🩷 SUGAR 💕🧁

AdahPotatah2024

How many grams of sugar did you enjoy today?

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WHO guideline recommends adults and children reduce their daily intake of free sugars to less than 10% of their total energy intake. A further reduction to below 5% or roughly 25 grams (6 teaspoons) per day would provide additional health benefits.

American Heart Association recommends limiting added sugars to no more than 6% of calories each day. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025 advise that all Americans 2 years and older limit added sugars in the diet to less than 10% of total calories. For a 2,000 calorie/day diet, that translates into 200 calories or 50 grams of sugar daily (about 12 teaspoons of sugar).

Sugar (Granulated)
Cups Grams Ounces
1/8 c (2 tbsp) 25 g .89 oz
1/4 cup 50 g 1.8 oz
1/3 cup 67 g 2.4 oz
1/2 cup 100 g 3.6 oz
2/3 cup 134 g 4.7 oz
3/4 cup 150 g 5.3 oz
1 cup 200 g 7.1 oz

AdahPotatah2024

12g in my coffee so far...

AdahPotatah2024

Some tips for reducing added sugar intake:

Choose plain yogurt with no added sugar and stir in fresh or frozen fruit or unsweetened applesauce and a dash of cinnamon.
Choose cereals with 5% of the Daily Value or less of added sugars and add sliced ripe banana or berries.
Choose water, seltzer, herbal tea, coffee and other beverages with no added sugar. Add a slice of orange, lemon, lime, or cucumber for a subtle flavor boost.
When a sweets craving hits, try one of these first: 1/4 cup of unsweetened dried fruit; 1 cup of ripe fresh fruit; or a 1-ounce square of 75% dark chocolate.
When baking, reduce the amount of added sugar by 1/4-1/3 cup. Or reduce the sugar by substituting half the amount with unsweetened applesauce or mashed ripe banana; for example, instead of 1 cup of sugar, use ½ cup sugar and ½ cup mashed fruit.
If you choose to enjoy a favorite treat high in sugar, practice eating a smaller portion than usual. Enjoy it fully by chewing slowly and savoring it.
Your taste buds can adjust to sweetness levels! As you consistently reduce your total sugar intake, you may notice your sweets cravings lessen or that certain foods now taste too sweet.
https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/carbohydrates/added-sugar-in-the-diet/

neanderthin

I use 0 grams of added sugar in my daily diet but on occasion I will have some kind of carb where sugar was added, but that's pretty rare.

ninerbuff

Sugar isn't something I worry about much, but then again I don't eat a lot of foods with added sugar.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
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Been in fitness for 40 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

claireychn074

I don’t monitor added sugars. I eat quite a lot of veg and fruit and that can have a lot of sugar in it. And during a hard training sess I’ll glug a bottle of Lucozade sport - which is basically pure glucose with added salt. I also enjoy chocolate which is full of sugar.

Most of my food is home made from basic ingredients so I don’t worry about it.

lisakatz2

I've cut down sugar a lot. The only added sugar I consume regularly is a teaspoon in my coffee (non-negotiable) and a Chobani yogurt drink, which I should probably drop/swap for something else but I'm sort of addicted to them. I like to think that the Chobanis keep me from habitually binging on sugar.

AdahPotatah2024

I skipped breakfast and ate a turkey sandwich with about 2 grams of added sugar from the bread. + 18 grams from half of a mango Jarritos Mexican soda. Already 32 grams today!

lisakatz2

Soda is a killer when it comes to added sugar (as you probably know). So are a lot of breakfast cereals.

I have a soda no more than once a month. Then, I have a real cane sugar Mexican Coke with my pizza.

AnnPT77

No idea. Don't care. Dropped that column from my diary so I could add fiber instead.

I'm good as long as most days I hit my calorie goal, eat at least my minimum fats and protein goals, plus eat at least 5+ 80g servings of varied, colorful veggies and fruits (ideally 10+ 80g servings).

I don't care how many grams of carbs or sugar I eat as long as I do the stuff above. I don't mind if there's moderate alcohol in the mix, either. Nor do I stress out if there's an rare day when I eat a bunch of sweets and lowball my nutrition.

When I've looked, I've almost always - maybe literally always - been over MFP's default total sugars goal, but it's overwhelmingly inherent sugars in veggies, fruits, dairy. I spot checked a couple of typical routine days sometime back out of curiosity, and was below 10% of calories from added sugar.

