How much sugar in one day?

hannahllama05
hannahllama05 Posts: 1
in Food and Nutrition
I am a sixteen year old girl who is watching her weight and was wondering... how much sugar should you consume in a day? I have been searching online for the answer and they have all been saying 25-30 grams and I am really confused... A small box of raisins is 20 grams of sugar?! According to an app i've been using to track what I eat, i've eaten 88 grams of sugar today, which is more than 4x what the internet is telling me to eat! I haven't eaten any high sugar foods... for breakfast I had a bowl of cheerios, for lunch i had a ham sandwich with an apple, when i got back from school i had a small box of raisins and some crackers with peanut butter, and for dinner i had rice! That doesn't seem like a lot of sugar to me, especially 4X as much as I should have?!

am i really eating that much sugar? because in that case, i've never in my life eaten less than 20 grams probably!

Replies

  • RllyGudTweetr
    RllyGudTweetr Posts: 2,019 Member
    1. If you're sixteen, there are more appropriate sites for you; MFP is designed for adults.
    2. Barring specific medical conditions like diabetes or hypoglycemia (not an exhaustive list of applicable conditions), sugar is just a carbohydrate. Don't treat it any differently.
    3. That's . . . not a lot of food, unless portions are larger than I typically see.
  • aeb09
    aeb09 Posts: 424 Member
    Unless you have medical reasons to monitor your sugar intake, you probably don't need to be ultra concerned about your sugar intake. With that said, fruit has a lot of sugar (and sugar is sugar, regardless of the source). If you ARE concerned for some reason you can swap out the fruit and add in extra vegetables. Any vitamins found in fruit are found in veggies for almost no sugar, most of the time.

    I eat ketogenic (not for everyone, obviously) and eat less than 5g of sugar every day. It's definitely possible but probably not something you need to do.
  • Renneke
    Renneke Posts: 70 Member
    That 25-30 g of sugar sounds like the WHO proposed "free" sugar recommendation. Think of "free" sugar as the sugar added to foods in the forms of sugars or syrups. Remember that in this case "free" is not good. So the sugar in the raisins and the apples doesn't count as free sugar. If you added sugar to your cheerios, that is free sugar. The sugar from the lactose in the milk is not "free", neither is the sugar in the bread. If you had honey baked ham, than the honey in the ham counts as "free" sugar. I sometimes try to limit the amount of free sugar that I eat to the WHO recommendations, because it limits the amount of candy I eat.
  • AJ_G
    AJ_G Posts: 4,158 Member
    That 25-30 g of sugar sounds like the WHO proposed "free" sugar recommendation. Think of "free" sugar as the sugar added to foods in the forms of sugars or syrups. Remember that in this case "free" is not good. So the sugar in the raisins and the apples doesn't count as free sugar. If you added sugar to your cheerios, that is free sugar. The sugar from the lactose in the milk is not "free", neither is the sugar in the bread. If you had honey baked ham, than the honey in the ham counts as "free" sugar. I sometimes try to limit the amount of free sugar that I eat to the WHO recommendations, because it limits the amount of candy I eat.

    And why exactly is "free sugar" not good?
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