How much sugar is good for you?

Ah, sugar. We all love it and many of us crave it, but what’s amazing about this ubiquitous sweetener is that there is so little agreement on one simple question: how much should we eat a day?

Scientists all agree we eat too much of it but if the war on fat has done anything, it’s given sugar a free ride and made people curiously unwilling to truly decry it.

The American Heart Association recommends 25g (6 teaspoons) of sugar for women and 40g (9 teaspoons) of sugar for men per day. Futurelife South Africa takes a tougher stance, pointing out that people who consume 1 or 2 cokes, fantas or sprites a day (sugary drinks, basically) are 25% as likely to develop type 2 diabetes. Their stance is this: no more than 14 grams a day (3.5 teaspoons).

But even that figure seems high. Go a step further and watch Damon Gameau’s popular documentary on the subject, That Sugar Film, and he espouses the merits of eating no more than 4g of sugar a day, the equivalent to one teaspoon. (In fact, Gameau doesn’t eat any sugar whatsoever, but he claims 4g should be the limit if you do).

In the end, the consensus seems to be this: cut down on the sugar you eat or suffer the consequences. Be it mood swings in the short term or health issues like diabetes in the long term, sugar is good for short bursts of energy but mercilessly short-lived and likely to give sugar addicts their short fix before the expected crash.

The juice equation

Let’s get some differences out the way. Eating an orange is not the same as drinking an orange juice.

An actual orange contains fibres, water and vitamins and it’s nearly impossible to eat more than three of four at a time. An orange juice contains eight, nine, ten squeezed oranges sans the roughage and good stuff and containing merely the sugar and some of the water.

Unrefined sugar

Nor are all sugars created equal. Fruits are unrefined sugars, while supermarket fare is normally refined. Seriously, refined sugars are everywhere you look. The next time you go to a supermarket, ignore the first and last aisle and peruse any of the others. You’re bound to find shelf after shelf loaded with hidden refined sugars.

Per Futurelife:

“The problem is that sugar isn’t only found in products that are obviously sweet, like chocolate and sweets. A tub of low-fat drinking yoghurt contains around six teaspoons of sugar, a medium-sized muffin has 2.5 teaspoons, a tablespoon of tomato sauce has almost two teaspoons of sugar, and a cup of muesli has more than six teaspoons of sugar. In the average day, most people eat far more sugar than they should, mostly because they are unaware for how much sugar their pre-packaged foods contain.”

The sugar epidemic

In Gamau’s movie, That Sugar Film, he eats 2400 grams of sugar in 60 days, the equivalent to 40g of sugar a day. He steers clear entirely of chocolate and traditionally “bad’ sugars and only eats healthy yoghurts, orange juices and so forth. And yet he’s still able to reach the 2400 mark without trouble.

In short, be careful what you buy and what you ingest. If it’s “low fat”, that’s normally a byword for “loaded with sugar”. Get your sugars from healthy, natural sources (like fruit), and start viewing oranges as a nighttime dessert treat, not a foodstuff we should juice and compress ten times over into a small plastic tub.

In the end, you are what you eat and sugar is proven to have serious health consequences. But not only that, it destabilizes one’s mood and leaves people feeling cranky.

Ultimately, you shouldn’t eat any unrefined sugar at all. Like weening yourself of any drug, breaking the sugar addiction should be undertaken wholeheartedly with the benefits of the separation front and centre in your mind.