Authors: Anne Alexander,Julia VanTine
Eating in response to emotions as varied as boredom, loneliness, or anxiety—what’s called
emotional eating
—is real. I told you about my stress-induced binges on sugar as a college student. Those episodes didn’t lead to much weight gain. The drama around food played out in my head rather than on my body. Back then, I honestly thought those candy bars would help me power through final exams. Now I know that sugar had its hooks in me, emotionally speaking. I was lucky. Those hooks only “pulled” when I was under stress. But for some people (maybe you), the dig of those hooks is constant; they struggle with cravings every day.
More than one person on our test panel described the connection to sugar as feeling like addiction. One told me she’d find herself leaving work in the middle of the day to drive to the corner pharmacy for chocolate, thinking, “What am I doing?” Another described himself as obsessed with sugary foods—“I feel like I spend my whole day thinking about sugar.”
In fact, in a study of 40 women of varying body sizes (some lean, some overweight) published in the
Archives of General Psychiatry
, those who scored higher on a scientifically designed food-addiction scale showed more activity in the parts of the brain associated with drug and alcohol addiction when they were shown pictures of chocolate milkshakes.
One sign of using sugar to manage emotions is that responding to a sugar craving—eating, say, chocolate or ice cream to satisfy it—doesn’t alleviate it. Rather, trying to satisfy the craving prompts a desire for more.
Memory plays a key role in the link between sugar and feelings. Many of the sugary foods we love and crave transport us back to times when we felt loved and cared for. Maybe fresh-from-the-oven cookies remind you of your beloved Nana. Perhaps you unwind with a bowl of ice cream in front of the TV every night because as a little kid, you did the very same thing with your dad, and that was your time together. Habit ties into the emotional attraction, too. If you’re used to having a muffin for breakfast, cookies in the afternoon, or dessert after dinner, something feels off if you skip it.
We all know that regular soda is liquid sugar. For a while, you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing about the controversial “Big Gulp ban” in New York City. But you rarely hear that kind of passion over a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread, which can have 2 teaspoons of added sugar per slice, or a bowl of raisin bran, which contains 4½ teaspoons—some of it from the raisins, but most of it added. (As I’ll explain later, you should be consuming only 6 to 9 teaspoons of added sugar per day.) It’s one thing to know you’re eating a sugar bomb. It’s quite another to learn that many foods you consider healthy or don’t even think of as sweet can be sugar bombs, too.
There are two main types of added sugars in foods: the kind you know about and the kind you don’t.
Straight-Up Sugar.
Found in candy, sweetened soft drinks (sodas, juice drinks, flavored milks, coffee drinks), sweetened breakfast cereals, energy and
cereal bars, and desserts, this type of sugar is right out there, loud and proud. While it’s often listed as “sugar” on a food’s ingredient label, it might also be called by any number of different names (see
this page
).
Even if you’re aware that these foods pack sugar, you may not realize just how much. For instance, doesn’t raspberry iced tea sound a lot better than Coke? A 16-ounce Coke has 52 grams, or 13 teaspoons, of sugar. A 16-ounce
bottle of Snapple Raspberry Tea has 36 grams of sugar, or 9 teaspoons—better, but not by much.
Secret Sugar.
Wander down any center aisle of your supermarket. Pick up bottles, jars, and boxes at random. More often than not, you’re likely to find sugar listed as an ingredient, even if you don’t recognize its alias.
True to their name, however, Secret Sugars lurk in foods you don’t even think of as sweet. These include pasta sauce, frozen entrées (low calorie or otherwise), packages of ramen noodle soup (the sugar is in the packet of broth, which tastes salty!), salad dressings, ketchup, barbecue sauce, and some deli meats and breakfast sausages. There are also sweeteners that you may not realize are sugar. For example, despite its Garden of Eden name, agave nectar contains more fructose than table sugar. And a popular brand of yogurt came under legal fire in 2012 for its simultaneous use of evaporated cane juice and claim of “no sugar added.” It’s frustrating, but once you’re familiar with the many words for sugar that appear in a product’s ingredients list, you’ll be better prepared to control your sugar choices.
