Sugar Smarts

Humans are hard-wired to crave sweet foods. In fact, if you’re used to eating a lot highly refined sugary foods, there’s a chance you’ve reset your appetite mechanisms, making you crave sweets even more. But if you want to continue losing weight and achieve your healthiest diet, you’ll have to cut back on foods that contain added sugar, such as sugary cereals, baked goods, sweetened drinks and other processed foods. These products usually contain a lot of calories, and few beneficial nutrients. Though it might be tough at first to control your sweet cravings, you’ll find that over time, you’ll lose your taste for sugary foods.

So, does this mean all sugar is off limits? Not exactly. There are two kinds of sugar in the diet: Added sugar and naturally occurring sugar. Added sugar is, just as is sounds, an ingredient added in creating cookies, candy and other foods. You’ll see all types of added sugar, including refined white sugar, raw sugar, high –fructose corn syrup, fruit juice sweetener, honey, maple syrup, molasses or any other caloric sweeteners, in product ingredient lists. Your body treats them all the same way; don’t be fooled into thinking that fruit juice sweetener (usually grape juice boiled down to a thick, zero-nutrient syrup) is any better for you than high fructose corn syrup.

You don’t have to eliminate added sugar, just keep a lid on it. Food containing it typically contain a lot of calories and sometimes, unhealthy fats, as well. Whereas naturally occurring sugar can be found in foods like fruit, milk and plain yogurt; these foods often offer other perks, like calcium, vitamins and minerals.

Over the next few weeks (and beyond), you’ll be working to limit your intake of added sugars. How much is too much? Use the chart below to learn what your daily cap is:

Unfortunately, parsing out what percent of the sugar in a food is added is impossible. Some organizations are lobbying the FDA to require added sugar to be listed on labels, but in the meantime, your only tip-off is the ingredient list and your own common sense. If a product does not contain fruit or dairy, then all (or nearly all) of the sugar is added. So, the sugar in candy, cookies and cakes is virtually all added sugar. An easy way to cut back on added sugar is to compare labels and buy products with less sugar.