My sugar goal is 60g??

stephaniecrg
stephaniecrg Posts: 13 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Hi all! I'm curious about this. I recently started setting my own macros for MFP (1500 cals, 40% carbs, 30% proteins, 30% fat) and as I'm sure a lot of you know, MFP calculated the actual gram amounts for those percentages for me when I entered them. I don't list my sugar intake on my food logging page since I rarely eat processed sugars anymore (no soda, no candy, barely any bread or pasta, etc), the only sugar I do eat is from fruits or the occasional milk in my coffee, and there are other nutritional values that I'd like to see by default that I KNOW I don't get enough of.

Well, recently I ate with some friends and allowed myself a small dessert as a treat and MFP popped up reminding me that my daily sugar limits me to only 60 grams per day. 60 GRAMS?? That's crazy! I looked back in my history and I rarely break 25-30 grams a day, if that, so this isn't a concern for my own health journey but rarely questioning MFP's judgement about my sugar "goals." 60 grams is a LOT of sugar. I know the values were generated automatically when I input my percentages, but there is no way that recommending 60 grams of sugar a day is appropriate, especially for a health and wellness site.

Has anyone else experienced this? I know I can go in and change it manually, but I'm just really curious about how skewed this seems. It was kind of shocking!

Replies

  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    There's some confusion, because a lot of the sugar recommendations (and there seems to be no particularly definitive one) are based on "added sugars." The ones from the Institute of Medicine (25% of calories) and from MFP (18% of calories) aren't added sugar, but sugar as a whole. For example, the one day recently that I've been anywhere close to the MFP recommendation (I'm usually quite a bit under, because I eat fruit, but not tons, and get a higher limit when my calories go up through exercise, and those happen to be the same days I'm more likely to have dessert), all of my sugar was from fruit, vegetables, some milk, and, yeah, some yogurt with added sugar, which I personally don't consider a bad thing to eat.

    Anyway, they aren't recommending 60 grams of sugar any more than they are recommending 2300 g of sodium (or whatever it is). They are basically picking from various recommendations about what the goal should be to stay under. And like I said, if you eat lots of fruit and are at a low calorie limit, it's not that tough to exceed and if you are hitting your calorie goals it would be silly from that to decide that you needed to eat less fruit. That's why a lot of people recommend against tracking sugar. If your sugars are really high your carbs will be too, and while there's a difference between getting all your calories from some carbs vs. others, the same is true for sugar.
  • stephaniecrg
    stephaniecrg Posts: 13 Member
    I guess that makes sense! I know MFP doesn't differentiate between natural sugar and processed, but I remember my recommendation when I first started a couple of years ago was 24 grams, so the big jump seemed abnormal. I never track sugar personally, but the recommendation was surprising to me. You're completely right, though--as long as any sugar you do eat is healthy sugar from fruits, etc. then it shouldn't be a priority to limit it.

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