nutrition
sugar
a spoonful of
By Eve Douglas
Even before Nigel Latta condemned it on TV, we all knew sugar
was not exactly “sweet as”. Bad for your teeth, responsible for
piling on body fat, no nutritional value, and – if that wasn’t bad
enough – a potential slippery slope towards diabetes.
And yet, consuming less sugar proved more than
challenging for our family. Not only is refined sugar
present in most processed food, from tomato sauce to
salami, it’s also an integral part of our Western culture.
Our typical breakfast is a range of sweet cereal served
with milk or fruit juice. Morning tea comes with a biscuit.
We may have a jam sandwich for lunch, a sweet yoghurt
with fruit for afternoon tea, and what dinner would be
complete without dessert? Add cold drinks, birthday
cakes, and reward lollies into the mix, and it’s easy to
see why breaking the habit is not an easy task.
Hosting a Chinese exchange student in our house for a
fortnight helped pave the way. On her first evening with
us, we asked her to stay at the table after the main meal
for dessert. She was baffled. Out came our trusted
Chinese Translator app. Turned out Xiaolian didn’t have
a problem understanding the word: she battled with the
concept. Why would you want to eat another dish when
you’re already full with all the delicious food you’ve just
had, she asked. We briefly considered explaining to her
that Westerners had two stomachs: one for dinner and a
separate one for dessert, but we realised our translator
app was not up to the task, and so we opted to skip
dessert altogether.
It’s not that the Chinese avoid sugar: they add it to their
stir-fries, they eat sweet sticky rice and syrupy fruit as
part of their main meal. But they don’t see dessert as a
separate ritual to be observed.
Once you get your head around not expecting sugar at
certain times of the day, it becomes easier to schedule it
less often. My children started copying Xiaolian’s
behaviour, and now if we feel like having something
sweet, we’re learning to stop and think whether a piece
of fruit or a portion of protein (egg, beef jerky, a handful
of macadamia nuts) or even a glass of water would
satisfy the craving.
It’s not that all sweet food is bad for you, of course. Milk,
fruit, and vegetables all contain natural sugars, and it’s
beneficial to include a variety of them in your daily diet.
We should be careful with fruit juices, though, even
those that are of the no-sugar-added 100%-pure-juice
variety. Boyd Swinburn, professor of global health and
nutrition at the University of Auckland says that
squeezed fruit juice has no fibre, so it’s easy to drink the
equivalent of five oranges in one sitting. Eating five
whole oranges wouldn’t be such a problem, but if you
squeeze them, the acid and sugar occur in a fairly
concentrated form, which is murder for your teeth.
Cane sugar and corn syrup are even more of a health
hazard, especially if you eat too much of them in one
form or another. While there is no precise figure for how
much sugar people should be eating, the World Health
Organisation’s new proposal is that sugar – including
sugar from fruit juice – should not constitute more than
5 percent of daily calories. So the maximum for an
average man would be eight 4.2g teaspoons a day, and
for the average woman six teaspoons a day.
If that sounds like a lot of sugar to be had in a day, here
are some figures:
Drink a 355ml can of Coca Cola and you’ll be
consuming 10 teaspoons of sugar, far above the
recommended daily dose. (That’s not counting the
sugar in your ham or in your bread.)
l 1 Tablespoon of tomato sauce contains approximately
a teaspoon of sugar.
l If you eat a whole 58g bar of Milky Way you’ll exceed
the recommended daily amount, because you’ll be
ingesting 8.5 teaspoons of sugar.
l
Even a cup of Kelloggs Special K contains one
teaspoon of sugar.
With all that in mind, you might wonder whether your
child really needs a muffin or biscuit in their lunchbox
every day. Perhaps if they’re going to have a sweet
snack after school, you should consider sending only
savoury carbohydrates to school – teamed with heaps
of fresh fruit and vegetables, of course.
Simply being aware of your child’s overall sugar
consumption, and knowing how much sugar hides in
takeaways and processed foods, will help you in your
journey towards a healthier family diet. Especially when
you ban the sugary drinks that are soooo bad on the
teeth, and replace them with good old-fashioned water.
l
did you know?
Your child’s breakfast cereal may contain more sugar than a slice of
chocolate cake. A normal recipe for chocolate cake consists of about
20 percent sugar. Some cereals contain almost twice that.
Sugar may give you wrinkles: excess blood sugar binds to collagen,
making the skin less elastic.
Pharmaceutical companies use sugar to grow penicillin (a fungus).
sugar-free easter?
What would Easter be without the Easter eggs? Fortunately, you can ask your Easter Bunny to be a
little more health-conscious this year.
Choose chocolate eggs that are at least 70% cacao. This will reduce the sugar content.
Dip frozen berries in melted chocolate, wait for the chocolate to set, serve immediately.
It’s easy to make sugar-free chocolate eggs filled with peanut butter: www.sugarfreemom.com/
recipes/sugar-free-chocolate-peanut-butter-easter-eggs-dairy-free/
You can also make solid chocolate eggs and sweeten the cocoa powder with dates:
honestlyhealthyfood.com/2014/04/14/raw-chocolate-easter-eggs/
Love those Cadbury Crème eggs? Here’s a healthier alternative: chocolatecoveredkatie.com/
2013/03/20/healthy-cadbury-creme-eggs/
why is sugar so bad for teeth?
sugar causes tooth decay
Microscopic bacteria called plaque grow on the teeth, usually in hard to reach areas. They eat sugar
and produce acid as a waste product within about 5 minutes. The acid dissolves the tooth which is the
start of tooth decay. Special enzymes in our saliva can stop the acid attack, however, it takes up to one
hour to produce enough saliva to do so. You can’t brush or rinse it off. So, every time we eat anything
with sugar in it, it is counted as one hour of decay.