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. Read more
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Staying Awake with Energy Drinks
by Shereen Jegtvig
You’ve probably seen beverages like Red Bull, Monster, Rockstar and other energy drinks. They’re hard to miss – in their brightly colored, hip’n happening cans – usually sold close to the check out lanes or prominantly displayed at gas stations and convenience stores. They promise to keep you awake, alert and energized so you can live a high energy life and feel like a rock star or an athlete. So what makes them so popular? Probably great marketing to be honest, but they’re really not any better than a cup or two of coffee…maybe even worse?
Energy drinks are usually heavily caffeinated, just as much or more than coffee. They often contain herbs such as ginseng or guarana, and sometimes a combination of B vitamins and amino acids such as taurine. And sugar, usually lots of sugar or artificial sweeteners. The caffeine is a strong stimulant and is the main reason energy drinks will perk you up. The vitamins aren’t any different than what you’ll get from your foods and the dosage of herbs may not be strong enough to do anything. The reason for using taurine in Red Bull escapes me completely – it’s actually more of a depressant than a stimulant in larger doses – so it probably doesn’t do anything at all. Read more
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Enrichment and Fortification of Processed Foods
by Shereen Jegtvig
Food manufacturers enrich their products when they replace nutrients lost during processing. For example, adding B vitamins to the white refined flour used to make bread. Enrichment doesn’t necessarily make the refined flour as healthy as whole grain flour because the fiber isn’t replaced, but adding the B vitamins back into the flour is certainly better than nothing.
Fortification is when food manufacturers add nutrients to foods that wouldn’t normally be present. This can range from the well accepted (vitamin-fortified breakfast cereals and vitamin D added to milk) to the just plain odd (Diet Coke with vitamins?). Some fortified foods are called functional foods, which mean they provide some health benefit beyond the usual nutrition profile for that food. Like margarine made with plant sterols that have been shown to reduce cholesterol levels with regular use. Read more
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Sweet Substitutes: The Alternatives To Sugar
Sugar. It’s sweet, tasty, and everywhere. It occurs naturally in many foods, and is often added to processed foods, in a variety of forms. Unfortunately, too much sugar can contribute to many health problems: tooth decay, obesity, and related medical conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. Artificial sugar substitutes are often added to foods to replicate the sweetness of sugar, without the added energy or calories. Most are suitable for people with diabetes or hypoglycemia, and are usually much friendlier to your teeth.
However, artificial sweeteners have been the subject of much controversy. Some people claim they have experienced negative health effects after consuming sweeteners, while others question the political motives behind the approval process and labeling protocols for each additive. Many dietitians recommend you avoid some artificial sweeteners, or that you avoid large amounts of sugar substitutes at any one time. (Larsen – Ask the dietitian, 2009)
Before you can decide which additives you want to consume or avoid, you need to know some basic facts about each sugar substitute. Read more
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What to Look For When Choosing Iced Tea
by Shereen Jegtvig for foodessentials
When the weather warms up, so does our desire for a glass of iced tea to beat the heat. And Iced tea can be very good for you health because tea is rich in polyphenols that work as antioxidants to prevent damage to the cells in your body. Drinking tea may help prevent cancer or cardiovascular disease and it can help you lose weight. That is if you don’t load your iced tea down with excessive amounts of sugar. Read more
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Regular Soft Drinks – What to look for?
There is a minefield of information out there on the perils of carbonated soft drinks and what one should be concerned with…the list is long and includes; calories, sugar, colors, additives, high fructose corn syrup, and aspartame. It is quite an emotional field with a vast range of opinions and studies. This is not surprising considering the size of the soft drink market, the money involved, and the fact that one of the target markets is our youth.
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The Best Kids Cereals:
This post follows on from the last post “Kids Cereals – What to look for”. We put that knowledge in to practice to try and find the best children’s cereals considering their sugar, fiber, artificial color, and artificial preservative properties. The products analyzed come from the Foodessentials database that includes tens of thousands of lists of products including this list of 17 kids cereals. Read more
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Children’s Cereals – what to look for: sugar, calories, fiber, additives:
There is a lot of information out there in regard to children’s cereals and nutrition in general. In an attempt to help you to filter out some of the duplicate info and some of the less than credible sources we have published a list of decent information sources below. Read more
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Kid’s Cereals are packed with Sugar!!
Of the list of 21 cereals taken from the foodessentials database and compared by sugar content, it was astonishing to find the level of sugar contained in most of the products. At the high end of the scale there are products with sugar levels of close to 50 grams per 100 grams and over. Whilst the lower end of the scale (dominated again by Annie’s Cereals – see previous article about cereals and colors) shows values more reasonable at around 6 – 20 grams per 100 grams.
This means that in one 100 gram serving of these high sugar cereals you’d be eating about 50 grams of sugar (50%). Read more
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