When discussing cutting out sugar, it’s important to note it’s about cutting out added sugar, not sugar that is part of the fruit or vegetable. While some fruit, like apples or berries may be high in natural sugar, it’s the food with added sugar, like cookies, cakes and even that sugar on your cereal in the morning that accounts for too much sugar daily.
Sugar is often a hidden ingredient.
While it’s all on the label, if you don’t read closely, you might not realize that food like ketchup contain added sugar. Even so called healthy foods, like granola or flavored yogurt, have added sugar. You have to find out how much you really eat to decide if you’re eating too much. Every four grams of sugar, equals one teaspoon and vice versa. So, if you’re adding two teaspoons to your coffee, you’re adding 8 grams. Labels will show you how many grams the product contains. A tablespoon of ketchup has 1.8 grams, while a donut has 14 grams. Even “healthy” products like low fat yogurt with fruit, has as much as 28 grams of sugar.
What’s the recommended amount of added sugar daily?
If you ate two containers of the low fat yogurts with added fruit, you’d be over the 50 grams that’s recommended for daily intake. You can see how easy it is to do. Sugar should be no more than 10% of your calorie intake. You can actually change grams into calories by multiplying by 4, since each gram is about 4 calories. If your two yogurts each contained 28 grams of sugar, then each one would contain 112 calories from sugar. That’s 10% of a 1120 calorie diet. Eating the 56 grams of added sugar from two containers of fruit yogurt is like eating 14 teaspoons of table sugar.
When you eat too much sugar, it affects more than your weight.
Your body depends on a healthy microbiome, those bacteria, fungi and etc. in your digestive tract and all over your body. Eating too much sugar can affect that. It can throw off the balance, which affects your immune system, mood and prevents the body from functioning properly. It also can damage teeth, increases the risk of acne, affects heart health, increases the risk of type 2 diabetes, cancer, depression and fatty liver disease.
- Eating too much sugar can affect how you look. It accelerates the aging process, both on the skin, which shows and, on the inside, which you’ll feel.
- One reason natural sugar in fruits and vegetables don’t affect your system like added sugar is due to the fiber it contains. The fiber slows the processing of the sugar in the body so you don’t have sugar and insulin spikes.
- Sugar is not just added to food, it’s added to drinks and has to be counted. Some studies show that as much as 47% of all sugar consumed comes from drinks. About 25% comes from soft drinks, followed by 11% from fruit drinks, with 7% from sugar added to coffee and tea. Sports drinks accounted for 3%.
- Don’t listen to commercials that say certain sugar is good for you because it’s natural. Table sugar is natural and so is high fructose corn syrup, maple syrup and corn syrup, all of which are bad for you in quantities over 50 grams a day.
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