By Melissa Breyer for Care2.com
The federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans suggest an upper limit of 25 percent of daily calories come from added sugar. Doesn’t that seem really high? If you have an extra 500 calories to spare, wouldn’t it be wise to spend it on something with some nutritive value? Aside from a waste of calories, a new study shows that adults who consume high levels of sugar have significantly elevated levels of several risk factors for heart disease.
The study, conducted by a group of researchers at the University of California, Davis, and in Japan suggests that the generally-accepted guidelines for sugar may be too lenient and should be reconsidered. The results of their study were reported online in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, and will appear in the journal’s October print edition.
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Maybe it was the recession or maybe the public started listening to the health professionals’ pleas, but either way, added sugar consumption has actually decreased in the United States.
Research has been continually held to track the added sugar consumption in this country. These stats refer to extra sugar used to sweeten foods, not naturally occurring sugars like fructose in fruit. One of the biggest culprits of added sugar consumption is found in soda. The quarter drop in sugar consumption was due majorly to the decrease in soda consumption.
The experts believe that the initiatives to remove sodas and sweetened drinks from schools had a large effect on the numbers. Also, the multiple campaigns to make consumers aware of the extreme amounts of sugar in small amounts of soda are believed to have been effective.
The study also leads the experts to believe that people were simply not able to afford as many calories as they were in previous years due to the economy. Hopefully, as the recession ends, this will be one number that will stay low and not increase.
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Renowned Princeton physiological psychologist and researcher Bart Hoebel has died at the age of 76. He was a leader in research on eating behaviors and the addictive qualities of food. He seems to have been a professor that invested in his students, and we hope that some of them will continue his research in his absence.
Below are just some highlights of what Dr. Hoebel’s research has taught us.
Sugar is addictive and affects brain functions the same way as cocaine and heroin.
High-fructose corn syrup leads to more weight gain than ingesting the same amount of calories via traditional sugar. It also causes abnormal increases in body fat, particularly in the belly, and triglycerides.
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The commercial seems innocent – a mom, trying to do the right thing for her family. She’s looking for a healthy breakfast choice, one that her kids will eat. She opens the pantry and pulls out a jar of Nutella, and the family happily sits down to nosh on it. She’s surrounded by smiling faces, all enjoying a breakfast of Nutella spread on whole grain toast. It’s a blissful shot, one that most moms would give their right arm to enjoy. Everyone eating breakfast with no fuss, no complaint, no “I hate that!” within hearing.
Sounds too good to be true? Well, it is. We’ve been ’round this debate before. Despite a lawsuit, the company is still insisting that Nutella is a nutritious breakfast choice. But is it really, or is this just a case of false advertising?
Janine Bolton, RD, has this to say about Nutella for breakfast: “I would not consider Nutella part of a healthy or balanced breakfast for kids. A balanced breakfast is one that features foods from different food groups, so that we get a variety of nutrients. Nutella does not belong to any food group and packs in over 10 grams of sugar per tablespoon. I wouldn’t recommend Nutella for anything other than an occasional treat.”
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Raisins seem like a pretty innocent food. They don’t contain added sugars, artificial preservatives or unnatural food colorings. But should they be considered as good as grapes?
According to the 2010 Report of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, 75 percent of Americans (including men, women and children ages nine to 18) do not eat enough fruit on a daily basis. According to data from the Japanese research group Nippon Data 80/90, this statistic looks no better in twenty other first-world nations. The International Nut and Dried Fruit Council has put forward a paper titled “Valuable Tools to Meet Dietary Recommendations for Fruit Intake,” which suggests that dried fruit is “nutritionally equivalent” to fresh, and should be treated as such in government dietary recommendations and guidelines around the world.
On one hand, this paper is a lobbying tool, putting science and statistics at the hands of marketers to promote a product. On the other hand, it proposes a seemingly reasonable solution for over-fed yet malnourished populations. In fact, MyPlate materials already suggests that dried fruits, such as raisins, be considered for healthy snack.
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