Added sugars…a subject most of us like to avoid. However, if you are trying to live a healthy lifestyle, then added sugars is something you need to know about.
Let’s break down the phrase “added sugars.”
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word added as:
“to join or unite so as to bring about an increase or improvement.”
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word sugars as:
“a sweet crystallizable material that consists wholly or essentially of sucrose, is colorless or white when pure tending to brown when less refined, is obtained commercially from sugarcane or sugar beet and less extensively from sorghum, maples, and palms, and is important as a source of dietary carbohydrate and as a sweetener and preservative of other foods.”
Separately, these words can be good. However, when you put these words together, trouble begins.
The more sugar you add to your body, the more risk you add to your body to obtain certain health problems such as diabetes or heart disease. When you eat vitamins and minerals your body takes what it needs and delivers it to parts of your body that will use those vitamins and minerals to make that part of your body function properly. The left-over vitamins and minerals your body doesn’t need, works their way out of your system naturally through digestion. Think of it this way…when you bake, you may use 1 cup of flour to make the bread rise. You only measure out 1 cup because the recipe says only 1 cup. The same thing happens to your body. You may only need 1 cup of vitamins to make your body function. Your body will naturally rid itself of excess vitamins it doesn’t need.
What does this have to do with sugar? Vitamins and minerals are easier to work their way out of your body than sugar. When you eat sugar, it gets “sticky.” Sugar will literally stick to the inside of your body making it harder to digest. Let’s go back to my baking analogy. When you mix your ingredients together, do you ever need to scrape the inside of the bowl to mix the batter thoroughly? I believe this is the same concept for what happens to your insides when you eat sugar. You need to scrape the inside walls of your body to get the sugar off in order to digest it. Since sugar sticks to the inside of your body, your body holds onto it much longer than it needs too; causing your body to be heavier.
Since sugar sticks to the inside of your body walls, it’s very dangerous to eat sugar in large amounts. If you mix one batch of cookies together and then decide to make a second batch, you’d most likely add more ingredients to the batter you have already mixed. Adding more ingredients to your previously mixed ingredients will make the batter thicker. If we eat more sugar than we need and sugar sticks to our insides, after a while, sugar will begin to pile itself on top of the last sugar we ate. The sugar inside our bodies will become mounds of sugar that attach to our body walls. The more sugar we eat, the thicker these mounds of sugar get and the smaller our bodies passage ways will become. We need to have clear passage ways for things to flow throughout your body easily such as blood, air, water, and nutrients.
I have asthma. I know how it feels when my airways begin to close. It’s hard for me to breathe and get air to my lungs. It’s not completely the same but if you think of your wind pipe, you breath through your nose and down the air goes into your lungs. If something were to get lodged into your wind pipe and there was no passage for air to get into your lungs, you wouldn’t be able to breath anymore. Blood needs to be able to flow throughout your body for your body to function properly. If sugar is building in your body’s natural blood flow path, eventually, there will be no way for your blood to flow throughout your body meaning your body might not function the way it should. I don’t like to imagine what could happen to my heart, the organ in my body that pumps blood to the rest of my body, if it didn’t have clear passages to get blood throughout my body.
Therefore, it’s very important to watch how much sugar we eat; added or not added. “Just understanding everything in this blog is work itself. Now, I have to watch how much sugar I eat too?” Baby steps. The first way to watch how much sugar you consume is to count the added sugars you eat.
“So, what’s an added sugar?” Added sugars are sugars that are added to food products in a factory somewhere. If you go to an orchard and pick an apple off the tree, and then begin to eat it, you are not getting added sugars from that apple. You are getting natural sugars but not added sugars. If a company comes in, picks some apples, takes them away in a truck, pounds the apples into a liquid form, and then decides to add extra sugar to it to make it taste sweeter, that’s when you get your added sugars; this is what I recommend you limit yourself from eating. If you look at a food label and it says a number next to the sugar content, I recommend you count those sugar numbers and find a number that works for you. Consulting your doctor will also give you a better understanding of how much sugar your body needs.
When I first began my weight loss journey, I barely ate vegetables and fruits. I always heard they were good for your body but I never really cared. I began eating them slowly, and stopped eating the added sugars such as cookies, cakes, cereals, breads, pastas, sodas, juices, etc. The weight came off easier than I had ever imagined. I get my blood drawn every few months, and my blood sugar, triglycerides, cholesterol numbers, along with many other numbers have been coming back in good healthy ranges since I began eating healthier. I’m not saying I don’t eat added sugars at all anymore, but I pay more attention to them now. I try to eat less than 24 grams of added sugar a day.
My motto is, “If it grows out of the ground, off a tree, or off a bush, and doesn’t see the inside of a factory somewhere, then there’s a really good chance that it’s healthy for your body.”
Foods with added sugars
Drinks
- Soda
- Sweetened iced tea (Try making your own sun tea instead of iced tea. You’ll be able to control what ingredients you put inside of it.)
- Lemonade
- Coffee, lattes, and cappuccinos (Watch your added sugar, milks, and creamers.)
- Milk
- Fruit drinks, juices, and Capri suns (Gatorade is a sports drink and should only be consumed if you are an athlete who burns hundreds/thousands of calories at a time.)
Sweets
- Candy
- Candy bars
- Baked goods such as cakes, cookies, brownies, and pies
- Ice Cream
- Pastries
- Donuts
Snacks
- Yogurt (Yogurt could make a great snack if its protein outweighs the sugar content. I like to use pain non-fat Greek yogurt.)
- Apple sauce (Have you ever tried to make your own apple sauce in a slow cooker without adding anything to it? It’s very good.)
Others
- Condiments such as ketchup, syrup, salad dressings
- Peanut butter (The protein in peanut butter is good but the sugar is high. Stick to your serving sizes.)
- Sauces such as pasta sauce, pizza sauce, and barbecue sauce
- Watch how much bread, pasta, white rice, potatoes, and cereal you eat because these are simple carbohydrates where your body will use what it needs and then turn the rest into sugars. Your body needs carbohydrates but it doesn’t need a whole bagel size.
Those foods may taste good, but they don’t fuel my body to make it run properly. A car needs gas to run. If you put soda or juice in the gas tank instead of gas, will the car still run? Our bodies work the same way. Some foods don’t make our bodies function the way our bodies are meant too. I am not a nutritionist, a doctor, or health provider, but I do notice a difference in my body’s performance when I avoid added sugars.