Cutting Back on Added Sugars

by Shereen Jegtvig

This week the American Heart Association released new guidelines on how much added sugar is acceptable in a healthy diet. Added sugars include sweeteners such as table sugar, honey and high fructose corn syrup that are either added during the production of foods or at the table.  In general, the guidelines suggest no more than about 150 calories per day (based on your daily calorie need) come from added sugar.  That’s approximately the same as 6 teaspoons of table sugar.

This may be less than many Americans are consuming each day.  In fact, one 12 ounce can of soda might exceed your limit – and just imagine how much sugar is in a giant super-sized soda.  It’s important to watch your sugar intake because eating too much sugar can easily cause you to take in more calories than you are able to burn each day.  That leads to being overweight, then obese and increases your chances of having high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.   Another consideration is that added sugar really has no additional nutritional benefit – nothing but simple carbohydrate calories that are easy to absorb and your body has no trouble converting the extra energy to fat.

It’s easy enough to watch your sugar intake at the table, but it isn’t always so easy to figure out how much added sweetener is in the rest of your foods.  Some foods are easy.  Candy, cookies, cake, sweetened soft drinks and sugary cereals are all high in added sugar.  But you’ll often find hidden added sugar in foods such as spaghetti sauce and baked beans – things you may not think about.  But hang on, I’ll help you with that in a minute.
First, I think it’s important to know that added sugars do not include the naturally occurring sugars found in fruits – you probably don’t want to cut back on your fresh fruit intake, you need a cup or two of fruits every day.  While fruits contain a fair amount of natural sugars, they also contain vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals and fiber.  All of which are important for good health.  (Of course, fruit juice (even 100% juice) can be high in calories because you remove so much fiber, pulp or peelings, so eating fresh fruit is the best way to get the good nutrition of fruits without extra calories).

Now, back to those hidden sugars in the foods you buy at the grocery store.  The first place to look is on the ingredients list.  Look for sugar, sucrose, high fructose corn syrup and honey as the typical added sugars.  You can also look on the Nutrient Facts label under carbohydrates, where you find the number of grams of sugar per serving, but it doesn’t differentiate between added sugars and naturally occurring sugars.  It’s always best to look at the ingredients list – and the higher on the list, the more of that ingredient you’ll find in the food product because the ingredients are listed in order of abundance.

You can use the FoodEssentials tool to help you by looking for the presence of sweeteners.  Here’s our list of spaghetti sauce:

As you can see, some brands contain high fructose corn syrup and one even has artificial sweeteners.

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