Sugar vs. added sugar

[Silent3]

In segment on the last Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher interviewed a Dr. Robert Lustig, talking about his new book, "Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease".

To the doctor's credit, he talked Maher down when Maher said, in his typical overwrought way, something like, "So basically, sugar is poison", and delivered a more measured "the poison is in the dose" kind of response.

The dose he's recommending is pretty small, however, at least compared to what we get in a typical American diet. For an adult male like myself, he called a "safe" dose 9 teaspoons a day, or only about 38 grams. I've seen plenty of things that deliver that much sugar in a single serving size.

The doctor made the distinction, however, that this is 9 teaspoons of added sugar. If you're eating an apple, apparently you either don't have to worry about the sugar content of the apple at all, or that sugar gets tallied in a separate column with an unstated limit of its own.

I can kind of, sort of, understand a basis for this distinction: The sugar in an apple comes along with other nutrients and fiber. It's probably absorbed by the body more slowly than added sugars, avoiding spiking your blood sugar level when you eat the apple vs. how the sugar hits you when you eat a twinkie.

But added sugar can be added to things that also have other nutrients and fiber, or other parts of your diet might be very rich in nutrients and fiber. How the hell would your body know or care about the difference, especially if you aren't creating significant blood sugar spikes?

Since I don't spend a lot of time reading the original scientific research that popularized health and diet reporting and rhetoric spins off from (typically in overstated, oversimplified, misunderstood, distorted, and faddish ways) I'm not sure what to make of this talk about sugar.

To put this in context for myself, I'm at a good weight now, having lost about 85 lbs. over the course of a year, and having kept it off for over a year now, maintaining a very steady and trim weight. My last blood work numbers were excellent, including blood sugar level.

I know with my dietary choices I've got to be eating a lot less sugar than most Americans, but even so, when I looked at the labels on the greek yogurt, the protein bar, and the whole grain cereal I ate this morning -- a roughly 600 calorie breakfast -- I'd easily gone over 4 teaspoons of sugar in this one meal, a small part of my typical 3000-3500 calorie daily diet. (I exercise a lot, and typically burn over a thousand calories a day doing exercise, 6 days per week.)

If the distinction between sugar and added sugar is all that important, however, there's no way looking at the label of my yogurt to know what portion of the sugar is "non-added" sugar that would naturally already be in the fruit and in the milk.

Should I discount part of the sugar on the label as non-added sugar? Assuming this 9 teaspoon number isn't just a number pulled out of somebody's ass (perhaps a big assumption), would my own personal limit go up because I exercise so much? Would my limit go up because I'm a taller than average man who weighs less than the average American male only because the average American male is overweight?

Since I'm in pretty good shape at the moment I'm not going to worry about any of this very much right now. At the same time, realizing that someone out there is recommending that I eat less sugar than I know I must be eating does put me in a state of mind to read labels more closely for sugar content and see what I can do to bring my sugar consumption down. Even if a lot of this talk is unsettled science with a liberal does of bullshit, it certainly isn't going to harm me to eat less sugar.

(I'd consider posting this in Health, and maybe I will just for fun at some point, but the signal to noise ration is guaranteed to be low, even if the possible amusement level is high.)

[Warpy]

1. Well, the nutritional labels are your friends

and the processors are really good at adding a ton of sugar to a lot of things you wouldn't expect it to be in, like canned sauces, soups and stews.

Basically count the number of things with an -ose suffix and see how high up they are on the label. Higher up means there is more of it.

A little added sugar, when you control it yourself, can tame a sour tomato sauce or give that something that was missing in a soup or stew. The Chinese use sugar as a flavoring in a lot of savory recipes but don't have much of a sweet tooth for pastries and candy, although that's changing with the introduction of things like soft drinks. Added sugar is not all bad, nor is it all created equally.

Manufacturers don't cook like you do, though. They want their stuff to taste good up to a year after it's canned or frozen and that takes a ton of sugar and salt.

Sugar is not poison and neither is salt. They're just things in our diets that need to be controlled and that means less processed food.

[Silent3]

2. I've got a bit of a problem with all of the talk about "processed" foods too. Which processes?

I'm not doubting that there's a lot of what generally referred to as "processed foods" which are, let us say, less than nutritionally optimal.

However, there are all sorts of "processes" you can perform when making (or manufacturing) food, and they can't all be bad and equally bad. After all, baking is a process. Roasting is a process. Slicing, dicing, grinding, fermenting, boiling, broiling... those are all processes. Is a process good because your grandma's grandma could have done it in her kitchen, but bad because was invented sometime after 1900 and is done in a large vat?

If there was any solid research here, you'd think they could be specific about what which particular processes are detrimental, in what way and to what degree.

By the way, I am aware of how ingredients are listed in order by weight, but still makes it hard to figure out for something like my yogurt what portion of the 15 grams of sugar was already in the yogurt and in the fruit added to the yogurt before additional sweeteners were added. I can at least figure out by looking at a container of plain yogurt that it has much less total sugar, about 4 grams for an equal serving size.

[Warpy]

3. It generally refers to manufactured foods that demand long shelf times

as they go from factory to warehouse to distributor to grocery shelves.

As for the yogurt, just look where the sugar is on the label. Compare it to plain yogurt. Five grams is a teaspoon, fifteen is a tablespoon when you're considering the difference in the carbohydrates between the two.

[Silent3]

4. Oh, they aren't going to make it that easy.

Looking at the black cherry flavor as an example, the plain yogurt and black cherries are the top two ingredients. Extra sweetening comes in two forms: evaporated cane juice, and cherry juice concentrate. If you added the weight of those two juices together, would they weigh more than the cherries or not? What portion of the cherries is sugar? What portion of those two juices is sugar?

