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 |  Subject: Don't quit fruit sugar: nutritionist hits out at top-selling book  Fri Aug 23, 2013 3:03 am | |
| A Sydney nutritionist has hit out at top-selling food author Sarah Wilson, claiming her sugar-free diet is dangerous and can damage the body.
"Three years ago I quit sugar, watched my body slowly deteriorate, and then had to claw my way back to health," Cassie Platt said before the release of her own book, Don't Quit Sugar, which she wrote to debunk myths about eating sugar.
"Sugar is our cells' preferred source of energy and is absolutely critical to proper metabolic function. Eliminating it from the diet will do you harm."
Sarah Wilson's book "I Quit Sugar" has been on the best-seller list since its release in January.
Sarah Wilson's book I Quit Sugar has been on the best-seller lists since its release in January.
Wilson's I Quit Sugar has been on best-seller lists since it was released in January. Random House and Penguin have engaged in a bidding war for the US rights to the book.
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Platt, whose philosophy is grounded in clinical research and human physiology, said she wrote her book in direct response to Wilson's, to warn of the dangers of quitting sugar and the long-term effects of doing so.
The nutritionist said eating habits should never be about what you can't have and that approach could lead to trouble.
"Your food choices should be based on biological and metabolic needs. What we eat should fuel our cells, facilitate growth, repair and reproduction and, most importantly, enable your body to function at its very best."
A spokeswoman for publisher Hachette Australia said Don't Quit Sugar showed "exactly how you can use sugar to keep [your] body performing at its peak".
"Through her own experience Cassie leapt aboard the 'quitting sugar' train with horrible results," the spokeswoman said. "Her hair fell out and she had bizarre [menstrual] cycles."
She removed sugar from her diet and "found the results... horrible."
The sweet stuff Platt advocates is natural sugars, the spokeswoman said. The book introduction specifies: "This doesn't green-light soft-drink consumption or a daily candy fix. It simply means that natural sources of sugar - fruit, honey, sweet root vegetables - need to be incorporated into the diet.''
For nutritionist Rosemary Stanton there are grey areas when it comes to the white stuff.
While the body has ''no need for sugar'' there is ''a social need for sweet food'', she said.
''For 45 years I've been telling people to eat less sugar,'' Dr Stanton told Fairfax Media. ''In my experience, going to no [sugar] doesn't work for very long.
"I definitely support eating less sugar - our dietary guidelines since 1979 in Australia have always told us that. But when people go to an extreme and have none - my experience is, they will often break out and blow it.
"If they had allowed themselves a small portion in the first place, that wouldn't happen. You can't go through life happily without having a slice of birthday cake.''
Dr Stanton says there is no harm in stopping eating biscuits, dessert, cake and soft drinks and emphasises that ''36 per cent of adults' calories are from junk foods and soft drinks.
"They are the foods I want to attack - especially when kids' diets are filled with junk with no nutritional value."
Dr Stanton does warn against the danger of stopping eating fruit, though: ''I think that's ridiculous - there's plenty of evidence fruit actually reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and other things. I worry if anyone takes the 'no sugar' message to that extreme.''
For the record, Wilson, who Fairfax Media has attempted to contact, eats fruit. Earlier this year she posted on her blog in response to a report on Channel Nine's A Current Affair story: ''I eat fruit. One of the ACA grabs sees me listing the high-fructose fruits, as requested by the journalist at the time (during an interview a while back).
"I recommend eating the low-fructose fruits where possible: kiwi, berries, grapefruit and so on. If you're doing my eight-week program, I advise cutting out fruit for six weeks. This is to break the sugar addiction and to recalibrate our bodies, just for that short period. I then, at the week-seven mark, invite everyone to reintroduce fruit and read how their bodies take to it.''
Don't Quit Sugar; Why Sugars Are Important For Your Health will be released on November 26.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/dont-quit-sugar-nutritionist-hits-out-at-topselling-book-20130821-2saf7.html#ixzz2cm0tZ27z |
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