34g of sugar a day....seems low to me

You can try splenda..however, personally, I have removed tracking sugar as I find the guidelines really low and if you eat alot of fruits and veggies, you almost always go over...and in my opinion, it is healthy natural sugar...

try to cut back. I don't track my sugar but I try not to eat anything with more than 6g, and I don't count the sugar in fresh fruit.

I always go over mine, too. All it takes is eating a few servings of fruit and I'm close to my allotted grams. I think that's crazy! I know there's debate between sugars from fruit and sugars from sweets, but no one can tell me that they're the same!

I agree, I had been struggling with this as I too go over all the time but it's all natural, organic fruit so I ignore that one!

i really dont count fruit often. But my typical sugar intake is hardly ever above 25g. If its anywhere around 35 to 40 its because i had a higher sugar granola bar.

I always go over mine, too. All it takes is eating a few servings of fruit and I'm close to my allotted grams. I think that's crazy! I know there's debate between sugars from fruit and sugars from sweets, but no one can tell me that they're the same!

breaking it down to the molecular level, which is how infact the body sees it , sugar is sugar.
fruits and veggies come with other good stuff so are better than sweets, as far as how much you
can get away with eating well thats up to your body

Okay so this is just from my experience with sugars...fruits of course have natural sugars which are better for you than the white stuff. I've also been going over my sugar counts with natural fruit, but I'm not giving myself a hard time about it because it's fruit and not a candy bar. But I also want to keep an eye on it because lowering sugars helps drop more weight, and also (gasp) control blood sugar levels. I try to replace regular sugar with splenda (or, if you don't like splenda - stevia is a good option). There are a ton of recipe's out there that use stevia (powder or liquid form and its an all natural alternative to splenda). I've also been crawling the web for "low carb" easy recipe's which help keep sugar low.

Actually, fructose does not cause a significant change in blood sugar levels, whereas sucrose does.
*shakes head* I'm having bad flashbacks to my organic chemistry class... haha

All sugars aren't created equal...

Sugar from fructose generally goes hand in hand with fibre which slows the insulin spike usually associated with sugar.

Also, sugar is converted to glycogen in the body. Now there's 2 places that this conversion takes place - in the muscles themselves and in the liver. The glycogen in muscle tissue is responsible for providing energy to the muscles exclusively for expansion and contraction. The glycogen in the liver is responsible for supplying the rest of the body with energy for vital functions like breathing and your heart beating.

Now here's the interesting bit.. Muscle tissue can convert glucose into glycogen and only glucose. You can't replenish your muscular glycogen with fructose, it just doesn't work. The liver however has the necessary enzymes to convert glucose, fructose, lactate, alanine and a whole bunch of other 3 carbon metabolites.

Once your liver glycogen stores are full, excess glucose will be passed through to the muscles to replenish those glycogen stores - but fructose will not. Excess fructose once your liver glycogen level is chemically signalled as full is converted into adipose tissue to be used for a time of famine (fat). In essence, fructose is converted into fat more easily that glucose as there's less place for it to go.

So eating excess amounts of fruit, while better for you than eating excess amounts of refined glucose, should still be kept an eye on.

Bit of a rattled off back of a *kitten* packet explanation there but the fundamentals are solid. I'm sure you can find more about it with a well placed google search.

Cheers

Jay

The sugar goal on MFP is more related to added sugar, not lactose (milk sugar, or sugar in fruit) but MFP does not differentiate the them which is why I don't track sugar. Having said that it is still best to limit fruit to 1-3 servings per day due to the sugar. Unless you are diabetic or pre-diabetic there is no reason to avoid fruit due to the sugar.

Ooh... Forgot to say on this. A good rule of thumb for sugar consumption (be it fruit sugars or otherwise) is to ensure that no more than 30% of your carbs come from sugars.

For example, I shoot for 180g carbs per day so that's 60g sugars per day - which come mostly from fruit for me.

Can't recall where I read that but it seemed pretty logical to me so I went with it. I also seemed to fit with the fats rule (no more than 30% or so of fats should be saturated).

Cheers

Jay