As for processing to increase shelf life, even that is done in many different ways. I don't think it can be universally said that anything that increases shelf life makes food worse for you health.

There are also processes and added ingredients that are just for flavor and texture, which may or may not be healthy changes to the food.

Some aspects of "processed" food, gram for gram, ounce for ounce, may not make food any better or worse for you, but it may make the food more addictive and/or seem less filling that other foods with the same caloric content, luring you into consuming larger portions than you should.

[SheilaT]

5. It's a problem.

And as you noticed, by reading the labels on the foods you had for breakfast, there's a surprising lot of sugar in things you'd never think would have it.

If your weight is where you want it to be, and your blood chemistry is where it should be, you don't have a lot to worry about, in my totally unprofessional opinion. Maybe, as you read more labels you'll make some changes in what you eat. Maybe you'll figure out a way to do more cooking from scratch. Personally, I'm not a fan of yogurt, but if I were I'd look into making it. I understand it's not hard to do.

It seems as though simply avoiding the obvious culprits, like soft drinks, obviously sugary snacks, and candy, goes a long way. But I suspect that the cookies and cakes I make from scratch actually have somewhat less sugar than those bought even at a bakery, let alone the boxed cookies at the grocery stores. Boxed cake mixes taste awful to me.

Because I like to bake I've noticed that older recipes tend to contain less sugar than the newer ones.

Here's something else I've noticed. For slightly arcane reasons I had not bought or used any ketchup for about four years. Recently I ordered a hamburger in a restaurant and put some ketchup on it. I was astonished at how incredibly sweet the ketchup was. Had I forgotten what it tasted like? How sweet it was? Or in recent years have the ketchup makers made it sweeter? I'm back to no ketchup.

[Silent3]

6. It's not that I didn't know the sugar was there, it's more recalibrating my idea of "a lot".

Nine teaspoons of sugar doesn't seem like "a lot" to me, at least spread out over the course of an entire day. According to some dietitians at least, that nine teaspoons should be my limit. When I'm eating over 3000 calories per day, that's less than 5% of my caloric intake.

I've already changed what I eat quite a bit from what I used to eat, and I know my diet is a lot healthier now, despite the fact that I can (at least if I treat all of the sugar listed on a nutrition label as if it belonged in that special category "added sugar" -- a dubious assumption for tallying what still seems like a dubious categorization) get most of the way to the supposed nine teaspoon (38 gram) limit just by eating a 600-calorie breakfast consisting of yogurt, a protein bar, and one cup of whole grain cereal with less than half a cup of skim milk.

Doing more cooking from scratch? Hah! Given that I hardly ever even assemble a sandwich at home these days, let alone cook or bake much of anything, I'm definitely a long, long, long way away from making my own Greek yogurt. I never was much of one for cooking or other food prep before, and now that exercise takes up 1.5-2 hours a day (even more sometimes) six days a week, I've got even less time for food prep.

You can, of course, simply get plain yogurt and add your own fruit to it. My wife does that. But besides being a lazy bastard in the kitchen, I love the huge variety of flavors pre-flavored yogurt comes in. There's no way I'd ever have a wide array of different fruits ready to go without having most of it spoil before it got mixed into my yogurt.

[SheilaT]

7. Big smiley face here.

I happen to love to cook, but not always or every day of the week, so I understand not wanting to do it at all.

Maybe the dieticians are more wrong than we realize. And if there's no way to distinguish actual added sugar from what's already in the food itself, just say screw 'em.

I long ago came to the conclusion that dieticians are people who essentially don't care for food very much, and have almost no awareness of different flavors. If someone tells me I can substitute low fat yogurt for full fat sour cream in some recipe and I won't taste the difference, I can tell you they're wrong. I can taste the difference. These are the same people who named a product "I can't believe it's not butter!" because they honestly cannot tell the difference. I can.

Anyway, if your weight is where you want it to be eat what you want, what tastes good to you. Don't even bother to look at most labels, unless your weight starts climbing up and you haven't been slacking off the exercise.

Another one of my pet peeves is the demonization of salt. We actually need salt in our diet. It's important to maintain things like blood volume. It's my understanding that the body doesn't store it. Some people seem to be somewhat sensitive to salt in connection to their blood pressure. But essentially every study I've ever looked at (not that I've made a detailed study here) has lowered salt intake along with lowering weight, and then concludes that it's the salt that influenced the blood pressure. Really?

And the salt thing is just one of the many food items that is treated as either totally horrible and should never be consumed, of if you'd just consume this one other thing you'll never get cancer, or shingles, or any other disease. What's important is a balanced diet, eating a variety of foods. No one food will kill you (unless you're violently allergic to it which is a totally different scenario) and no one food will cure you of anything. Unless you're seriously deficient in some nutrient and that food has huge amounts of it. Again, something else entirely.

[Silent3]

8. Oh, I'm not too worried anyway, I was more interested in getting skeptical reaction...

...to the latest talk about sugar and the odd distinction of "added" sugar.

To the extent I have any concern, it would be: (1) wondering if reducing sugar intake might be a good idea for my long-term health, in ways that wouldn't be easily apparent just going by my current condition, and (2) while my body fat is in the nominally healthy range at a little over 20%, I'd like to get down to the "fit" category with 17% or less, and perhaps that would be easier to do with less sugar.

I'm not concerned enough about either issue, however, to make any immediate or radical changes in my diet,

And yes, I've heard that salt has probably been excessively demonized, and haven't been worrying much about salt consumption or hidden added salt.