By
The Food
and Drug Administration recently came out with a sweet surprise. Its proposed
new nutrition label will finally give us a bit of key information we need to
understand our food: the amount of added sugars.
If you look
at a nutrition label now, you will see how many grams of sugar are in a serving
of your food. That includes all sugars. It counts the lactose in milk and
naturally occurring sugars from fruit. The nutritionally important bit of info
for most of us is not total sugars, but added sugars — which include the
sweetener we call “sugar” plus others like high-fructose corn syrup and honey.
In
addition to the blueberries and the yogurt in your blueberry yogurt, how much
sugar did the manufacturer add? If you’re trying to pick the healthiest yogurt
or granola bar, that’s a fact you need to know.
Until
now, the simplest way to do thiswas something
nobody will try at home. You can count the number of raisins per serving of
Raisin Bran and then calculate the amount of sugar in them. And, as it turns
out, the cereal is actually full of added sugars.
More
than two decades ago, the nutrition activist group Center for Science in the
Public Interest asked the government to include “Added Sugars” on nutrition
labels. The government refused. Why? Because it might confuse consumers.
The
activist group tried again in 1999. That year, sugar consumption hit an all-time
high. Yet again, the answer was no.
In 2013,
with First Lady Michelle Obama calling the nation’s attention to the
catastrophic state of our diets, it was time to try again. And — just recently
— the Food and Drug Administration agreed.
It’s
ridiculous that it took two decades for the government to side with consumers
over the interests of the food industry, but thank goodness our leaders came to
their senses. At least on this one issue.
The
nutrition advice you’ve probably heard on sugar involves phrases like “empty
calories” and “eat sparingly.” The conventional wisdom was that added sugars
were bad simply because they contributed calories to your diet without any
nutrition.
As for
the advice about eating it “sparingly,” that’s not what we do here in the
United States, where about 15 percent of our calories come from sugar.
In
truth, added sugar’s more than just an empty calorie. It’s harmful to your body
in a number of ways, and eating too much can increase your risk of contracting diabetes and heart
disease, having a stroke, and more serious illnesses.
The good
news is, once the new nutrition labels take effect, you’ll at least be able to
know how much you’re eating. Going by the American Heart Association’s
recommendations, women should stick to six teaspoons (25 grams) or less, and
men to nine teaspoons (38 grams) or less.
Hopefully,
food companies will be as eager to claim their products are low in added sugars
as they were to claim “zero trans fats” when that went on the label.
Successfully
reducing sugar consumption to healthier levels, even with labeling, will be no
picnic in the toxic food environment we live in. The real change will come if —
or when — food companies decide to remove heaps of the sweet stuff from our
food instead of admitting to obscene amounts of it on their labels.
And that will be a sweet victory for health.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
OtherWords.org