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Children Should Eat Less Than 25 Grams of Added Sugar Daily
- tomjen3 10y agoChildren arguably shouldn't eat added sugar, or much non-added sugar in the first place. 25 grams a day when we have an obesity epidemic is probably way too high.
- wyager 10y ago25g of sugar is under 100 Calories. This is not a substantial contribution to the caloric intake required to sustain obesity.
- madengr 10y agoSounds damn near impossible. I'll wager a peanut butter sandwich has more than that, not accounting for jelly.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoI'm not sure about either (a) what kind of peanut butter you're eating or (b) how huge of a sandwich you've got.
- healthnutter 10y agoTry eating natural peanut butter. The only listed ingredient should be peanuts. Very healthy.
- infinite8s 10y agoHave you noticed that the price of natural peanut butter is almost 2 times that of the sugar-adulterated peanut butter?
- emidln 10y agoI wonder if this is purely price discrimination or if requiring more peanuts means the cost is actually higher (relative to using HFCS).
- VLM 10y agoNut quality. Try eating a bitter rancid old peanut alone and then smothered in corn syrup. The more sugar you add, the lower quality/cheaper of a nut you can use.
- magic_beans 10y agoIt depends on the season. Prices of natural peanut butter (by natural peanut butter I mean the only ingredients are peanuts and salt) are really cheap right now in September ($3.60 for me). But by February they can get up to $8.00 a jar.
- ams6110 10y agoJust checked the Jif peanut butter in the cupboard. 3g of sugar per serving. But yes with typical supermarket bread and jelly added, a lot more.
- generic_user 10y agoYou can buy both peanut butter and fruit spread without added sugar. They taste much better then the sugar heavy brands.
- themgt 10y agoThis comment is a great microcosm of what's gone wrong in the US food supply. "Peanut butter" doesn't by definition require any ingredients other than peanuts. Want some added salt for flavor? Sure! This is America though. So let's take those healthy salty nuts and mix in a few tablespoons of high-fructose corn syrup! Not just as an option - let's put that in every damn product we offer, except maybe a double the price "natural" option for yuppies. Same with yogurt - great, healthy food: almost impossible to find in a US supermarket without shitloads of added sugar. I don't care about "what the market wants" comments, nor am I a fan of NYC-style "soda laws". I do think it ought to be borderline criminal that basically all the huge companies whose job it is to supply the US public with food have laced a majority of their otherwise healthy product lines with poison, to the point where the inability to find basic foodstuffs not laced with poison is just taken as a fact of modern life.
- DanBC 10y ago25 grams of sugar is about 5 teaspoons. How the fuck does a peanut butter sandwich end up with that much sugar?
- madengr 10y agoIt's between 6-9g. Two tbsp of peanut butter is 3g, then 3-6g for the bread. Now add a tbsp of jelly and it goes up 10g. So you are talking 19g for a pb&j.
- agumonkey 10y agoHaving been "forced" out of sugar by my own body, I can attest sugar is borderline a drug and almost all (if not simply all) processed food is coated with sugar (or fat and salt) to make them more appealing than necessary. Now out of disease I can also attest how easy it is to go back to unhealthy diets and lifestyles. Governments should tax this and give subventions to those who wants to reach a more active healthy lifestyle.
- wyager 10y agoSomething is enjoyable and has mildly negative health effects? Better tax it! Can't trust adults to decide for themselves if the risk of drinking, smoking pot, or God forbid, eating sugar!
- infinite8s 10y agoThe problem is the costs of those actions are usually externalized to everyone else.
- wyager 10y agoOnly if you have socialized healthcare. Private deregulated healthcare internalizes these costs, solving the problem. I agree that if everyone else is on the hook for your medical bills, they have a say over what you ingest. This, of course, is why I'm against everyone being on the hook for everyone else's medical bills...
- swombat 10y agoThese are not mildly negative health effects. There has been an enormous rise in diabetes and obesity, including in children. Large numbers of people are dead because of these side effects and there are enormous costs imposed on the health system.
