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The trend of today’s times is the so-called sugarfree meal plan, where you eliminate sugars if possible. Other studies, however, confirm that sugar is important for brain development. So how is it really? What is an acceptable daily dose?
First, let’s clear one thing up: sugars are a subset of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates also include, for example, fiber, whose consumption is on the contrary desirable, or other complex (composite) carbohydrates.
Sugar, on the other hand, belongs to simple carbohydrates, which also include fruit sugars. Simple sugars are converted into glucose in the body very quickly and immediately enter the bloodstream.
Sugar
A rapid rise in blood sugar triggers a quick release of a large amount of insulin. However, this causes a sharp drop in blood sugar, which in a person manifests as great hunger or a craving for more sweets.
And when you give it to the body, you suddenly have an excess of sugars. And these are stored as reserves in the form of fatty tissue.
Complex carbohydrates break down more slowly and do not provoke such sharp fluctuations in the amount of sugar in the body. They satisfy hunger for a longer time, so a person eats fewer calories but does not starve. And that is the important thing.
If we had to limit something, it would not be carbohydrates in general, but simple sweet sugars. But our body cannot do without them either. So how many should we eat for it to be beneficial?
There is no recommended daily allowance of sugar for an adult or for a child (as there is, for example, with vitamins).
According to the recommendation of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, added sugar should make up at most 10% of daily caloric intake.
If you count on eight thousand kilojoules per day, then your daily sugar allowance comes to 40-50 grams, which is approximately 8-10 small cubes per day (or 4-5 large ones). As for fruit sugar, its amount should not exceed 300 grams per day!
The World Health Organization and the American Heart Association (American Heart Association) have even stricter recommendations: according to them, women should not eat more than 5 small cubes of sugar per day (approx. 25 grams).
What does this mean in practice?
Skipping ten sugar cubes that we put into tea or coffee sounds fairly simple. Remembering the sugars in chocolate bars, pastries and sweet drinks we can still manage, but it gets harder beyond that.
Added sugars are found in yogurts, dairy products, cereal bars, breakfast porridges and flakes.
Natural sweeteners, such as honey or agave syrup, are also still sugars, only compared to white sugar they contain, for example, enzymes or minerals.
Added sugar is also contained in dried fruit and dried meat. So a person has no choice but to watch the values on food packaging and look at how many carbohydrates and how much of that is sugar the product contains.
And if calculating and converting to grams or cubes is complicated for you, a simple guide is given by leading American nutrition consultant Brigitte Zeitlin: “Choose products that have less than 10 grams of sugar per 100 grams of product.”
