Why It's REALLY Worth Weaning Yourself Away From Sugar

Today's 650-word post could save you tens of thousands of empty calories per year.

My lovely wife Laura is training for her first marathon, so she's carefully evaluating what she eats with an eye toward eliminating some of the lower-quality inputs into her diet.

It led her to a truly shocking discovery. She discovered she was eating more sugar than she realized. A lot more. And it was all just hiding there in a couple of innocuous daily beverages she hardly even thought about.

First of all, every morning she'd have one or two cups of half-coffee/half-milk, each with two spoonfuls of sugar. And then, on most evenings, she'd have a big mug of hot cocoa--with another two spoonfuls of sugar.

Hey, she's got a sweet tooth, and that's okay. I'm a black coffee guy and I've always thought sweetened coffee was kind of girly, but hey, that's just me. Vive la différence.

Of course, logically, Laura could easily see that the idea of pouring five or six spoonfuls of sugar down her throat every day wasn't exactly healthy (especially when you phrase it that way).

So the first thing she did was mentally reclassify her evening hot cocoa as an infrequent "special treat" rather than a less-than-special daily habit. Then, she cut back to just one cup of coffee per day. Then, she (actually me, since I fix her coffee most mornings) weaned herself away from so much sugar in her daily coffee.

How? Simple: I just gradually cut down on the sugar I added to her coffee. I worked down from two rounded spoonfuls to a spoonful plus a little. She never even noticed. Then I worked down to just a spoonful. She still never noticed. Then a little less than a spoonful.

Well, at this point, she noticed. But within a few days she got used to it.

Now, after a short couple of weeks, she's happily drinking her coffee with less than a full rounded spoonful of sugar. She likes it exactly the same as before, and she's experiencing no feelings of deprivation whatsoever.

And yet she's eliminated more than four rounded spoonfuls of sugar a day from her diet.

What we found was that your palate can be conditioned away from sugar just like it can be conditioned away from salt. Given time, you can teach your mind and your taste buds to not want quite so much sugar.

Okay. Here's the important part. Laura knew that it would be a good idea to cut this incremental sugar out of her diet. But then we did the caloric math. This is where it got disturbing.

Geek that I am, I actually weighed the amount of sugar in a "rounded spoonful" of the spoons in our kitchen, using my trusty EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale. We have typical, medium-sized spoons in our kitchen--not baby-sized, but not ginormous IKEA spoons either. And a "rounded spoonful" of sugar worked out to exactly 8 grams.

So here's the (mortifying) math: at 8 grams per spoonful, Laura's daily coffee/hot cocoa habit added up to 32 grams of unnecessary sugar per day. That's 960 grams (or 2.1 pounds) of sugar a month. Or an astonishing 25 pounds of sugar a year.

Expressed in caloric terms, the math is even more astonishing. Start with the fact that a gram of table sugar contains about four calories. Doesn't sound too bad, right? Until you realize that eating 960 grams of sugar per month works out to 3,840 calories. Nearly two full day's worth of excess calories every month, assuming an average woman's 2,000 daily caloric intake.

Just wait. 32 grams a day x 365 days works out to 11,680 grams. Which means this annual excess sugar intake works out to 46,720 calories per year.

Forty-six thousand seven hundred and twenty incremental and largely unnecessary calories per year. That's nearly twenty-four days' worth of unnecessary calories.*

All in the form of a couple of easily forgettable daily beverages.

Readers, where do you think your empty calories hide? Share your thoughts below!


* A quick footnote: As I was working through the caloric math in this post, I simply couldn't believe the total sums I was arriving at. It didn't seem possible that I could come up with over 46,000 excess calories from what seemed like such a small, innocuous daily habit.

I checked and rechecked (and even had Laura check) the math, and I even reduced some of the assumptions too (e.g.: Laura actually cut more like five rounded spoonfuls a day out of her diet, not four, but I used four spoonfuls in the calculations above to be more conservative, and because the evening hot cocoa was a nearly-every-day habit, not an every-day-without-fail habit).

But I guess the conclusion here is that the little things really add up. I mean really add up. And if you have a daily soda, frappuccino or other sweetened beverage habit, you may be ingesting way, way more pointless calories than you realize over the course of months and years.


