Day 16

Fruity Friday

The average American consumes 1.4 kilos of sugar per week or roughly 1610 kilograms in a lifetime. That is 1,767,900 purple skittles.

So as I awoke this morning I was kindly alerted that I had made an error in my teaspoon calculations yesterday. The bottle of Lucozade I drank was actually 10 teaspoons of glucose. Now I am certainly not endorsing you drink Lucozade, but given we are looking mainly at the fructose part of sucrose, this means I only had 30 teaspoons of sugar yesterday and explains why I slept so well last night.

To remedy this, the only noble thing to do was to bump the count today to 50 teaspoons of sugar. I thought about a strategy and given the requirement of ‘upping’ or ‘lifting’ the count, I naturally reached for a ‘Boost Juice’. My 1 litre bottle of Wildberry SKINNY with its boost of green tea came in at a sugar experiment record of 106 grams of sugar, or 26 teaspoons. Now it is not intended to be drunk in one hit but I took it on my run of errands this morning and it was gone in a matter of 8 sets of red traffic lights. That ‘1 litre of Goodness’ left me with only 24 teaspoons remaining for the day. I had wiped off over half the days requirements in a few hearty gulps.

I still felt rumbles from my stomach though, which is interesting given the amount of sugar that I had just put into it. I am keen to examine in more depth the effects of fructose on our hunger and appetite hormones. I got home and immediately woofed down a chocolatey Vita Go liquid breakfast with 4 teaspoons and an Uncle Toby’s Fruit Fix bar which also had 4. My poor poor stomach; chocolate, soy, green tea, blueberry juice and a stick of congealed fruit to deal with all before midday. I have never watched the channel 7 show ‘Revenge’  but my stomach is currently writing the next series.

Fruit was clearly becoming the theme of the day, so I decided to conduct a little experiment. I bought a small packet of organic sultanas, the type you would envisage in a child’s lunchbox. I tipped them out and counted them, 91. 91 shrivelled grapes rammed into a cardboard storage device.  I then went and purchased a bunch of grapes and also counted them out. 91 grapes is a lot of grapes. There is no way you could eat all of them at once without a dull ache and some serous wind. You can however get the same amount of SUGAR from those 91 grapes by simply drying them out and then giving them to your children as a snack.

I broke up the fruit party with a bottle of Arizona ‘Green Tea Original with honey’. If there were awards in this experiment, it would be a front runner for the most attractive bottle. Bulbous, practical, a cherry blossom with turquiose hue that infers Japanese peace and tranquility. Touche design team but out with the recipe makers, 36 grams of sugar in the bottle, 9 teaspoons of tranquility shattering crystals.

I made it to dinner feeling absolutely ravenous. My day had consisted of nothing substantial to eat, nothing to fill the coffers and tell the brain that I felt satiated. I’m sure if I had embarked on a grape eating adventure I would have reached 25 and the fibre in the grape would have told some amazing cell to pass a message to another amazing hormone and I would have stopped. Sugar on its own doesn’t seem to do that, I felt like a hummingbird again dancing from flower to flower extracting the nectar.

A delicious steak and cauliflower gratin slowed the buzz of my humming wings and I lay spread eagle on the couch, a very happy man.

I have only recently reached for my low fat Fruche yoghurt with its 5 teaspoons of sugar. Something tells me that this little tub of rich, peachy creaminess had finally found its correct time-slot; dessert.

Another day has gone and for one show only, 50 teaspoons were devoured.