Unfortunately, food manufacturers are not required to distinguish between natural and added sugars on a food label. All you’ll see is a gram amount for sugars. That can make determining your intake of added sugar tricky. For instance, you could pick up a 6-ounce cup of plain low-fat yogurt, look at the Nutrition Facts label, and see that it has 12 grams of sugar. You might think that sounds like a lot, but that’s not
added
sugar—it’s the sugar naturally present in dairy products. Look at the ingredients list and you won’t see any form of added sugar listed, so you know it’s free of added sugar.
But what about fruit yogurt? Fruit has natural sugar, and the yogurt has natural sugar. Does that mean that the 26 grams of sugar listed on the label for a 6-ounce container of low-fat blueberry yogurt is natural sugar? Check the list.
Added sugar goes by many names. Anything that ends in
–ose
is sugar, and so is anything with
sugar
or
syrup
after the name. If you see any of the words in the list on a food’s ingredients label, the product contains added sugar.
Next, check out how many sources of sugar there are on the label. Ingredients are listed in order of predominance by weight. That means the product contains more of the first ingredient than any other single ingredient. Since sugar comes in a variety of forms, it is possible that sugar could be the predominant ingredient when you combine them together.
For example, the blueberry yogurt ingredients list reads:
Cultured grade A low-fat milk, blueberries,
sugar, fructose syrup, high-fructose corn syrup,
contains less than 1% of modified cornstarch, pectin, kosher gelatin, sodium phosphate, malic acid, natural flavor, calcium phosphate. Contains active yogurt cultures including
L. acidophilus
.
The ingredients highlighted in bold are all forms of sugar. Add them together and chances are there’s more added sugar in this yogurt than blueberries! It’s impossible to tease out exactly how much added sugar this yogurt contains, but if you’re armed with some back knowledge, you can make a reasonable guess.
We said above that 6 ounces of plain low-fat yogurt has 12 grams of sugar. So right there you know that about 14 grams of the sugar in the yogurt don’t come from the milk. Maybe
a few of those grams come from the blueberries themselves. Let’s be generous and say there’s ¼ cup of blueberries in that yogurt. That amount has 4 grams of sugar. You’re left with 10 grams or 2½ teaspoons of added sugar in the yogurt. (Every teaspoon of sugar has 4 grams and 6 calories.) Given the fact that you should be getting only 6 to 9 teaspoons of added sugar on a typical day, is this the way you want to use a third of them?
By getting a general idea of how much natural sugar there is in various grains, fruits, dairy products, and vegetables, you will find it easier and easier to guesstimate the amount of added sugar in packaged products.
These are all different names for sugar:
• Agave nectar
• Barley malt
• Beet sugar
• Brown rice syrup
• Brown sugar
• Buttered sugar
• Cane crystals
• Cane juice
• Cane sugar
• Caramel
• Carob syrup
• Castor sugar
• Coconut sugar
• Corn sweetener
• Corn syrup
• Corn syrup solids
• Crystalline fructose
• Date sugar
• Dextrose
• Evaporated cane juice
• Fructose
• Fruit juice concentrates
• Glucose
• High-fructose corn syrup
• Honey
• Invert sugar
• Lactose
• Maltose
• Malt syrup
• Molasses
• Muscovado sugar
• Raw sugar
• Rice bran syrup
• Rice syrup
• Sorghum
• Sorghum syrup
• Sucrose
• Sugar
• Syrup
• Turbinado sugar
Sugar Mimics
are foods that don’t typically taste like sugar but mimic its action in the body. Foods like crackers, pretzels, potato chips, bagels, white rice, and pasta may not contain sugar per se, but they might as well—they’re digested as rapidly as sugar. And they have the same effect on the body: Glucose floods the bloodstream, triggering a rise in the fat storage hormone insulin and disruptions in other hormones that control appetite. Thus, Sugar Mimics have the same harmful effects as Straight-Up and Secret Sugars.
Maybe you already know that a steady diet of such refined carbohydrates, stripped of their fiber and nutrients, is associated with overweight and chronic disease. Not your problem, you say. You start the day with whole wheat toast or bran cereal. You snack on whole grain crackers and hummus. Occasionally, you splurge on a whole grain bagel. Whole grain equals healthy. Right?
Not quite. If your whole grain intake consists mostly of foods made with
whole grain flours, such as whole wheat English muffins or whole grain cereals and crackers, you can also grow a sugar belly.
