Trial Run

When most people think about sugar, they think of the kind you use to bake cookies or put in coffee, or maybe even the powdered kind you put on doughnuts. When you can see the sugar on your food, or when you measure it out and put it in there yourself, the majority of people can recognize that these foods should be limited and enjoyed in moderation. It may or may not be surprising that the average American’s sugar intake is on the rise, but it is surprising that this increase is not necessarily from excessive cake consumption, but from slowly increasing the amounts of added hidden sugars in many foods.
The average American, over the course of a day, ingests 31 teaspoons of added sugar every day. The USDA defines “added sugar” as “sugars and syrups that are added to foods or beverages during processing or preparation [but] this does not include naturally occurring sugars such as those that occur in milk and fruits.” That is to say, the majority of those 31 extra teaspoons that Americans consume are not in the familiar form of grainy white crystals. Instead, they are hidden in our foods under the guise of long, unpronounceable, chemical-sounding names, and buried in foods among dozens of other similar ingredients. Hidden sugars appear in foods where you would never expect them to be, including bread, canned beans, soups, deli meats, peanut butter, and crackers – not to mention sauces, like ketchup, pasta sauce, BBQ sauce, and salad dressings. These foods aren’t generally sweetened, so no one expects them to contain appreciable amounts of any sweetener. Because of this, people eat more of these products, thinking these foods are healthier for them when, in fact, they might contain unnecessary amounts of added sugars. It seems that all foods are getting sweeter. In 1978 Kellogg’s Special K had 9.6g of sugar per 3.5 oz, but this has now nearly doubled to 17g — a similar level to vanilla ice-cream. In the same year, cans of tomato soup had, on average, 2.6g of sugar per 3.5 oz; tomato soups today have 6.4g of sugar per 3.5 oz, with almost three spoonfuls of sugar in every bowl.
All sugars, regardless of type, are carbohydrates. Their main nutritional function is to provide energy in the form of calories. And while we all need calories to live, the problem arises when sugars begin to show up in places they never were before. For every gram of extra sugar added to a food, that food gains four additional calories. While this may not seem like a lot, when companies insert 10 extra grams of sugar into your morning cereal bowl, you are eating 40 extra calories. Companies are effectively jacking up the calorie content of all of your food without providing a feeling of being full or contributing to your daily nutritional requirements. Add to this the inability to accurately gauge the listed serving size of 2 tablespoons of ketchup or the ½ cup of cereal, and the inability to eat just one serving, and you have the additional problem of over-consumption. All of this leads to an increased risk of overweight and obesity, as well as an increased risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.
For this reason, several health organizations recommend that added sugars should make up no more than 10% of your total calories -- about 8 teaspoons a day for an average 2,000-calorie diet. Unfortunately, these added sugars are not easy to avoid, and if you try to do so, you will very quickly discover that it takes a great deal of time and an impeccable attention to detail. For instance, sugar has many aliases: beet sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, confectioner’s sugar, corn sweetener, corn syrup, dextrin, dextrose, evaporated cane juice, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, galactose, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, invert sugar, lactose, maltose, malt syrup, maple syrup, molasses, raw sugar, sorghum, sucrose, syrup, table sugar, turbinado sugar, and white sugar. To sort through ingredient lists upwards of thirteen ingredients for each occurrence of one or more of these words can be both painstaking, and also annoying. A good rule of thumb is to avoid foods that have a type of sugar listed as one of the first three ingredients on the label.