Do you realize how much sugar is in the food you eat? I’m not just talking about the spoons of sugar you add in your tea or coffee at Timmy’s. There can be a lot of HIDDEN SUGAR in packaged foods. I don’t eat a lot of packaged foods, but we do buy some for my step-daughter, who is 10 and loves sugar! I’m usually ok with the treats as long as she gets a good amount of veggies and other good foods in her. But recently I started to pay more attention to the labels on the snacks in our kitchen and was shocked by what I found.
Ok, first let me explain how you can quickly look at a food label for the amount of sugar. Sugars are often listed by weight (g) but you can do a quick conversion to teaspoons by dividing it by 4. For example, the label to the right shows 18g of sugar. 18 divided by 4 = 4.5, which means that 1 serving of this product has 4½ teaspoons of sugar.
Here are some real-life examples:
This bottle of Coke has 27g of sugar. But make sure to check the serving size, which is 240mL. This bottle is 590mL, which means you need to more than double the amount of sugar to find out how much you’d be taking in if you drank the whole bottle. Luckily, the bottle also shows the nutritional information for the whole bottle, which states 65g of sugar. To figure out how many teaspoons, we divide this by 4 and get 16.25. That means there are just over 16 teaspoons of sugar in this bottle of coke!
Many people know there is a lot of sugar in pop and make what they think are healthier options, but that’s not always the case. Iced tea is a popular “healthier” choice, but the large can of Arizona Iced Tea has 72 g of sugar, which (divided by 4) is equivalent to 18 teaspoons of sugar, more than the bottle of Coke!
For more information on the sugars hiding in our food, there’s a great website called Sugar Stacks http://www.sugarstacks.com/ that asks “would you eat a stack of 16 sugar cubes?” which is what you are essentially doing when you drink a bottle of Coke!
It’s always good to take a quick glance at labels to see what you’re actually consuming. Think about what you are putting into your body! Make your calories count with nutritious, whole foods instead of empty calories found in sugary drinks and food.
Naturopathic Doctor
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