Free Shipping on all US orders! 🎉🎉🎉
|
Sugar is a unique problem in the American diet. Added sweeteners are all around us, including in many food products that you may not consider sweet. These sweeteners are highly caloric and can trick your body into wanting even more food. |
|
A focused effort to reduce sugar consumption can have big benefits — and doesn’t need to leave you grumpily hungry. Among the strategies: Read supermarket labels. Don’t let breakfast become a thinly veiled dessert. Eliminate soda, especially regular soda. If you’re like most Americans, you eat more sugar than is good for you. But it’s entirely possible to eat less sugar without sacrificing much — if any — of the pleasures of eating. Surprising as it may sound, many people who have cut back on sugar say they find their new eating habits more pleasurable than their old ones. Here's why you eat more sugar than you realize, and why it's a problem. The first thing to know: Added sugars, of one kind or another, are almost everywhere in the modern diet. They’re in sandwich bread, soup, pickles, salad dressing, crackers, yogurt and cereal, as well as in the obvious foods and drinks, like soda and desserts. The biggest problem with added sweeteners is that they make it easy to overeat. They’re tasty and highly caloric but they often don’t make you feel full. Instead, they can trick you into wanting even more food. Because we’re surrounded by added sweeteners — in our kitchens, in restaurants, at schools and offices — most of us will eat too much of them unless we consciously set out to do otherwise. How Did We Get Here?It’s not an accident. The sugar industry has conducted an aggressive, decades-long campaign to blame the obesity epidemic on fats, not sugars. Fats, after all, seem as if they should cause obesity. Thanks partly to that campaign, sugar consumption soared in the United States. But research increasingly indicates that an overabundance of simple carbohydrates, and sugar in particular, is the No. 1 problem. Fortunately, more people are realizing the harms of sugar and cutting back. What to CutHealth experts recommend that you focus on reducing added sweeteners — like granulated sugar, high fructose corn syrup, honey, maple syrup, and molasses. You don’t need to worry so much about the sugars that are a natural part of fruit and vegetables. Most people don’t overeat naturally occurring sugars, as Marion Nestle of New York University says. The fiber, vitamins and minerals that surround them fill you up. A typical adult should not eat more than 50 grams (or about 12 teaspoons) of added sugars per day, and closer to 25 is healthier. The average American would need to reduce added-sweetener consumption by about 40 percent to get down to even the 50-gram threshold. The GameplanChanging is hard. It’s much more effective to come up with a few simple rules and habits that then become second nature. (One strategy to consider: Eliminate all added sugars for one month, and then add back only the ones you miss. It’s easier than it sounds.)   |
