Sugar

[Veronica]

My trainer has me looking at my diet for sugar.

How many grams of sugar per day is reasonable?

V.

[kelownagirl]

My trainer has me looking at my diet for sugar.

How many grams of sugar per day is reasonable?

V.

Actual granulated sugar or sugar content in food in general?

[Veronica]

Sugar content in food in general.

I'm sort of appalled at how much sugar there is in my food.

My yogurt has 18 grams, cereal 9, Red Bull 27! Okay, I'm not really surprised at the Red Bull.

But it seems to add up to an awful lot of sugar.

V.

[kelownagirl]

Sugar content in food in general.

I'm sort of appalled at how much sugar there is in my food.

My yogurt has 18 grams, cereal 9, Red Bull 27! Okay, I'm not really surprised at the Red Bull.

But it seems to add up to an awful lot of sugar.

V.

I've cut back a lot just by eating less processed foods. I eat unsweetend plain yogurt now. Plain oatmeal. I do eat chocolate tho - sugar in that. I use splenda in my one cup of coffee and sugar free pop but that's rare so I don't get much aspartame. I eat lots of fruit and get my sweet fix from that.

[Veronica]

Luckily, I don't put sugar in my coffee.

The chemical stuff in diet things makes my head wonky. My MIL likes to cook desserts with the fake sugar. I can always tell because my head just feels weird. I get the same effect from MSG. Now I ask her if she used it and I politely decline if she did.

She and and my FIL work hard to try to eat in a more healthy way. They are truck drivers and it's hard to get a healthy meal on the road. So I understand why she cooks with it. I'm not even sure they have real sugar in their house. MY FIL does have a real big sweet tooth.

V.

[ny biker]

My trainer has me looking at my diet for sugar.

How many grams of sugar per day is reasonable?

V.

If your trainer wants you to cut back, shouldn't s/he be giving you guidelines as to how much is too much?

I just try to avoid processed foods and stick with the basic idea that vegetables, fruits, whole grains and lean proteins are things to focus on. I have known people who won't eat fresh fruit because "it has too much sugar" but I think that's ridiculous.

[Veronica]

If your trainer wants you to cut back, shouldn't s/he be giving you guidelines as to how much is too much?

It's something we've just started to discuss. Right now I'm keeping a food diary.

She's wondering (and so am I) why I'm not leaner. Most weeks I burn 4,000 calories through exercise - weights and cardio. If I have an event on the weekend I burn more - last week's total since I did a 200K on Saturday was over 11,000. And I don't wig out and totally overeat the next day.

I've been keeping track of my calorie intake for years at a USDA site. I eat about 2,000 calories a day, usually slightly less.

I've always been of the mindset calories in/calories out. And that philosophy worked when I was younger. But my body fat percentage is a little higher than I'd like now, so we're exploring why.

She brought up how much sugar is in my diet and that got me curious. Why does my breakfast yogurt have more sugar than my ice cream?

V.

[Blueberry]

V- is it plain yogurt or flavored? The flavored stuff tends to be loaded with sugar. Unfortunate - it does taste good

CA

[Veronica]

Of course it's flavored.

Why does non-fat vanilla yogurt have more sugar than regular vanilla yogurt?

V.

[michelem]

Here's some info I found doing a quick search:

How Much Can You Feed Your Sweet Tooth?
Sugars found naturally in fruits and milk are not a problem. It's the added sugars that need to be limited because they provide calories but few vitamins and minerals. You'll find sugar-laden food at the top of the Food Pyramid. Added sugars can be found in soft drinks, candy, jams, jellies, syrups and table sugar we add to coffee and cereal. Added sugar can also appear in sweetened yogurt, soups, spaghetti sauces, applesauce and other items where you wouldn'tsuspect it unless you check the list of ingredients.

Here are some guidelines for added sugar based on calories in the daily food choices:

1,600 calories - Limit sugar to 6 teaspoons per day or 22 grams per day
2,200 calories - Limit sugar to 12 teaspoons per day or 44 grams per day
2,800 calories - Limit sugar to 18 teaspoons per day or 66 grams per day

So if the food label on your sweetened yogurt says a one-cup serving contains 22 grams of sugar, and your meal plan has 1,600 calories a day, you've eaten your day's allotment of sugar.

http://www.lifeclinic.com/focus/nutr...od-pyramid.asp

Incidentally, my doc (who is an MD, with one of her specialties being nutrition) has told me to limit my fructose intake as well as the refined sugars. This is super-hard for me 'cause I LOVE fruit! I'll post in a separate post some excerpts from an article she wrote on the topic.

[Veronica]

Yeah, I'm beginning to think I need to go back to my steel cut oats for breakfast. But guess what I like to put on them... brown sugar and maple syrup. At least I'm in control of how much goes on.

I knew about the spaghetti sauce. You can find some w/o sugar - typically higher end, more expensive brands. I wonder how much sugar is in my pasta.

V.

[firenze11]

Why does non-fat vanilla yogurt have more sugar than regular vanilla yogurt?

V.

Because those tricky little devils that make the food add it in to thicken up and improve the flavor of non-fat items. When you take fat out, you need to replace it with something. I was on a low fat diet for awhile a couple of years ago and appalled by how hungry I would get after eating, then I saw how much sugar (and general processed stuff) was in everything I was eating.

I've been trying to cut down on processed foods and sugar but I have a problem with not eating yummy baked goods.

Holy moly @ the daily allotment of sugar. Ok, I guess I really need to cut down on my sugar, too!

[Grog]

Why does non-fat vanilla yogurt have more sugar than regular vanilla yogurt?

