Are you eating too much sugar?
March 06 2014
The World Health Organization (WHO) is again urging people to lower the amount of sugar they eat, suggesting there are health benefits to restricting so-called free sugars or added sugars to less than five per cent of one’s dietary intake.
What does that mean? Well, for the average adult, that would be about six teaspoons (30 millilitres) of sugar a day — less than the sugar contained in a single can of sugar-sweetened soda. For children, it could be as low as three teaspoons (15 ml) of sugar a day, said Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the WHO’s department of nutrition for health and development.
In the draft recommendations issued Wednesday, the global health agency said people should limit their intake of sugar to no more than 10% of their daily calorie intake, but if they could get to five per cent, that would be better.
“The five per cent would probably be the ideal one and the 10 per cent is the more realistic one,” said Branca.
Free sugars are sugars added to foods by manufacturers, cooks or the people eating the food — brown sugar on oatmeal, for example — as well as natural sugars found in fruit juices, honey, syrups and molasses. Intrinsic sugars are the sugars in whole foods like fruit; intrinsic sugars are not included in the WHO intake limit recommendations.
The sugar in an apple is intrinsic. The sugar in apple juice is free sugar.
The recommendations are likely to be contentious. And nutrition experts who have been waiting for the recommendations expect push back from the food industry, which would need to dramatically reformulate products if consumers were to be able to meet the targets and still eat prepared and packaged foods.
In 2004 when the WHO tried to include the 10 per cent sugar limit recommendation in its Global Strategy for Diet, Physical Activity and Health, the U.S. Congress — under pressure from the sugar industry lobby — threatened to withdraw U.S. funding for the agency. The direct reference to the 10 per cent figure was removed from the final report.
The American Heart Association suggests that added sugars make up no more than half of one’s daily discretionary caloric allowance, which it says would be no more than 100 calories or six teaspoons (30 ml) a day for most American women and 150 calories a day or about nine teaspoons (45 ml) of sugar for men.
Eating a diet of homemade whole foods and cutting back on sweets, processed foods and sodas is a great way to achieve these recommendations.
