When you wake up in the morning, what’s your go to meal? Maybe a bowl of multigrain cereal with 2% milk, maybe a small bowl of strawberry yogurt with some pieces of fruit. Maybe you’re more traditional and prefer pancakes with syrup, bacon, eggs, the whole shebang. Or maybe you’re one of those people who runs out the door with their vanilla latter or coffee with cream and sugar. No matter your eating habits, odds are you’re starting off your day with way more sugar than you even realized. In fact, your entire diet likely consists of hidden processed and refined sugars and could be what’s keeping you from feeling energized, losing those few stubborn pounds, or even causing more serious health concerns. Let’s start with that bowl of cereal. The average sugar content across multiple popular brands of cereal comes out to about five teaspoons per 100g of cereal. To put that into perspective, 100g is about the size of a medium apple. Now visualize scooping five teaspoons of sugar into your cereal every morning. Seems like a lot right? That’s because it is. In 2015 the Washington Post published a story that estimated the average American consumes about 32 teaspoons of sugar per day. Consuming that amount of sugar on a daily basis would be equivalent to filling up half a drinking glass with sugar and simply going at it with a spoon.
So what? The truth is that sugar itself isn’t the root of all evil, it’s the amount in which we consume it. Our bodies were not made to properly digest and process the amount of sugars that the modern day diet consists of. Humans evolved on a simpler diet of hunted proteins and fruits and veggies that were prepared and eaten with no additives other than animal fat or salt. Up until the 1900s when trans fats were entered into the food supply and processed foods took off, the average human’s sugar intake came mostly from fruit. While fruit and table sugar tend to be molecularly similar, fruit often has less sugar per volume than other processed sources and it also contains fiber and good for you vitamins and minerals that give your body more time to break down the sugar and use it as fuel before storing it as fat. That’s the problem with all of the other sugars we’ve gotten so used to eating, our bodies don’t know how to break it down leading to crazy insulin spikes and direct storage as fat.
Weight gain is only one of the side effects of eating a diet high in sugar. Your body processes sugar using the liver in the same way it breaks down alcohol. Remember those awful hangovers? Your liver experiences the same turmoil when you overload it with sugar. Forcing the liver to work overtime every day to process all the sugar in our diets has the same effect as drinking heavily every day and can ultimately lead to sever liver damage. Excess sugar intake could be feeding bad cells and organisms that reside inside us naturally. Several studies have found that sugar is readily used by cancer cells to increase growth, meaning that an excess of sugar in the system could lead to an increase risk of cancer. That much sugar can also mess with our gut, feeding the bad bacteria that is normally kept in check by good gut bacteria and leading to Candida overgrowth, parasites, leaky guy, and all other types of digestive issues. A handful of chronic diseases have been linked to excess sugar via weight gain and obesity.
So how do we keep our daily sugar intake down? Eat whole foods and read labels! The fact of the matter is that even foods that are labeled as “healthy” loaded with sugar. Yogurt, crackers, bread, peanut butter, salad dressings, basically anything you can buy in a store that required multiple steps to make it contains a lot of added sugar. So read your labels. Choose peanut butter without added sugar, opt for the cereal or granola with the fewest grams of sugar per serving. Better yet, make your own granola at home using simple ingredients so that you can regulate the amount of sugar added. Cut out sodas or any of those sweet treats that you know are basically nothing but sugar. Try to make simple sauces like marinara from scratch at home, use olive oil and lemon as a salad dressing instead of buying a pre-made bottle at the store. Eat whole fruits and veggies and don’t be afraid to eat healthy fats! Opting for “fat-free” or “low fat” options can often trick us into eating more sugar. Pay attention to what you’re putting into your body. Try to limit your processed sugar intake to only 6 teaspoons per day into of 32. You may have to kick some cravings, but your body will function at a higher efficiency, you’ll notice weight is easier to lose and you’ll ultimately feel better. A life filled with a little less sugar is a whole lot sweeter!
