Need a reason to cut back on sugar? How about 45?
That’s the number of adverse health effects a new study published in the journal BMJ tied to high sugar consumption. The review of 8,601 studies found a significantly higher risk of 45 health outcomes, including high blood pressure, obesity, stroke, gout, cancer, asthma, depression and early death.
To reduce the risk of these adverse affects, the findings suggested reducing the consumption of free sugars or added sugars to below 25 grams (or 6 teaspoons) a day. This is on par with the current recommendations from the American Heart Association, which recommends that women limit total added sugars to 6 teaspoons, per day, while men stick with 9 teaspoons per day.
The not-so-sweet reality: The average American eats about 22 teaspoons of added sugars every day.
You may immediately point to sweet foods like soda, cakes, cookies and candy as the culprit. While it is smart to limit these foods, it’s often the small amounts of added sugars found in many of the foods we eat regularly that can rack up your daily sugar intake. And many processed foods containing added sugars don’t even taste sweet.
It’s also important to separate the term added sugars from naturally-occurring sugars in the diet like fructose in fruit or lactose in dairy. All humans have a “sweet tooth” hardwired in the brain, a function of receptors, or sensors, on the tongue that recognize a sweet taste as pleasant. Added sugars provide the same stimulation to these receptors as fruit.
Because sugar and fat interact so closely in foods, another challenge to finding hidden sugars is that many foods with added sugars don’t taste particularly sweet. The combination of sweet and fat provides a product that just tastes good. So, the “taste test” for figuring out added sugars is not reliable.
The only way to know for sure is to read the nutrition label on the back of the package. Skip the front panel, which is less regulated, and often has convincing…
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