By Jeremy Logan,
Beyond the waistline and into the hearts of Americans everywhere, added sugars have found themselves in nearly everything we eat.
According to The American Heart Association – added sugar was not a significant component of the human diet until the advent of modern food-processing methods. Since then, the intake of sugar has risen steadily.
Keri Smith, a dietician at Chas, said that most people aren’t aware of how much sugar they are eating.
“I will pull out a few facts about your typical can of regular cola, and it is going to run about 41 to 44 grams of sugar,” Smith said. “The recommended intake of sugar for women is only 6 teaspoons [30 grams] a day, and for men it’s 9 [45 grams]. When I start telling people those types of comparisons it really surprises them.”
A recent Documentary titled, “Fed Up,” claims that added sugars in our diet, is the main culprit in the obesity epidemic, and that they can be found in everything from soda, to diet, non-fat foods.
“From my experience its having a huge impact,” Smith said. “I see everything from kiddos, to elderly, and everything in between, and often times when I am seeing a patient because they are interested in weight loss or they have diabetes, anytime I am doing an initial assessment, there is some sort of processed sugars that make up a large amount of their diet.”
David Reed, a student at SFCC who is enrolled in the Health and Fitness Technician program, said that he lost over 100lbs, in part, by taking sugar out of his diet.
“I took a nutrition course and I had weight issues before I started and I just saw results,” Reed said. “Refined sugars, gluten, soy and dairy. I don’t have any wheat. Mostly I eat rice flower if I have a bread or a flower.”
Wheat flour and other empty carbs are a form of simple carbohydrate, and they break down in your body the same way that added sugar does.
“No matter how you get a form of a sugar or carbohydrate they all break down into glucose in the blood, but depending on what type of carbohydrate it is,” Smith said. “There are the simple carbohydrates, which are the refined processed ones, and the complex ones, which are your whole grains and so on. They do affect the body differently, being that whole grains have higher amounts of fiber, or occasionally higher amounts of protein and that will affect how quickly the body will break down a carb into sugar.”
According to Smith the important thing is to read the labels of your food and understand what they mean. There are a number of other ingredients in your food that can break down into glucose.
“They [people concerned with their health] need to look at the sugar alcohols which are anything with an OL at the end of it,” Smith said. “Sorbitol, mannitol, those are all a type of sugar, they are low in calories so they are like a sugar substitute you could say but the problem with those is that when eaten in large amounts those calories can add up and they can cause digestive issues.”
She warns people not to be tricked by clever labeling.
“We had a carb counting class, and we had an example of Ritz crackers and the front of the package is plastered with, ‘whole grain Ritz crackers, 5 grams of whole grains per serving,’ but when you look at the ingredients the first ingredient is unbleached, enriched, wheat flour.” Smith said. “The easiest way to know a true whole grain is if the first ingredient has the word whole grain or whole wheat in it. The very first ingredient has to have the word whole in it to be a true whole grain product”