WELLNESS WEDNESDAYS:
A Day of Sugar
“Briefly, inflammation is a telltale sign that something
isn’t right in the body, that the body is encountering harmful stimuli, which
can be any number of things from pathogens to damaged cells and irritants. To protect itself and try to remove the injurious
stimuli, the body triggers inflammation, an elaborate response involving the
vascular system, the immune system, and various cells within the injured
tissue. The ultimate goal is to start
healing, but when inflammation becomes chronic due to disease or prolonged
stress, it can become destructive. One
of the ways we can measure inflammation in the body is by assessing levels of
C-reactive protein (CRP), a protein whose levels increase when inflammation is
present…Researchers are now discovering bridges between certain kinds of
inflammation and our most pernicious degenerative diseases, including heart
disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and an
accelerated aging process in general.
Virtually all chronic conditions have been linked to chronic
inflammation, which, put simply, creates an imbalance in your system that
stimulates negative effects on your health.”
-- from The End of Illness by David B. Agus, M.D.
Sugar is part of every lesson taught in our Growing Healthy
Kids project. Kids love sugar and no
wonder. It is sweet and it is the
ingredient that makes candy fun. It is also more addictive than crack
cocaine. I see the addiction it causes
in children every time I do a program at the Boys and Girls Club. I will set a couple of bottles of soda on the
table next to a bag of sugar. The kids
instantly want to drink the soda and to stick their fingers into the bag of sugar for a
taste. Boys will grab the sodas and
stuff them into their pockets, then check to see if I am looking. Girls
will hover around the sugar bag and ask to have a taste. It scares me to see how addictive sugar is
and how powerfully addicted American children have become to it.
Sugar starts a chain of inflammation in the body which is
the spark which awakens many diseases.
While reading The End of Illness recently, the quote by Dr. Agus above really hit me. While Dr. Agus’ primary
focus is cancer and mine is obesity, we both share a common interest in
educating others about what happens to your body and your health when you eat
foods that promote disease. Healing
begins when you commit to eating more good foods and less of the bad.
As promised in last week’s Wellness Wednesdays article,
today’s lesson is about becoming a nutrition detective and learn what a day’s
worth of sugar should be vs what people really eat. Start with the facts about sugar:
- Sugar has NO NUTRITIONAL VALUE – zippo – nada!
- Sugar has no vitamins
- Sugar has no minerals
- Sugar has no fiber
- Sugar has no enzymes
- Sugar DOES have calories, though, which is part of the problem. Sugar has lots of calories (“empty calories”)
- Sugar acts like a match that lights a fire, or inflammation, inside the body. This is what Dr. Agus was talking about.
The first lesson in being a nutrition detective is to decide
what to look for. The Nutrition Facts label shows grams of sugar that foods
contain. You can look for grams of
sugar OR you can convert the grams to teaspoons of sugar. You can also learn to spot the zillion
different names of sugar and look for them on the list of ingredient on
processed food. Sugar has many names and
if it is one (or two or three, as commonly happens in processed foods) of the
first five ingredients on a label, then I recommend you NOT buy that food
because it is mainly sugar. Start by
looking for these common names for sugar:
high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and cane sugar.
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| Small pile of sugar (4 teaspoons) is the most elementary age kids should consume in a day. Middle pile is sugar in one soda (11 teaspoons). Big pile is what an average American middle or high school student consumes in one day (33 teaspoons). |
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| The kids were very serious about their jobs as Nutrition Detectives. |
Thanks to the kids at Gifford Youth Activity Center in Vero
Beach, Florida, for helping me with the demonstrations you see in the pictures. According to American Heart Association,
children ages 4-8 should eat and drink no more than 12.5 grams of sugar a
day. Divide 12.5 by 4 and you get 3 (and
a fraction) teaspoons of sugar. Kids
ages 9-18 should be eating no more than 33 grams of sugar a day. Divide 33 by 4 and you get 8-1/4 teaspoons of
sugar.
How much sugar are we eating every day, on average, in
America? According to the American Heart Association, adults consume about 22
teaspoons a day and kids consume around 33 teaspoons a day.
One 12 ounce soda (root beer was what we used in the
demonstration at Gifford Youth Activity Center) has around 45 grams of
sugar. When you divide the grams of
sugar by 4 you get the number of teaspoons of sugar. So one can of soda has about 11-1/4 teaspoons
of sugar, more sugar than kids should have in an entire day!
To summarize:
- If you have elementary age children, they should be eating and drinking no more than 12.5 grams of sugar (or about 3 teaspoons) a day.
- If your kids are in middle or high school, they should be eating and drinking no more than 33 grams of sugar (or a little more than 8 teaspoons) a day.
- The average amount of sugar a child 4-8 consumes in one day is 21 teaspoons!
- The average amount of sugar a kid 9-18 years of age consume is 33 teaspoons a day.
I hope this lesson in how to be a Nutrition Detective will
get you and your family checking Nutrition Facts labels when you go
shopping. Watch out for foods loaded
with added sugars. Every day we have choices.
If you would like more information about all the names for sugar, then get a copy of Nourish and Flourish (see top right corner). This is the first book from the Growing Healthy Kids project. It will guide you and your family on a path to better tasting food without sugar - and it is filled with kid-tested recipes!
In gratitude,
Nancy Heinrich
Founder, Growing Healthy Kids, Inc.
