I love to cook and bake! I guess I always have. However, when I developed the digestive issues that prompted me to give up all grains and refined sugars (see my post on my history), I had to learn a new way to cook and bake which included eliminating ingredients that were inflammatory and processed with ingredients that were harmful to my healing. The first of these ingredients I will deal with is refined sugars.
Even though I don’t normally have a “sweet tooth”, giving up refined sugar was difficult for the baker and the mom in me. If you are unsure how much sugar you and your family intake, just take a walk through the grocery store and read the labels of your “go-to” processed food items.
Let’s start with breakfast cereals. Check out the sugar content on processed breakfast cereals and let’s start with a one-cup serving of Special K Cereal, the cereal that many people eat if they are trying to lose weight. Special K has 4 grams of sugar per one cup of cereal. Four grams is approximately equal to one teaspoon. Now let’s compare a “kid” cereal. Trix has 12 grams of sugar per one cup serving. That is equal to three teaspoons of sugar.
Now let’s look at an old classic cereal: Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. Let’s also consider the difference between a serving (3/4 cup as listed on the box) as opposed to a bowl of cereal. If the man in your house eats a bowl of cereal like my husband does (when I have it in the house), he is eating far more than a one-cup serving; maybe more than double, depending on the size of the bowl. One serving of the Frosted Flakes has 10 grams of refined sugar…that doesn’t sound bad until you figure out that a bowl is more than double that serving amount. If your bowl is perhaps 75 grams, that puts the sugar intake up to 25 grams per bowl and that 25 grams equals more than six teaspoons of sugar.
Ok, so let’s say you just “grab a bar” on your way out the door. A Nutrigrain Cereal Bar (sounds healthy, right?) has 13 grams of sugar, more than three teaspoons. If you start adding up the sugar you are consuming just from processed foods and then add it to the sugar you add to your foods, you will start to see why some studies estimate that the average American consumes approximately 19.5 teaspoons (82 grams) of sugar each day which translates into about 66 pounds of added sugar each year, per person!
Reading the labels and educating yourself about what is in the processed foods you buy is the first step to lessening the sugar in your diet. You will also need to educate yourself on the many aliases that sugar goes by: dextrose, fructose, dextrin, fructose, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), lactose, maltose, maltodextrin, mall, mannose, panocha, and many more. As you begin the process of reading labels, you will be surprised how many of your staple items contain sugar: ketchup, pickles, pasta and other meat sauces, mayonnaise, and salad dressings, just to name a few.
Now, I do not have a medical degree, so feel free to do your own research and draw your own conclusions. However, I found that from the day I stopped eating refined sugar, it took my body about two weeks to get through what seemed like a “detox” period and for the sugar cravings to stop. I discovered that once I was past that time period, food began to taste different…better. I did not crave sweets and foods tasted sweeter to me without sweetener and typically “sweet” foods were too sweet for me. I also had more energy and definitely fewer “highs and lows”.
That was 2013, and to this day, I do not eat refined sugar. Occasionally, someone will beg me to “taste” something…and if I do, I wish I hadn’t. My sweeteners of choice are natural and/or organic maple syrup (NOT pancake syrup), local raw honey (I use it sparingly, mostly just in my cup of green tea in the morning, because although it IS natural and has many wonderfully healing properties, it does have a high glycemic index), organic stevia powder (use sparingly due to extremely sweet taste) and organic coconut sugar (I use this in place of brown sugar in baking).
Hope you have found this post thought-provoking as well as helpful as your journey to a healthier you! Till next time, when I talk about flour: the good, the bad and the choices you have.
