How To Be Healthy - How Much Sugar Per Day Should We Have?

How much sugar is too much? You could argue that any added sugar is too much because

our body does not need us to feed it sugar - it has no need of added sugar, and it gets no nutritional value from it. It does need sugar in the form of glucose, which it gets by converting some foods. Glucose is essential to feed our cells and thus our whole system. The glucose in our blood, which we call blood sugar, is distributed throughout our body to keep it functioning and healthy.

How do we measure the amount of sugar we eat? The American Heart Association recommends added sugar should be no more than 5 percent of our daily calorie intake. The World Health Organisation advises a maximum of 10 per cent. But who is going to work that out? The best way I can put that in perspective is by putting it around the other way - 90 percent of our calorie intake should not be from added sugar. Which means we should not be eating a lot of it.

The trap here is, while we can control the amount of sugar per day we add to food, we cannot control the amount that food manufacturers are adding. This makes it hard to work out how much we are actually having. The only thing we can do is to use common sense and read the labels on food packaging, which are often not very clear. The main message is we should not eat a whole lot of sugar. The reason for this is, eating a lot of sugar has been linked to some of our major modern lifestyle diseases - heart disease, obesity and diabetes, to name three of the big ones.

When I found out, many years ago, eating too much sugar was harmful I changed my eating habits. Here are some of the things that helped me cut down sugar:

1. I stopped putting sugar in my tea and coffee. This took a little while to get used to but now I have trouble drinking these with added sugar. I do like cappuccino with chocolate on the top, but I do not add sugar. If I am served coffee which is very bitter I will sometimes add a little sugar

2. I cut out eating breakfast cereal with added sugar - which applies to most popular brands. I changed to oats and muesli with low or no added sugar

3. As a family, we changed to raw sugar. There was no white sugar in the house. Raw sugar still has some nutrients in it whereas white sugar has absolutely no nutritional value

4. My wife is a great cook and always had cake in the house and made delicious sweets - made on raw sugar. If I had sweets I would have a small serving but mainly I limited my dessert, cake and cookie eating to the weekends

5. I started reading the labels on food, which did not help much then because the information was pretty poor. However, some foods are obviously high in sugar, so I avoided those.

6. I did not have drinks with a high sugar content. We did not have soda or soft drink in the house except for special occasions

We add sugar because we like it. Unlike most food, which we eat because we are hungry, we eat sugar simply for the pleasure it gives us. And we know it gives us a lift because it quickly converts to glucose and raises our blood sugar. Most of us are not going to give it up completely, but if we want to be healthy we do need to limit the amount of sugar per day we consume.

by: William Burnell

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