- wyager 10y ago> These are not mildly negative health effects. Yes they are. Life expectancy changes from median sugar intake are negligible. > There has been an enormous rise in diabetes and obesity, including in children. People have been eating a ton of sugar since the British started colonizing sugar cane producers. The rise in diabetes and obesity coincides with improving nutritional access. As people eat more, they get fatter. Big surprise. The solution is not to tax the shit out of food. > there are enormous costs imposed on the health system. So internalize those externalities and make people pay for their own health care.
- djsumdog 10y agoThis concept should be extended to adults and should include starches and not just sugar. A few years back I dropped to <100g of carbs per day (excluding fibre) and went from 70kg to 61kg and have stayed that way for years. All the research shows cholesterol and fat has nothing to do with heart disease. The leading factor in heart disease is inflammation, and excess sugar damages the arteries causing inflammation. Cholesterol build up is a result of your body constantly trying to repair the damage caused by excess sugar.
- shanusmagnus 10y ago"All the research" and "nothing to do with" are both huge oversimplifications / exaggerations of what otherwise might be a good point.
- sunnyps 10y agoThen you should provide a citation. Here's a quote from the Harvard health blog[1]: "A summary of the committee’s December 2014 meeting says “Cholesterol is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” Translation: You don’t need to worry about cholesterol in your food. "Why not? There’s a growing consensus among nutrition scientists that cholesterol in food has little effect on the amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream. And that’s the cholesterol that matters." [1] http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warning-about-cholesterol-in-food-201502127713 http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni...
- Johnny_Brahms 10y agoWell, the discussion was not about cholesterol, but about fat in general, about which the blog writes > A better focus is on reducing saturated fat and trans fat in the diet, which play greater roles in damaging blood vessels than dietary cholesterol.
- shanusmagnus 10y agoCholesterol in food is not what almost anybody has been concerned about for the last twenty years. Cholesterol produced in the blood as a result of saturated fat intake, or as a consequence of lipid metabolism in the face of tonically elevated glucose load, is another matter. Anyway, a starting point for your literature review on a contrary school of thought (which is, at present, the dominant school of thought) can be found at the American Heart Association [1]. [1] http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/HealthyLiving/HealthyEating/Nutrition/Saturated-Fats_UCM_301110_Article.jsp http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/HealthyLiving/HealthyEating/Nu...
- bruceb 10y agoI think part of the problems is people don't realize how much sugar is in non sweet food. Cheaper spaghetti sauce often has hi fructose corn syrup but one might never guess it. I have starting reading the label of any packaged food more frequently and have been surprised how much sugar is lurking in many non obvious items.
- kyriakos 10y agoI am a bit obsessed with food ingredients so I always read the labels. I noticed there's sugar in most ready made sauces and ready made meals. Indian sauces, pasta sauces, and salad dressings all have a lot of sugar. Surprisingly you can find added sugar in mexican spice mixes and most bread types (probably not a lot but I never understood why).
- headShrinker 10y agoAmerican Indian, American Chinese, and American Thai food are all cooked with huge amounts of sugar. It's kind of gross when you realize how much sugar is in curry or general Tao's chicken, chicken tamarin, volcano chicken...
- mikeash 10y agoMy Chinese in-laws cook some dishes using an insane amount of ketchup, while telling me to eat less sugary foods. They were rather shocked when I pointed out that ketchup is basically sugar syrup with some tomato added.
- kyriakos 10y agoThere's a lot of people who have misconceptions about sugar unfortunately. E.g. my mother in law made a cake she, told me there's no sugar in it, i tried it was very sweet. She then said "yes i only used honey and sweet canned milk but no sugar". Technically she didn't cane sugar directly but if all the ingredients contain it..
- kyriakos 10y ago25g is quite a lot actually when we are talking about "added" sugar. I did a rough estimate of how much my son eats/drinks per day and it's not more than 15g. Maybe it's harder to stay under in USA though.