Can a chemist explain in a better way than my rough understanding allows? Here's my take at it:

Fat maximizes flavours. It has something to do with the shape of molecules I think, but I don't remember the details. Remove the fat and a lot of people will not find the food item tasty (understandably so, considering a lot of the industrial food available to us). So they add sugar instead (our brain likes sugar a lot), but they can still print "low fat" on the container, which helps with sales.

You can make plain, non-fat yogurt really tasty, but it takes better milk, which Big Dairy is not necessarily able to provide at the cost and price structure it's operating at, I'm afraid...

[redrhodie]

Have you had your thyroid checked? I have a friend with Hashimoto's disease (hypothyroid) and she gained weight despite a low calorie diet and lots of exercise. She had none of the classic symptoms (sluggish, moody, skin disorders) except weight gain and infertility.

(side note--I have a new baby kitten sleeping on my lap as I'm writing this. I know you know what that's like my feet are falling asleep, but I can deal).

[michelem]

This was written by my MD:

For years nutrition scientists said that a calorie is a calorie, and consuming too many or burning too few causes obesity. Bits of evidence refuting that axiom are trickling into nutrition science. For a long time research has focused on fat vs. carbohydrate, but hints that fructose (a sugar) contributes more than glucose (the ‘bad’ sugar in diabetes) to insulin resistance, fat and diabetes surfaced years ago. Scientists uncovered unsuspected effects of fructose on a variety of metabolic processes, which remained obscure pieces of information with unknown cause and effect until recently.

Now we know much more. We know that fructose increases enzymes (the worker-bee proteins of the body) that make fat. We know that fructose turns off at least three of the body’s mechanisms to keep blood vessels open and flexible. We know that it affects hormones that reduce insulin’s effectiveness. We know that eating excess fructose leads to high uric acid levels, which contribute to high blood pressure.

For those of you who think I’ve lost my marbles and am making this up, I may have lost my marbles, but I’m not making this up – A lot of this data is very recent and not widely disseminated yet. All of these metabolic consequences of fructose feed into the Metabolic Syndrome, the constellation of abnormalities that eventually leads to diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, abnormal cholesterol levels and heart disease.

Fructose, a very common sugar molecule, constitutes half of sucrose in beet- or cane-derived table sugar. The other half is glucose. In addition to beet and cane, fructose occurs naturally in honey, fruit, maple syrup and corn. Fructose tastes sweeter than sucrose or glucose.

In 1957 Richard O. Marshall and Earl R. Kooi developed a process whereby an enzyme (glucose isomerase) turns corn sugar’s glucose into fructose. The resulting ‘high fructose corn syrup’ (HFCS), with up to 90% fructose, tastes sweeter than table sugar. In 1971 Japanese researchers figured out how to mass produce HFCS, which made it very sweet and very cheap. Since the USDA subsidizes corn agriculture with price supports that foster over-production, we have sustained corn excess and a very cheap route for sugar to your stomach.

HFCS entered the food chain in the mid-1970’s. With sweeter sugar, food manufacturers don’t need to use as much, making sugary food even cheaper to make. By the 1980’s HFCS-sweetened sodas and juices had flooded the market. Food manufacturers switched to HFCS to sweeten any processed food. Big Gulps replaced 12 ounce Dixie cups. Even yogurt and tomato ketchup, two foods that I somehow thought would be ‘pure,’ contain HFCS.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Public health nutritionists, promoting very low fat diets to lower cholesterol, could not predict the effect of HFCS because it hadn’t existed before. Sugars are part of the carbohydrate family, so high carb, sweet foods proliferated in the fat phobic 1980’s, when everyone thought that carbs were ‘good’. Contrary to the low fat promise, though, people’s waistlines expanded rather than contracted.

It is no coincidence that the obesity epidemic and soaring rates of childhood diabetes and adult metabolic syndrome took off in the 1980’s. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an ongoing project of the Centers for Disease Control, documents the dramatic ballooning of Americans’ weight. The 1960-1962, 1971-1974 and 1976-1980 surveys produced consistent levels of obesity and healthy weights. In each of those surveys, about 12% of men and 17% of women were obese and about 46% of men and 53% of women were in the ‘desirable’ weight range.

That all changed with the 1988-1994 survey, in which obesity jumped to 21% in men and 26% in women, and kept on climbing to 27.5% in men and 25% in women in 1999-2000. The rates of overweight but not quite obese are even higher. Obesity is defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) greater than 30. BMI expresses weight in proportion to height. Desirable is 18-25.

What does this have to do with you? Everything, if you are diabetic, overweight, or hypertensive, or if you have friends or relatives with those problems. You might care that the childhood diabetes epidemic will affect Americans’ productivity and longevity for years to come. If nothing else, the growing public health consequences impact your insurance rates.

Your choice of soda vs. tea or milk just graduated from “empty vs. healthy calories” to “damaging vs. OK”. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of fructose is that it drives its own consumption. Excess glucose tells the body “enough already!” and the enzyme that degrades it stops working, at least for a while. That doesn’t happen with fructose. Its enzymes turn on and the body churns any huge amount you give it into energy or fat. Unless those calories are burned during physical activity, most will end up around your middle before they cause disease that kills you.

A calorie is not a calorie, metabolically. Just like the total fat number doesn’t tell you how much ‘bad’ saturated and ‘good’ mono-unsaturated fat there is, carbohydrate and sugar totals doesn’t tell you the source of sugar. Your food label-reading chore now must extend to the ingredients section. You get to make a choice between cost and health.