Sweet Talk

I'm talking about sugar again today, but with more ways to help you cut back or make healthier choices. Perhaps you've tried cutting back by:

• saying no to sodas
• refusing to eat or drink anything with high fructose corn syrup
• using honey to sweeten your coffee
• reading labels on everyday items
• opting for healthier snacks, such as fruit

These are all great ideas, but what else can you do as you continue on your journey toward cleaner eating?

Huffington Post listed 10 Essential Rules to Healthy Eating and #8 is Ditch the Whites:

White Flour
The milling process strips the grains of most of their nutrition. The result: "White flour digests in your body rapidly, which makes blood sugar spike," says Foodist author Darya Pion Rose, PhD. (Cue the almost inevitable crash.) "It should be a supplement to your diet, not the main event." Try more-nutritious flours, like almond, coconut, and chickpea. One easy way to start: Substitute white whole wheat flour for 1/3 cup (or more) of the white flour in recipes.

White Sugar
Research suggests that sugar can be addictive. And it's a sneaky ingredient added to processed foods that don't even taste sweet, like bread and pasta sauce. Reach for organic honey or maple syrup instead; they're less refined and offer small amounts of antioxidants. (Still, aim for no more than 24 grams of added sugar per day.) Steer clear of foods with sugar listed among the first three ingredients -- and that includes agave nectar, evaporated cane juice, malt syrup, and anything ending in "-ose." ("There are 1,001 code names!" warns Rose.)

Here's a list of 30 code names for sugar from the Consumerist.

But how and why? 

Here is a great article from OneGreenPlanet to give you a little more info and help you get started. It's short and to the point, so please take a minute to read it. The article starts with this, "Linked to weight problems, joint problems, heart problems, bone problems, brain problems, and immunity problems — too much sugar is not just about cavities anymore."

What's the most sugar you should eat per day?

CBS News reported that "The World Health Organization is dropping its sugar intake recommendations from 10 percent of your daily calorie intake to 5 percent. For an adult of a normal body mass index, that works out to about 6 teaspoons -- or 25 grams -- of sugar per day."

Remember you can always eat less! This is a maximum recommendation.

Keep educating yourself.

We know how popular agave nectar became. I started using it to sweeten my coffee and yogurt and other recipes calling for sweetener. I continued reading about it and found conflicting information, so we stopped using it in January (see related post). A friend shared this article from The Oz Blog, and again it confirms the other not-so-good news about agave nectar.

What can be used to sweeten my foods?

The more I read, the more I'm reminded that we don't need sweet foods! If most of the sweeteners are bad or contributing to health problems, then they shouldn't be part of our diets. Artificial sweeteners can not fuel our bodies. To sweeten foods naturally, honey and maple syrup are the best choices. Yes, you can use very small amounts of sugar or eat desserts and still be healthy, BUT you have to be honest with yourself about how much you are consuming.


Action Item: This may be time consuming (but aren't you worth it?), but count the grams of sugar that you consume just for today. Check packaging or look up the food online with a quick search. Count all day or stop when you get to 25 grams and see how long it took you to get there! Hopefully it wasn't during breakfast.

For Further Reading: Plenty of links on this post today, so I won't add any more :)