- tomatsu 10y agoA bowl of cereal and a can of pop and you're way over the budget. If you then add some processed food, you'll consume even more sugar. Even seemingly harmless stuff like baked beans, pasta sauce, or toast contain quite a bit of sugar.
- kyriakos 10y ago25g is about 6 spoons (google says there's 4g per spoon). Kellog's Cornflakes have 8g sugar per 100g serving. A scoop of ice cream has around 15g. So if your child avoid regular soda's and milkshakes, drink natural juices instead of sweetened 25g seems quite decent.
- tomatsu 10y agoAs far as sugar goes, juice is the same as coke. Unlike fruits, juice lacks fiber. The sugar is absorbed instantly. > A scoop of ice cream has around 15g. The problem is that pretty much anything contains sugar. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2993513/Pasta-sauce-sugar-Mars-bar-soup-sweet-cider-reveal-white-stuff-lurking-favourite-foods.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2993513/Pasta-sauc... Cornflakes is the blandest kind of cereal and that one already contains a whopping 8g (32% of your budget). Add some toast, pasta sauce, some low fat yogurt, etc and you're way over those 25 grams of sugar. By the way, Cornflakes are actually worse than they seem. Simple carbs are almost instantly turned into sugar.
- derefr 10y ago> Cornflakes is the blandest kind of cereal Now, now, don't forget about bran.
- ahallock 10y agoConcentrating on grams of sugar seems highly reductive. Usually foods with added sugar are also high in fat, additives, food coloring, etc. I think it's a combination of these things.
- taeric 10y agoFat has actually been reduced rather significantly in ready made foods. That said, you are almost certainly right that we have reduced the model below the complexity of reality. However, just as in machine learning, a simpler model often performs better on new data than a complicated one. Learning From Data (link: http://amlbook.com/ http://amlbook.com/), actually has a very good section explaining this.
- DanBC 10y ago> Usually foods with added sugar are also high in fat, Things like low fat yoghurt often use large amounts of sugar to improve mouth feel. The 80s war on fat in food has been pretty terrible for public health, allowing bags of 100% sugar candy to be sold with big "Fat free!" stickers.
- guelo 10y agoI've been confused by the recent emphasis on added sugars. Why does it make a difference where the sugar comes from? Two bananas also have 25g of sugar but somehow it's different according to this guideline. Maybe it comes from a reluctance to telling people not to eat fruits and vegetables.
- kyriakos 10y agoIt has to do with the way the sugar gets metabolized. Actually the rate it gets absorbed and released in the bloodstream. A banana has a lower glycemic index than refined sugar. A gram of refined sugar will cause a blood sugar spike requiring a large amount of insulin to remove it from the blood. A banana, takes longer to digest and release the sugar meaning the sugar spike is smaller hence less insulin. Type 2 diabetes is thought to be caused by sugar spikes in the blood stream - the more insulin gets released at once the body builds tolerance to insulin and requires more and more to do the same work leading to diabetes. check the following for a list of glucemic index in different foods: http://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycemic_index_and_glycemic_load_for_100_foods http://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glycem...
- timr 10y agoNo. It has to do with the desire for a single, simple guideline that stands in for a bunch of different factors. It's right there in the article: “Children who eat foods loaded with added sugars tend to eat fewer healthy foods, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products that are good for their heart health,” Dr. Vos said. “If your child is eating the right amount of calories to achieve or maintain a healthy body weight, there isn’t much room in their food ‘budget’ for low-value junk foods, which is where most added sugars are found,” Dr. Vos said. This recommendation is coming from the American Heart Association. Diabetes is related to heart health, but they aren't making this recommendation based on an argument about sugar metabolism.
- kyriakos 10y agoThe original question was about what's different with sugar in a banana and refined sugar - I don't think it was in context with the article.
- sreya 10y ago25 grams of sugar is less than a bottle of gatorade...Most kids aren't even close to this target
- apolymath 10y agoThis post should be renamed to "Children Should Eat Zero Grams of Added Sugar Daily" because sugar is more harmful than alcohol, cigarettes, and sitting idly in your office chair all day.