The dangers of hidden sugar
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The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
Sugar is everywhere, not just in sweets and fizzy drinks, but in foods we often think of as healthy too. So how much sugar are we really eating? Are some types better than others? And should we be worried about the hidden sugars in our everyday diet? Well, joining me now to discuss this is registered dietitian Sarah Keogh. Sarah, lovely to speak to you. So we hear when it comes to all different foods and different food groups, everything in moderation.
How much hidden sugar are we consuming in our diet?
Does that apply to sugar too?
Yes, definitely. I mean, one of the things we don't want is people nearly obsessing about every little tiny bit of sugar in our food because we don't need to. We absolutely need to limit sugar. We don't want to be going over, you know, seven to 10 teaspoons of added sugar a day in our food. But we really don't need to be obsessively reading every label and every pack. I mean, most people already know what the high sugar foods are and that we need to limit them. So it's more just taking a bit of a sensible approach around it.
Seven to 10 teaspoons. I have to say, I think that sounds pretty generous, but can you actually get through that pretty easily in a day?
Yeah.
Are all types of sugar the same and should we worry about them?
You know, it depends on what you're eating. The main place where you will get a lot of sugar is if you're drinking soft drinks. So if you're having sort of fizzy drinks that are sugar, they can have easily sort of eight to ten teaspoons of sugar, if not more, in sort of a can of a soft drink. So when we see people who are big sugar consumers, that's usually where we see the big, big amounts. You know, if someone is kind of buying sort of a 500ml bottle of soft drink and they're drinking maybe two of those in the day, like that's a huge amount of sugar coming in. But if someone's kind of So relatively normal eating, you know, and there's a little bit of sugar that might be in a fruit yogurt or a little bit of sugar that might be in a bit of a breakfast cereal or something like that.
Those amounts are rarely huge unless you're eating huge amounts of them.
I did buy something recently for the kids. I think it was a vitamin instead on the front of the packet. No added sugar. I thought, Grant, OK, perfect. I just want to give them the vitamin. I don't want to give them another sugar hit in their diet. And then I turned the pack around when I got home, when I had bought it, when I'd already given them the two little jellies. And the first ingredient in it was sucrose. So are we actually a bit confused, I suppose, as to what is sugar and what no added sugar actually means when we see it on a pack?
Well, that sounds interesting. If the ingredient was sucrose and it says no added sugar, it doesn't sound like that was accurately labelled. Yeah, I'd love to see that label, actually. Just, I mean, one of those things, if you have no added sugar, it doesn't mean no sugar, because if it had no sugar, it would say sugar-free or no sugar. So if it says no added sugar, it means there is sugar in there. But what it means is usually that it's naturally occurring. So what you might see is if you bought something like fruit juice, And that can say no added sugar, but it will naturally because fruit juice itself is naturally got a certain amount of sugar in it. There will be sugar in it.
What is the recommended daily limit for added sugar intake?
You might see it sometimes I see it on jams where it says no added sugar, but they've used something like grape juice instead. So even though they haven't added like table sugar, there is sugar in the product. So a little bit of the no added sugar ones, I'd have a bit of a glance at the sugar in them. We consider low sugar to be less than five grams of sugar per 100 grams and less than two and a half grams of sugar per 100 mils if it's a drink. Now, that doesn't mean everything has to be under that. But if it's high, we would say anything over about 22 grams of sugar per 100 grams in a food would be high in sugar. But again, we don't need to avoid every little bit of sugar. It's what your total intake is in the day.
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