing in the world for someone with a corner shop to go and have a Magnum or a handful – and I mean a handful – of chocolate Freddos or jelly babies, or a cherry muffin. You feel like the sugar rush will get you through the hours.

Then about eight years ago, I started to have serious health problems. I had an upset tummy all the time, I lost a lot of weight, and I really felt rotten. The doctor diagnosed IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) and told me to eat more fibre. I then did a little extra self-diagnosis and had a stool test done, which revealed I had a Candida problem; this means bad pathogenic bacteria in my gut, which were feeding on the sugar I was eating.

I started taking probiotics and stayed completely away from all types of sugar for a year, meaning no sweets or fizzy drinks and also no fruit for the first couple of months. I could feel the benefits of it reasonably quickly, and gradually I got better.

However, just like every smoker who has tried to quit, I felt that I’d cracked giving up sugar and one chocolate bar wouldn’t do me any harm. From there it was a slippery slope, as one became three in a couple of days, and three became even more after that. I didn’t get as ill again and didn’t necessarily realise I had any symptoms from returning to sugar, but gradually I did get to a stage where I’d feel so tired during the day that I absolutely had to have a sugar rush. Even being more aware of the dangers of sugar since I’ve been ill hasn’t actually stopped me going for that hit on a regular basis.

Personally, I do believe that sugar is a poison. But this has still not stopped me poisoning myself on a regular basis over the years. At the moment I am trying, once again, to stay clear.

Read David Gillespie’s tips on how to kick the sugar habit

‘Fat Chance: The Bitter Truth About Sugar’ by Robert Lustig (Fourth Estate, RRP £13.99) is available to order from Telegraph Books(0844 871 1514) at £12.99 + £1.35 p&p

Sweet poison: why sugar is ruining our wellness