I get where WHO is coming from, given common eating patterns these days in the developed world amongst those food-secure enough to make healthier choices.

But personally I'm more concerned about getting all the good things into my eating, at appropriate calories. If I do that, the less nutrient-dense things get squeezed out without focusing or obsessing about them. YMMV.

AdahPotatah2024

For dinner, today, pasta fagioli (https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/25690/andreas-pasta-fagioli/) this recipe except with poma organic crushed tomato instead of sauce and macaroni..and a glass of merlot - just 1 added sugar gram at most for dinner from the macaroni.

So total today- about 33 grams/I'd like to keep it under 25 g most days..

I read this easy way to tell the recommended amount of sugar grams: total calories (1500) 10% (150) and divide that by 4 (37.5) for 2,000 calories it'd be 50.

AdahPotatah2024

@lisakatz2 Yes, that's the main reason I thought about tracking my sugar. My daughter convinced me to stock up on Jarritos soda fiesta packs.🤣
I usually buy sparkling water, for home, and save the soda drinking for occasional restaurant dining!

yirara

I had a small chocolate bar yesterday and added honey to my dinner. Plus quite a bit of fruit and veg. Thus: No idea. I don't pick database entries based on correct sugar. I pick them based on correct main macros and calories.

AdahPotatah2024

I made sure to put just 2tsp sugar in my coffee this morning! I am just going to try to get it under 25g for this week, and then I'll probably stop tracking it. I feel better knowing yesterday's was about 10% of my calories or less.

AdahPotatah2024

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zSg6KXWLUGU&pp=ygUXdGlyYW1pc3UgcmVjaXBlIGZvciB0d28%3D

I'm going to wait, and make this next week!😋

Krazy80ate

Yea sugar is a beast as is high corn fructose syrup. The body doesn’t truly know how to process the High corn fructose syrup and doesn’t treat it as a true sugar. Want your mind blown look up the ingredients in snack crackers. Soooo when you look at say wheat thins, I think is the one sugars are listed multiple times under several names sugar, fructose ,sucralose, dextrose, maltodextrose, high corn fructose syrup and probably many others I don’t know about. Equally as disturbing is that sometimes these ingredients are listed more than once which in my opinion could imply that it was added again because it was over the rda or normal serving size. Sugar has also been linked to cancers in several studies.

AnnPT77

Krazy80ate wrote: »

Yea sugar is a beast as is high corn fructose syrup. The body doesn’t truly know how to process the High corn fructose syrup and doesn’t treat it as a true sugar. Want your mind blown look up the ingredients in snack crackers. Soooo when you look at say wheat thins, I think is the one sugars are listed multiple times under several names sugar, fructose ,sucralose, dextrose, maltodextrose, high corn fructose syrup and probably many others I don’t know about. Equally as disturbing is that sometimes these ingredients are listed more than once which in my opinion could imply that it was added again because it was over the rda or normal serving size. Sugar has also been linked to cancers in several studies.

That's not how labeling regulations work, at least in the US.

Usually, if the exact same ingredient is listed twice on a product label (in the US), it's because that ingredient is in a ingredient in that product that has ingredients of its own (i.e., isn't a simple one-ingredient food).

For example, these are the ingredients from a common grocery-store chocolate chip cookie sold in the US:

Semi-sweet chocolate chips (sugar, chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, milk fat, soy lecithin [an emulsifier], vanilla, natural flavor), Unbleached flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid, malted barley flour), Butter, Cane sugar,
Brown cane sugar, Eggs, Baking soda, Salt, and Natural vanilla flavor.

Sugar (as I bolded) is in the ingredient list 3 times. The first listing is because there is sugar in the chocolate chips they used. (Note that that sub-list of the chocolate chips' ingredients is in parentheses.) The last two are separate because the two types of sugar (regular white cane sugar and brown cane sugar) are different ingredients in labeling terms.

The overall product has 140 calories per 28g serving. A serving has 12g of added sugar, which is well within the generic recommended daily limit for added sugar, which is 50g of sugar within a generic 2000 calories. (There isn't really an RDA for sugar; there's a recommended limit, as the OP says, 10% of calories.)

