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.”