Sugar...oh honey, honey!

​​Last week, The New York Times wrote an alarming article about the sugar industry. The article reveals that the sugar industry paid off three Harvard scientists back in the late 60s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and frame saturated fat as the culprit instead. Americans took this advice, shaped by the sugar industry, and our health has been impacted ever since.

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​How did this misleading information from the 60s come to affect so many Americans? In 1982, The American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture urged Americans to reduce our intake of fats. And we did. Since that time our consumption of fats has decreased and our country’s obesity levels have increased in spades. We are an overweight, yet malnourished society. There are many problems with our Standard American Diet (S.A.D. – how fitting is this acronym?) today. We are eating more processed foods that are full of oxidized vegetable oils, additives, and preservatives. However, the biggest issue with our SAD diet is that it is full of sugar. We consume low-fat, high-sugar foods that some experts blame for fueling the obesity crisis.

Processed foods today contain more sugar and fewer nutrients that ever before. Excess sugar consumption increases blood triglycerides and inhibits immune function. Sugar is added to virtually every processed food, limiting consumer choice. How can we avoid it? Approximately 80% of the 600,000 plus packaged food products in the United States have added caloric sweeteners. We expect to find sugar in the usual suspects like cake, candy, and cookies. So when we want to have a special treat, this is something we may chose to consume. However, it is strategically placed in canned vegetables, baby foods, cereals, breads, peanut butter, crackers, and condiments – and the list goes on. Added sugar has become so pervasive within the food environment that we can hardly avoid it even if we wanted to. 

​So how much sugar are we actually consuming? The average American consumes about 150 pounds of sugar per year (which is about 23 teaspoons per day) and the greatest intake of sugar is in liquid form from soda and sweetened beverages. You may be thinking to yourself, wow, that sounds like a lot of sugar, but compared to what? 

​How much sugar should we have per day? The American Heart Association has set recommended guidelines for Americans – women should have no more than 6 teaspoons a day and men no more than 9 teaspoons per day.  One can of soda has 10 teaspoons of sugar. Let me emphasize that…Americans would have reached the maximum amount of sugar allowed for the day indulging in this one drink. To learn ways to get the sugar out, take a look at a previous blog I wrote about this topic. 
 
Join me next week for a discussion on the truth about fats.

Sources:
​Hyman, M.  (2016). Eat fat, get thin. Little, Brown, & Company.
Lustig, R. (2013). Fat chance. Hudson Street Press.
​New York Times. (2016). How the sugar industry shifted blame to fat. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html.