Wheat thins don't list the same sugar several times in the ingredient list. They do list three different types of sugar, which need to be listed separately because they aren't the same ingredient in regulatory terms:

Whole grain wheat flour, Canola oil, Sugar, Cornstarch, Malt syrup (from corn and barley), Salt, Refiner's syrup, Leavening (calcium phosphate and baking soda)

They have 140 calories per 31g serving, 4g of added sugars, so about 11.4% of calories from added sugars, only a bit above the recommended limit (which is an all-day recommended limit, not a single-food limit).

I feel like you're overdramatizing the situation in other ways, but your guess about why things are labeled as they are (at least here in the US) is incorrect. It's not a dodge about the RDA or serving size. (In the US, serving sizes for similar foods are standardized for comparability, though the rules are subtle about how the reference serving sizes apply to nutrition labels, especially for "piece" type foods like cookies or crackers.)

AdahPotatah2024

This article was published more than 8 years ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/20/why-the-sugar-industry-hates-the-fdas-new-nutrition-facts-label/
Why the sugar industry hates the FDA’s new Nutrition Facts label
In early 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it was going to consider making a few changes to the nutrition facts label found on just about every food item sitting on grocery store shelves around the nation. And the food industry freaked out.
For more than two decades, the label had gone unchanged, which, for the most part, food manufacturers seemed to like. Specifically, the industry was content that the label did not reveal the amount of "added sugars" in a product -- the sugar content not present before the food was produced and packaged -- or how much of these added sugars people should consume daily.
...The change addresses some of the early arguments waged by the sugar industry, which argued that having a line that says “sugars” and another that says “added sugars” would be confusing, since it wouldn't make clear that the latter is part of the first. The FDA addressed that problem by changing “sugars” to “total sugars” and adding "includes" to the “added sugars” line.
Still, the industry argued that the label puts added sugar in an unfairly negative light, vilifying even small amounts.
"The Sugar Association is disappointed by the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) ruling to require an 'added sugars' declaration and daily reference value (DRV) on the Nutrition Facts Label (NFL)," the association said in a statement Friday morning. "The extraordinary contradictions and irregularities, as well as the lack of scientific justification in this rulemaking process are unprecedented for the FDA."
Not all food organizations, however, agreed. Both Mars and Nestle have supported the measure. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, a trade organization representing many large food and beverage companies, issued a statement calling the update “timely.”
Several health and nutrition groups, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have issued statements expressing their support for the new label (CSPI, for its part, has been lobbying for them for almost two decades), which they say help inform people about the alarming prevalence of sugar in the American diet.
..The sugar industry has used its political clout (and pretty large sums of cash) to defend its place in the American diet. Last year, decades-old documents revealed how the industry skewed ...
The result has been a string of victories that have helped infuse what we eat with a great deal more sugar than virtually any doctor would recommend. As John Oliver pointed out in 2014, sugar is so prevalent in the American diet, it creeps into the strangest things, including Clamato juice, Subway sandwiches, Luna granola bars, Yoplait yogurt and California Pizza Kitchen salads. It's little wonder that per capita sugar consumption in the United States is something of a global anomaly — the average American consumes more than 126 grams of sugar per day, which is slightly more than three 12-ounce cans of Coca-Cola and more than twice the average sugar intake of 54 countries observed by Euromonitor, including Canada and Britain.
The hope is that the new label, which makes clear when a food manufacturer has relied heavily on sugar to make its product tasty, will help Americans make more informed choices about the foods they eat. The daily recommended limit is 50 grams of added sugar, which, as Politico pointed out, means a can of soda will look much less appealing to anyone who bothers to peek at the label.
...

AdahPotatah2024

I agree with Krazy80ate except *excess sugar* I think 5-10% of calories sounds about right. It's true you have to watch out for all the hidden sugars in some foods!

paperpudding

I'm with those who dont actually track sugar.

My weight is being maintained at the right level, my blood sugars on blood tests are always ok, I'm not a great sweet tooth so I don't add sugar to coffee and co and I don't drink sugary drinks

I do eat cookies and such sometimes - but no problem with that in context of an overall reasonably nutritious diet.

SafariGalNYC

Today - no added sugar.

Typically I don’t do added sugar on a daily basis. On occasions it would probably be in the form of dark chocolate.

I enjoyed some blueberries and the most beautiful pomegranate today though. 🫐 (8 grams -sugar, tastes better since my husband peeled the Pom for me.) ☺️

There used to be an added sugar challenge around here in the threads a few years back that was fun.