Sugar. Even the word itself satisfies me. Don’t we all love the sweet, tasty treats that we are constantly encountering throughout our days? You can’t walk into a supermarket or go out to eat anywhere without seeing a yummy dessert. Everything in moderation is alright, but how do we regulate the amount of sugar we are putting in our bodies if the sugar industry is EVERYWHERE?
Think for a moment about your daily diet and what it consists of. For me, it looks a little something like this:
For breakfast, maybe i will have some coffee with creamer and a bagel with cream cheese. moving on to lunch, i’ll get a salad from the salad bar in Findlay dining commons. For dinner, who knows? Maybe I go to the Pollock buffet and get a sandwich from the deli with a bowl of soup on the side, and since I’m going to treat myself… I HAVE to get a bowl of ice cream since it’s included in the buffet.
That honestly doesn’t seem so bad on the surface. But I’m going to state a scary thought: almost everything we consume in America is low quality and unhealthy, and has far too much sugar in it. Why? Because it’s cheaper! There isn’t a way to avoid that, however, I do recommend watching how much sugar you are consuming
Back to my diet: the creamer in my coffee is is flavored, and actually has 5 grams of sugar per serving (one tablespoon) and I definitely put way more than one serving in. I don’t even want to know how much sugar is in my cream cheese… I already know it is way too much because of how processed cream cheese is. Processed = sugar. Remember that. Lunchtime: am I really being healthy by getting a salad? It honestly depends! The dressing on top of my salad probably throws me way over the daily amount of sugar I should consume (less than 30g a day for both men and women). The lunchmeat on my sandwich from the deli that I got for dinner? PROCESSED.
It isn’t a surprise that so many americans are overweight. It is difficult to eat healthily in this country, and the main problem of our diets as American’s is sugar, just because is a gateway to so many health problems like diabetes, for example. My advice to you is to educate yourself. Keep track of how much sugar is in each of your meals, and don’t go overboard with the desserts. The sugar industry is sneaky and doesn’t have to put the percentage of your daily allowance that that specific food or drink product has in it on the nutrition label, and that is because it is most likely over 100% of what you should be having per day!
Make your health a priority. Don’t obsess over every gram of sugar you eat or drink, but be aware of the fact that if you are careless, there may be some very negative conseuquences. When you read a food label, look out for these tricky alternate ways of saying that a product has sugar in it:
picture found here.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post about sugar! I hope it motivates you to educate yourself on the risks of high-sugar diets.
Read more about the correlations between sugar and health problems. Different hypotheses and mechanisms exist to explain each problem depending on what it is… but eating healthy has no negative consequences, so you might as well do the best you can 🙂