I just saw a clip from a very popular podcast where an ‘expert’ talked about the equivalent sugar in a bowl of cereal not being as bad as a bowl of plain white rice. It basically conflated carbohydrate energy with white sugar cubes. This is ridiculous. We have a hard enough time trying to cut sugar out of our diets to have this deceiving information shared to millions of people as if it’s informative much less helpful.
I’ve only ever spent a few weeks tracking my calorie intake and that was only about a year ago. I didn’t really give it an honest effort. However, 7 years ago I started paying attention to sugar content in foods and that had a dramatic effect on my healthiness. I reduced my sugar intake considerably, and I dropped the weight I needed to.*
It was really challenging. Almost everything had more sugar than I expected. Here are two examples:
1. Ketchup. Sugar isn’t on the ingredients list, it’s usually corn syrup. But a serving of one tablespoon has 4 grams of sugar – and who ever just uses one tablespoon of ketchup? I used to consider ketchup its own food group, I put it on everything. Now, I have almost completely eliminated ketchup from my diet. I’ll only have it occasionally on fries or cooked into a recipe, but I often substitute it with mustards (plain, Dijon, and/or honey Dijon, although you need to check the ingredients for sugar in the honey Dijon).
2. Granola. When you go into a granola aisle in a grocery store, you might think you’re choosing a healthy meal. Most granola has at least 14 grams of sugar per serving and some go up as high as 22g or more. The first time I looked, the lowest I could find was 8g. When you factor in that the recommended serving sizes are usually half to 1/3 the size of what my typical serving would be, all of a sudden this ‘healthy meal’ has a crap load of sugar in it!
There are also other very obvious places where it’s easy to cut out sugar. Cookies and soda are easy examples. I don’t drink a lot of pop, and when I do it’s usually sugar free. I will also have the occasional cookie (or 3), but occasionally means 2-3 times in a month at most.
Sugar is added to so many things, and it affects our gut biome, which in turn can generate cravings and a cycle of always seeking/desiring more sugar. I’m not immune to this, but by intentionally avoiding sugar I can say that my desire for it has been dramatically reduced.
The newest thing I’m keenly aware of is keeping away from sugar replacements as well. Foods don’t need to be sweet to be good. But again, this is hard. It seems like every processed item in the grocery store is filled with sugar, corn syrup, or sweeteners. It takes effort to avoid. But it’s worth the effort.
I like to think I’m already sweet enough, I don’t need loads of sugar to make me any sweeter. 😆
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*Note: When I lost the weight 7 years ago I didn’t just cut out sugar. Initially I combined this with a couple other strategies to get the greatest impact: 6 weeks on a ketogenic diet, and about 10 months of intermittent fasting, which I still try to follow several nights a week, eliminating after dinner snacking, which for me is seldom healthy. I still pay a lot of attention to my sugar intake.)
