A TEASPOON of the stuff might make your medicine go down, but exceeding your recommended daily sugar intake could lead to obesity, tooth problems, heart disease, and not-so-healthy eating habits.
And for those reasons, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has just announced that it is cutting its recommended sugar intake for adults in half, from the original 10 per cent of total daily calories to 5 per cent. For a normal weight adult, that’s about 25 grams, or 6 teaspoons, per day.
That amount will be a shock to many Australians, who on average eat 27 teaspoons of total sugars a day (including natural sugars), according to the 2012 report Sugar Consumption in Australia: A Statistical Update.
Americans eat around 22.2 teaspoons of added sugar every day (not including natural sugars found in things like fruit).
The American Heart Association (AHA) has said that people need to make a distinction between naturally occurring and added sugars when it comes to daily sugar intake.
The AHA says that adult women should get 5 teaspoons (20 grams) of sugar per day, adult men 9 teaspoons (36 grams), and children 3 teaspoons (12 grams). To put that in perspective, a can of soft drink alone can have as many as 40 grams, or about 10 teaspoons of sugar.
The AHA guidelines, published in a 2009 issue of the journal Circulation, make the point that added sugars, such as high-fructose corn syrup or ordinary table sugar added to sodas, breads, and other processed foods, are likely responsible for the increase in calorie consumption and the subsequent rise in obesity of the past few decades.
“Naturally occurring sugars in fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy and whole grains don’t need to be avoided; they make up part of a healthy diet,” says Rachel K. Johnson, PhD, MPH, RD, professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and one of the experts who came up with the AHA guidelines.
Of course, knowing how much sugar you should be eating is completely different from calculating what you’re actually eating.
“The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t require that nutrition labels list the amount of naturally occurring sugars separate from the amounts of added sugars, making daily intakes of added sugar difficult to estimate,” notes Johnson.
So their guidelines are for total sugar intake, since it’s difficult to parse out what’s been added, with the caution that you should avoid added sugars first and worry less about sugars found in fruits and other whole foods.
“We’re not saying that you should eliminate sugar from your diet or that you can’t have sugar-sweetened foods,” she says. But when you can’t stay within your recommended sugar intake, you need to make up for it with extra exercise.
Over the past 30 years, according to the AHA, Americans have consumed an average of 150 to 300 more calories per day, 50 per cent of which come from beverages, while their physical activity levels remain unchanged.
“Rather than waste your sugar intake on sodas and other empty calories, use it in a way that enhances the flavour and palatability of already nutritional foods like flavoured yoghurt or flavoured milk,” Johnson adds.
The best way to cut added sugars out of your diet is to limit processed foods as much as possible, and satisfy your sweet tooth with fruit. And while it’s important to avoid added sugars in processed foods, you should also limit the amount of sugar you add at the table, whether it’s table sugar (4 grams of sugar per teaspoon), maple syrup (4 grams per teaspoon), or honey (5.6 grams per teaspoon).
Make a practice of this, and you won’t need to spend so much time staring at food labels and counting sugar grams. But since that’s not always possible, we compiled a list of a few common processed food items, and their average levels of total and added sugars, based on the U.S.
Department of Agriculture’s Nutrient Database.
Plain bagel: 5.05 grams of sugar, 4.8 of which are added
Whole-wheat bread (one slice): 5.57 grams of sugar, 5 of which are added
Regular soft drinks: 8.97 grams of sugar, all of it added
Fruit punch: 11.29 grams of sugar, 4.4 of which are added
Bowl of cornflakes: 6.11 grams of sugar, all of it added
Fruit-flavoured yoghurt: 19 grams of sugar, 11.4 of which are added
Italian salad dressing: 8.85 grams of sugar, 6.9 of which are added
Fruit cocktail (canned in light syrup): 13.93 grams of sugar, 6.4 of which are added
Smooth peanut butter: 9.22 grams of sugar, 3.1 of which are added
Granola bars: 21.8 grams of sugar, 20.4 of which are added
Low-sodium spaghetti sauce: 11.57 grams of sugar, 6.5 of which are added
This article originally appeared on Rodale’s Organic Life.
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