Are you interested in tracking Natural Sugar vs Added Sugar?

There are some processed foods I don't like if they're overly sweet, so I may compare different brands and choose the one with the lesser added sugar. Pasta sauce is one. Another example is I mostly liked some Lays baked potato chips I recently tried, except I thought they tasted sweeter than regular ones. Sure enough it had 2 grams added sugar. Interestingly, Ruffles baked potato chips have 5% less fat and only 1 gram of added sugar. They're both produced by the same company. Some day I'll give them a try. But, no, I don't "track" added sugars when logging.

I'm not so into tracking per se, but I do think this is an important distinction.

Refined sugars are generally devoid of all nutritional value, while naturally occuring sugars in whole foods come with additional nutrients. For example - dates are so sweet that I consider them to be nature's candy. Luckily eating them provides a lot of fiber and also minerals that your body needs. What does regular candy have?

I think we all are aware that there are other things we get from food, like vitamins & minerals, so there are differences, based on where you get your sugar from.

However, other than the body having to break down different sugars, they all end up the same. You can have a high sugar diet, and not eat junk.. there is a ton of sugar in fruits, berries, and dairy. It's harder to consume as much sugar, but a lot of people who eat a " healthy " diet, consume an incredible amount of sugar. Fruit juice is just as bad as pop, as far as sugar. skim milk has half ( 12 g ) the sugar of a Coke per 8 ozs. (21 g ).

Now, skim milk has some benefits, and Coke has none I can think of.. but let's take Vitamin D.. we ADD Vitamin D to milk, orange juice, cereal, oatmeal.. so we get 10-20% per serving.. along with the sugar in the cereal, orange juice, and milk for breakfast.

Meanwhile, there are MUCH better sources of Vitamin D.. without a lot of sugar, if ANY. One 3.5 ozs serving of wild caught salmon has 124%. Even the farmed salmon has 66% of the RDA. Even if we use the best number for milk, which is fortified with Vit. D ( 22 % ), you would need to drink 3 full glasses, to get as much Vitamin D as 3.5 ozs. of farmed salmon... 5.5 glasses to equal wild caught 3.5 oz. serving. Each glass with 12 g of sugar. So 3 glasses of milk is 36 grams of sugar versus ZERO.

I think you can see that orange juice, and cereal are also loaded with sugar, so getting the nutrients in these foods, comes with lots of sugar, which breaks down to glucose.

124 g of Vitamin C in a cup of orange juice.. 152 g in a cup of sweet red peppers.. difference is 24 g sugar versus 3.9.

There is better, but natural sugar is not that much better, and a lot of the foods we think are healthy, are loaded with sugar.

We can't avoid sugar completely, but if we just realize that all sugars break down into glucose, then we should be asking why we think foods with lots of sugar are healthy?

The goal should be to get your nutrients from foods with little to NO sugar. THOSE are healthy foods.

You may still indulge in some high sugar foods, like milk or orange juice.. just realize that you are choosing a food which has a lot of sugar in it, and act accordingly.

We all get sugars.. vegetables have sugars in the, but a lot less sugar, and we can still get all the nutrients we need, if not more from low sugar sources.

There are a few vitamins and minerals which may require us to eat foods which have higher amounts of sugars, but those are rare.

So instead of tracking the different types of sugars, why not just get rid of as much of both kinds of sugar? That is why I answered that I am not concerned where I get sugar.. I am more concerned with quantity. We have to get some, but if we limit it to foods which are lowest in sugar, which still allow us to get all our nutrients, then we can't go any lower, and if we are low enough, does it really matter what kind of sugar it is?

If you consume 10 g of sugar a day. I doubt it's that harmful.. natural or added. Of course, at that point, it's unlikely you are eating added sugar, but if you got 10 g of sugar from 4 ozs. of Coke, with no natural sugar ( that would take some work ), I doubt that would kill you either. Quality only matters if you have a large quantity of sugar in the diet, and not really that much. It just gets absorbed a little slower.

Better, but still not good for you.

For some people it's important for others not so much.

Considering that 1/3 or around 100 million people that don't already have diabetes have prediabetes and together with the people that have diabetes that's around 140 million people, yeah we should worry. What these people have in common is hyperinsulinemia or basically higher levels of insulin pumping through their veins to make sure the sugar is hustled out of the blood immediately. Unfortunately, kids now have both prediabetes and diabetes and in high enough numbers that we now have dropped the nomenclature "adult onset diabetes" which use to distinguish the difference between type 1 and type 2 and that's called what? progress?

Considering about 70% of the foods consumed by people in the US are processed foods and of that 70% another 70% are ultra processed and mainly from manufactured powdered carbohydrates mostly grains and then added sugar used for palatability along with salt and fat and with that constant dopamine hit all day long it's been one big science experiment and now people are asking if should worry about added sugar..... Crazy times.

cwolfman13 wrote: »

Not something that is particularly important to me. For starters, sugar is sugar and it is processed the same by the body...your body doesn't know the difference between sugar coming from a fruit or sugar being added to something. I also don't really have much of a sweet tooth, so I don't eat much in the way of added sugars and I don't have any health concerns for which I need to monitor either added or naturally occurring sugar. I mostly focus on an overall sound and nutritious diet and ensuring I'm getting appropriate nutrition.

This. You're either absorbing a monosaccharide or disaccharide in the end.


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