A new dietary sugar intake study from the University of Utah shows what happens when mice eat the kind of diet many Americans now eat: 25% of total calories in added sugars and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The results were chilling: females died at twice the rate of controls, while males lost fertility and territorial instinct. And as the researchers pointed out when the corn and sugar associations tried to downplay the significance and shuffle blame, city mice tend to eat what humans near them eat. Yeah.
So of course, as the mother of a diabetic kid with a known and prominent sweet tooth (that goes for both of us, but we also love vegetables, or we’d never survive), I have to ask, how do you keep your added sugar calories under maybe 13% instead of 25%?
I don’t have a simple answer to this, particularly as I’ve discovered that most of my friends don’t cook anymore, if they ever did. Most of them think making soup means opening a can and dinner means ordering pizza. Snack, and occasionally breakfast too, is a power bar (shudder). All vegetables are precut, and many die in the fridge of sad neglect. They have good intentions; Whole Foods rubs its hands with glee when they see them wander in.
And although they’re smart, they have a very hard time wrapping their heads around the differences between added sugar, “naturally”-sourced or “unprocessed” brown sugar, sugars naturally present in whole unprocessed foods…agave syrup, power bars, “sugar-free” cookies…blah blah blah…all the gimmicks, in other words.
They don’t really understand the noncommercial measure that counts most for actual diabetics: total grams of carbohydrate in the current meal. Because that’s what you have to calculate and dose insulin for. Not just the sugars.
But even then, you don’t calculate for the whole day’s eating and just give one big dose based on a guess of what you might eat later. You calculate meal by meal and give a dose of short-acting insulin for that meal.
Calculating added sugar calories against total calories in a day is really difficult when you’re the mouse, so to speak. That’s the way nutrition researchers think about measuring the effects of your diet. It’s not the way people think as they’re getting ready to eat.
Especially if you’re eating out or you don’t have every food label right in front of you or you don’t walk around every minute with a meticulous food diary. It’s like doing taxes when all you want to do is choose and eat a decent lunch.
WHAT DOES WORK?
I’d say, thinking like a diabetic. Or rather, in this case, like a diabetic’s mom.
- First, definitely go meal-by-meal. Be sane.
- Second, in any given meal–or snack–estimate the sugar grams as a fraction of the total carb grams, not the total calories, which can come from fat as well as carb. Too confusing.
- Third, just count all the sweet stuff together. The whole idea of comparing added sugar vs. total consumed sugar is a pain in the tush to figure out. Once it’s in your system, it’s all sugar, and popular New Age-y fantasies about agave syrup and Hawaiian brown sugar and palm sugar being “natural” and “healthier” tend to fog things even worse.
- Count fresh fruit, plain milk and yogurt–-these are also in the form of sugar, not starch–and just figure that fresh fruit, milk and yogurt are the best choices (duh) per serving because they’re less concentrated in sugars than candy, pies, cakes, cookies, snack bars, power bars and …. syrup.
- And then really look at the nutrition labels for anything packaged or processed. Including vegetables. If nothing else, it’ll be obvious why I rant against carrot juice instead of whole carrots, for example…
The first step for any of this, though is to know how much carb you’re actually eating.
Step 0. Know thou thy carbs. Continue reading
Filed under: Desserts, Diabetes, Food Politics, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: added sugars, carb counting, diabetes, low-carb diet, nutrition labeling, sugar consumption, sugar-free | Comments Off on Beating sugar shock
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