How Much Sugar Do I Eat?
What is it?
Sugar is a generalised name for a class of sweet-flavoured carbohydrates; table sugar or granulated sugar is called sucrose (Wikipedia).
How much is that?
It is easy to not put too much thought into how much sugar is in our foods. Until I took out my scales and weighed some sugar recently, I didn’t know.
One standard 5 ml teaspoon holds around 4.2 grams of sugar, and as there are around 4 calories (3.87 cal (16.2 kJ)) per gram, 1 teaspoon of sugar has 16.8 calories. This may not seem like a lot, but wait, there’s more.
If we take drinks such as Coca Cola, Sprite, and Just Juice and normalise the serving sizes to 250 ml or approximately one glass, then in the table below we see that one glass of either beverage provides around 100 calories per glass. (Note: beware of serving sizes and the sizes of the containers that your drink or food comes in. 200-250 ml is an appropriate serving size for drinks, but the Coca Cola bottle we gathered our nutritional information from was 600 ml and that was considered to be one serving.)
Is this a problem? As usual the answer is it depends; it depends on many factors such as your body weight, body composition, your activity levels, and on what you are trying to achieve.
Although figures vary, typical cited calorie consumption for women is 2000 calories, and for men it is 2500 calories (or 8,372 kJ and 10,465 kJ respectively). The challenge with such figures is that they tend to represent averages, and there are few people who are average; most of us fall either below or above average.
Using these figures as the basis of our discussion, we can see that one 250 ml glass of any of the beverages below will provide 1/20th and 1/25th the calorie needs for women and men respectively. Again, is this a problem? Well it still depends.
For instance, if you have a weight management challenge, and you have already consumed your maximum recommended calories, then topping up with around 100 more isn’t going to help your goals, particularly if you do so on a regular basis.
But we need to ask why you would choose a sweet drink in the first place. If you are consuming a sweet beverage as part of a balanced diet, the better choice would be fruit (or vegetable) juices as they provide more vitamins and minerals than soft drinks. If you just happen to want to say relax and imbibe your favourite beverage, then fine, depriving yourself is not necessarily helpful (see book Mindless Eating), but remember that the calorie investment is ~100 calories/glass. If on the other hand you are trying to quench your thirst, then doing so with 100 calories/glass is probably a goal-busting way to do so; perhaps your last glass (diluted?) could be your favourite beverage with the glasses preceding it simply water?
So, what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is that we ought to be aware of what we are eating. It’s OK to relax our defences and indulge occasionally, but for foods we consume on a regular basis, we really ought to check the labels and check our quantities to make sure we are going to meet out dietary goals.
