With the start of 2016 came an update from the U.S. government about how Americans should be altering our diets. The Obama administration released the update on the Dietary Guidelines, the official governmental advice on what to eat based on new nutrition scientific research. These guidelines are only published once every five years.
The biggest change?
Americans have been advised to drastically cut down on sugar so that it accounts for 10 percent or less of our daily calorie intake.
The only problem with this recommendation?
What if you aren't a "calorie-counter?" This percentage is wildly abstract and difficult to imagine, especially in the grocery store faced with thousands of products. To give you just a ball-park idea, if you follow a 2,000 calorie diet (the number that most other food labels are based off of), these new guidelines suggest limiting sugar at 12 teaspoons per day. Ouch.
An NPR article published on January 7, 2016, cited this photo to demonstrate the true shock to our systems this reduction in sugar will have -- if we follow it, that is.
As NPR notes, "These two muffins each contain 35 grams (about 8 teaspoons) of sugar. Add in a cup of sweetened blueberry Greek yogurt (18 grams, or about 4 teaspoons, of sugar) and you've got 22 teaspoons of sugar – the amount many Americans eat per day. Under the new Dietary Guidelines, we should eat no more than 10 percent of daily calories from sugar. On a 2,000-calorie daily diet, that's about 12 teaspoons."
So, while the government is finally revealing the sugar epidemic our country has experienced, they aren't making this easy on us. Will there be flashing red lights on every product that contains more than 12 teaspoons of sugar on its own? I doubt it. This leaves us with only one solution: we'll have to become label detectives.
Campaigns like Rethink Your Drink encourage consumers to drink water rather than sweetened beverages by providing these visual representations using sugar cubes. Three of the following drinks already surpass the daily allowance for sugar and the other three are not too far behind.
And for products unlike soda, whose advertising still screams 'healthy?'
Other health experts suggest leaving a product on the shelf if sugar is listed in the top three ingredients, since the order listed is proportionate to the amount of the ingredient in the product.
And now, eight food products that seem too good to have fallen into America's sugary mess...until now. Look out for these hidden culprits.
--Yogurt with fruit (up to 19 grams per cup)
--Canned soup (up to 15 grams per 1.5 cups)
--Salad dressing (up to 4 grams per tablespoon)
--Tomato sauce (up to 12 grams per 1/2 cup!)
--Bread (up to 2 grams per slice) Why did they ruin something already perfect?!
--Granola Bars (up to 9 grams per bar)
--Dried fruit (one serving size of cranberries is 29 grams)
--Orange juice (up to 9 grams per glass) Opt for whole fruit instead.
www.everydayhealth.com (8 High-Sugar Foods You're Eating Everyday)
It looks like I'll be spending some quality time with the aisles of my grocery store. You might even get a little thrill, like me, when you discover that you were so close to being duped by good 'ole General Mills with that box of "healthy, whole-grain" granola cereal, but not this time, sugar lobbyists!
