increases the amount of other food we can eat. This is why our average daily calorie intake has increased by 30% in the last three decades.

Clearly we have an insatiable desire for sweetness, born of an evolutionary safety mechanism aimed at keeping us away from poisonous foods which were sour. Even better, if you are a fructose purveyor, it actually makes your customers want more food.

So how has something which now forms almost 20% of the average diet, crept into our food supply without anyone noticing?

The long and the short of it is the nutritionists guessed wrong when they said reduced fat and exercise was the solution. Governments didn't question the guesses and nobody invested serious money into finding out the real answer until there was an obvious buck to be turned.

Flying under the fat radar, fructose crept into every food we buy, often under the banner of making it healthier. We were told to eat more fruit and so we counted dried fruit and fruit juice as good things, and fed them to our kids.

We were told to drink less full fat milk, so we switched to zero fat alternatives, like Coke and apple juice.

We were told to avoid high fat spreads like peanut butter, so we switched to healthy honey and fruit conserves.

We were told to avoid high fat breakfasts like bacon and eggs, so we switched to healthy cereals which were a quarter to half sugar.

The miracle is not that we have all become overweight and sick. The miracle is that we are not all dead in the face of the incessant fructose doping.

So why don't we know this? The drug companies do, but they haven't the cure they were looking for, so there's not much point telling us how to solve the problem ourselves.

There's a saying in the IT industry from which I hail: 'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' - perhaps for the nutritionists and politicians, it's 'Nobody ever got fired for recommending a low fat high exercise diet'.

Every day that fructose remains a part of our diet, is a death sentence for thousands of Australians. So what should be done? What can be done?

The quickest and easiest solution would be to immediately ban added fructose as a food.
Fructose is not necessary; it is just addictive and cheaper than the alternatives. For politicians with less intestinal fortitude, the next best option would be a regulation that requires the clear and unambiguous labelling of the fructose content of all foods. Then those of us who want to avoid it can vote with our wallets.

Robyn Williams: And it's interesting that Dr Norman Swan ran a similar fructose warning on The Health Report way back. But do keep exercising. David Gillespie is a lawyer and his book, Sweet Poison is published here by Penguin.