Related Posts:
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Where Going Generic Works... And Where It Doesn't
Companies Vs. Consumers: A Manifesto
How to Own the Consumer Products Industry--And I Mean Literally Own It


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Diabetes and Hiding Sugar in Plain Sight

Just a quick update for readers: Casual Kitchen's post on How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight was republished today at A Sweet Life, which is one of the key resources for diabetics on the internet today.

My post talks about a new technique food companies are using these days to make their foods look like they contain less sugar than they really do. If you want to keep an eye on your sugar intake, this post is a must-read.

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How Food Companies Hide Sugar in Plain Sight

Today's post is about an increasingly common labeling trick that makes food look like it contains less sugar than it really does.
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Everybody knows that if you want to see what's in the food you buy in the grocery store, all you have to do is check the ingredients list. All foods are required to list all their ingredients, ranked by prevalence, somewhere on the label.


Therefore, if you want to get a rough sense of how much high fructose corn syrup is in your breakfast cereal, or how much sugar is in your pasta sauce, all you have to do is glance at the ingredients. If sugar or HFCS is one of the top three or four ingredients on the list, then you can safely roll your eyes and put the product back on the shelf. It's an easy decision-making method for consumers who don't want to eat over-sweetened food.

Or is it?

Insidious Workarounds
Unfortunately, a quick glance just isn't enough any more, because many food companies have caught on to us. They know that we've all trained ourselves to scan the ingredients and make sure sugar and high fructose corn syrup aren't near the top of the list.

So they've arrived at an insidious workaround that subverts our quick glances, and often leads consumers to underestimate the sugar content of a food. How? By using three, four or even five different kinds of sugar in the food, and listing each sweetener separately.

Thus a sugar-heavy cereal that years ago might have listed sugar as the second ingredient may now be made with sugar, brown sugar, molasses, dextrose and corn syrup solids. And those ingredients may be listed as the sixth, seventh, ninth, tenth and twelfth ingredients, respectively. Here's the insidious part: the sugar/sweetener content is higher than ever, but sugar now appears sixth instead of second on the list. And the consumer, who quickly glanced and didn't see sugar among the top three ingredients, is misled into thinking that this food has less sugar than it really does.

Protect Yourself
How can you protect yourself from being misled? Here are three tips:

1) First, you'll have to read ingredients lists a lot more closely than you did in the past. There's just no way around it.

2) Second, be on the lookout for the following ingredients--any of them can be used in addition to, or as a substitute for, plain old sugar:

molasses
brown sugar
honey
maple syrup
glucose
fructose
juice concentrates (these are typically fructose- and glucose-heavy)
brown rice syrup
high fructose corn syrup (or HFCS for short)
corn syrup (an often-used alternate name for HFCS)
corn syrup solids (HFCS in powder or crystalline form)
dextrose (a form of glucose, also a sweetener)
maltodextrin (another sweetener, made up of a chain of glucose molecules)

[A brief word on the last two items on this list, dextrose and maltodextrin. Despite having fancy names that don't sound sweet at all, these two variant forms of glucose are indeed sweeteners.]

3) Third, be aware that when you're looking at a list of ingredients with multiple sweetening agents, there simply isn't enough information for you to estimate the total sugar content of that food. However, a good rule of thumb is to assume that any food with three or more sweetening agents has an inappropriately high sugar content.

Walk Away
Finally, let the consumer products companies know that you won't use your wallet to support hyper-sweetened foods or misleading ingredient labeling. Of course it's one thing if you're buying cookies or candy--you'd expect to see sugar and its variants prominently (and repeatedly) listed in the ingredients.

But if you see this labeling technique used with cereal, pasta sauce, prepared dinners or any other food that really shouldn't contain tooth-aching quantities of sugar, punish that brand immediately. Put the product back on the shelf, shake your head at the shortsightedness of the processed food industry, and slowly walk away.

Related Posts:
Why You Should Always Read Ingredient Labels
Brand Disloyalty
Just Say No to Overpriced Boxed Cereal
How to Enjoy Wine On A Budget
Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs

This post owes a debt of gratitude to David Kessler's The End of Overeating, which got me started thinking about this issue.



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!