Added Sugar increases risk of Heart Disease

A new study in the Journal of American Medical Association and reported on by NPR radio (you can listen to the report here) stated that consumption of added sugar can increase your risk of heart disease.

Added sugars are in everything, and are hard to avoid because there is no requirement for manufacturers to differentiate between added and natural sugars on the food label.  The only way you can avoid them is by searching the food label for the hundreds of ingredients that are considered added sugar.

The NPR report goes on to quote Jene Welsh, a registered nurse and researcher at Emory University, who states that at least 15% of calories consumed by Americans can be attributed to added sugar.  This is the equivalent of 21 teaspoons of added sugar a day!!  And people who consumed the most added sugar in the Emory University study consumed about 46 teaspoons a day.  Whereas those who consumed the least amount of added sugar (less than 7 teaspoons a day) had the lowest risk of heart disease.

FoodEssentials Scanner can help you to avoid added sugars:

With the FoodEssentials Scanner ¨Added Sugar¨ is one of the many available additives you can select to help you to monitor on food labels.  Once selected you just need to scan the bar-codes of products and it will show you whether the product contains added sugar using a simple red, yellow, and green traffic light system.  (As you can see in the first picture to the right).

In addition if you click right from the Added Sugar on the label view it will then show you which ingredients in that product are considered to be added sugar.  You can see an example of this in the second picture to the right.

Below, I have also included the full description of added sugar as included in the application.

¨Sugar is a standard nutrient that by law must be submitted on all food labels distributed and sold in the USA.  However, manufacturers are not required to stipulate how much of the total sugar value is in fact added sugar – that is to say, additional sugar that has been added to food on top of the natural occurring sugars.  There are many different ways that added sugar can be represented on food labels, but all of them are a source of extra calories.  Ingredients such as fructose, sucrose, molasses and even fruit juice concentrates  are all considered to contain added sugar properties, and consequently add to the total sugar content.  Other common ingredients that contain added sugar properties include corn based sweeteners and syrups, nectars, honey and cane juice.  The FoodEssentials Scanner Added Sugar analysis can save you time by identifying all these ingredients with a click of a button, saving you from having to scour the ingredient list yourself.¨  FoodEssentials Scanner Added Sugar Description

Let us know how many products you find that contain added sugar!!

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