Holy Sugar

Posted on by buildingtheloveshack

Image result for sugar pictures

 

I confess to having the blahs…. How can one have the blahs in Summer? Well it’s easy… Have surgery that limits your arm movement, then add-on this humidity that we can’t seem to break this year, which makes me a house prisoner.  Now add-on sitting around which makes you gain weight and you got the blahs.

To fill my what seems like endless days of sitting around I have been reading. I came across an article in Zoomer Magazine on fitness for Yes, the Baby Boomers. We won’t talk about the fact that I’m reading magazines for the Baby Boomers or the question on when did that happened?  Not so long ago I remember reading Teen Beat and now I am reading Zoomers… but anyways back to the article. It talked about nutrition.

There was a scary number in there. The average Canadian eats 26 teaspoons of sugar a day. That equals almost 500 calories a day. It also said that if you look on your labels you will find sugar in salad dressing, barbecue sauce, ketchup, meats and many places you didn’t expect to see it. I wasn’t too surprised to find it in barbecue sauce or ketch-up because they are sweet. But salad dressing?

And so I started looking and sure enough on the label for the salad dressing it read, oil, vinegar, Sugar. Sugar was the third ingredient on the label. WOW…

As I kept looking, I was shocked to see it every where.

Here I have Husband and I on a one dessert a week because we quit smoking… yes we are both now no-smokers and have been for some time.  And like everyone else who quit smoking, we gained the weight and lots of it.

So we are both back to getting active, having one dessert a week and I have increased our daily intake of fruits and vegetables, adding salad to every dinner and now I look at the label and find out I am eating sugar with my salad.

My next project is to make my own salad dressing and read every label of every product we purchase.

It’s interesting when you look at recipes for home cooking, there are very few recipes, that aren’t for desserts, that have sugar in them. Then you look at many processed foods and they seem to have sugar in them.

I am not sure when as a society we increased our need for sugar in our diet. I sure don’t remember my mother or grandmother feeding us sugar. We drank Kool-Aid and we got snacks. They also baked but the food was made in the kitchen, we were never over weight and neither where they and there sure wasn’t any sugar in our salad or our meats.

Image result for kool aid man pictures

 

26 teaspoons a day seem like a lot of sugar to intake and that is the average. No wonder I feel blah.

Well, I have now found another way to keep me busy while I am off waiting for my return to work in another eight weeks. I will be tearing the pantry apart and getting rid of all that sugar stuff.

26 teaspoon a day, I still can’t digest that number mentally. I really hope I have been on the lower end of digesting that number but looking at the circumference of my waist line, I think I have had a few more than I knew.

16 thoughts on “Holy Sugar”

  1. It’s pretty shocking when you start looking at labels! And to think that one of those packets at the diner that you add to coffee is one gram but to have 26 of them is just WOW. Yuck!

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    1. When you start reading the meat labels and find out there is sugar in sausage, hamburgers, and bacon. Then I looked at bread labels and found sugar there too… I think it’s time to start using all those kitchen gadgets I have and start cooking my own stuff.

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      1. One of our County Extension agents conducts two 6-week long walking/running challenges each year and she gives 30 minute long related lessons each week. The sugar lesson was one of them. We were all shocked!

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  3. That is pretty amazing. Last year I had gout in one toe and it was swollen at the base of my big right toe. I’ve followed what I thought was a sensible diet for several years only to find out that I was eating all the wrong things and, on top of it, excess sugar was bad for gout. I gave up sweets in 2011 so I wasn’t eating the sugary treats … it was in everything else I ate. I did not want to take meds so I retooled my whole diet and went on concentrated tart cherry which I mixed with water … no longer on it as it was expensive, but very scary – now I read EVERY label and it is shocking!
    https://lindaschaubblog.net/2017/03/05/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-2/

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    1. We always thought we ate well too until now. I am just realizing how much sugar is in our food. I am weeding off my bowel meds for my IBS. I just started doing digestive enzymes. I am hoping that is the answer to a lifetime of this condition. So far I am having good results.

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      1. That is good to get off those medications – I have a friend with IBS and whenever she is stressed about something her IBS flares up. She has had it since she was a teenager. I also started watching sodium intake … I have not used a salt shaker in decades but I do eat canned soup and it has a lot of sodium. But even bread or milk has sodium – there is no escaping it!

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  4. I had to start reading labels when I was diagnosed with diabetes last year. I too was staggered at how many foods have sugar, and at how much sugar is in those foods. There are so many displays of foods that i can not eat.

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  5. I’m educating my kids on what is healthy and unhealthy. They’re only 3 and they’re starting to tell me, ice cream is not healthy mommy, they drink lots of water and I refrain from having sugary drinks in the house, only allowed at parties and in small quantities and then they tell me, “it’s too sweet mommy, I don’t want my tummy to hurt” Even I’m surprised at times when they tell me they don’t want candy I got for them, just to test them. I started a blog for them ‘ParkRaydars’. I think I’ll do a post of recognizing healthy and unhealthy food, hopefully their peers can learn from them as well. And Thanks for following my blog.

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