On a recent trip to the supermarket, I came across a beverage sweetened with erythritol that, according to its nutrition label, contained 5 calories and 1 gram of sugar per serving. I’d never heard of erythritol, so I decided to investigate.
What I found: erythritol (pronounced ih-RITH-ri-tawl) is a sugar alcohol, one of several (such as xylitol and sorbitol) that are used to sweeten beverages, candies, gum, jams, and yogurt with few or no calories.
Sugar alcohols as well as the natural sweetener stevia and artificial sweeteners such as sucralose (marketed as Splenda) are all safe, according to the FDA. But after some research and discussions with
Prevention
advisory board members, the nutritionists who developed this plan and I decided not to include
any
sugar substitutes in the Sugar Smart Diet. Not even zero-calorie stevia, derived from an herb, which is as natural as it gets.
Why? Because they deliver hundreds of times the sweetness of white table sugar, with few or no calories. And evidence suggests that exposing your taste buds to these high-intensity sweeteners makes them less receptive to natural sources of sweetness such as fruit. For example, sucralose is 600 times sweeter than sucrose; stevia, 200 to 300 times as sweet. Neotame, a relatively new zero-calorie sweetener, is more than
7,000 times
sweeter than white table sugar! Remember the name. While not yet widely used, neotame is expected to find its way into beverages, dairy products, frozen desserts, baked goods, and gums. High-intensity sweeteners undermine sugar freedom because they reduce your appreciation for the true taste of sweet—the kind that comes from actual food rather than from vats in industrial parks.
More worrisome: the link between the use of artificial sweeteners and an increased risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes. The theory is that exposing our bodies to sweetness without calories can lead to an outpouring of insulin, thereby leading to insulin resistance. For example, a study published in
Diabetes Care
found that diet soda drinkers had an increased risk for type 2 diabetes, and several large studies have associated the use of artificial sweeteners with weight gain.
On the Sugar Smart Diet, you’ll stick to natural sweeteners like honey, maple syrup, and dried fruit most of the time, indulging in decadent sugar splurges when you choose to. Once you eliminate diet drinks, artificially sweetened yogurt, or those pink, blue, or yellow packets that you stir into your morning coffee, you likely won’t miss them. After Phase 2, the flavor of whole foods and natural sweeteners will seem incredibly intense. Skeptical? One of our test panelists, Nora, described the taste of broccoli as “sweet as candy” and Pellegrino with a slice of lemon as “an explosion of flavor.” She rightsized her “sweet buds,” and so can you.
The FDA has a strict definition of whole grains: cereal grains that consist of the intact, ground, cracked, or flaked kernel, which includes the bran (where most of the fiber is), the germ (chock-f of protein and healthy fats), and the starchy innermost portion (the endosperm). (In contrast, refined grains contain only the endosperm.)
Whole grains themselves—brown rice, steel-cut and rolled oats, wheat berries—meet that criteria, and brim with fiber and nutrients. It takes longer for digestive enzymes in the stomach to reach the starch inside whole grains or grains cracked into large pieces, which slows down the conversion of starch to sugar.
For products such as bread or pasta to be labeled whole grain, the FDA says, the grain can be ground, cracked, or flaked, but must retain the same proportions of bran, germ, and endosperm as the intact grain. So far so good.
However, in the process of making whole wheat or whole grain flour, the kernels are pulverized practically to dust, so they’re digested about as quickly as white flour, table sugar, or HFCS. This means that they can spike blood sugar and insulin levels, leading to hunger and prompting you to reach for more of these foods. You’re caught in an unending cycle of cravings and consumption.
But that cycle can be broken, and the Sugar Smart Diet can help you do it. What makes the Sugar Smart Diet unique is that it helps you get at sugar in
all its guises and from all angles
. You learn to identify and cut back on Straight-Up Sugars, Secret Sugars, and Sugar Mimics. You learn to face and manage the physical and emotional pull of sugar. Our 32-day plan combines the power of healthy, whole foods, physical activity, emotional coping strategies, and sugar know-how to help you outsmart sugar cravings without feeling hungry or deprived—and lose weight and improve your health in the process. It will get you off that sugar merry-go-round and quench those nearly unstoppable cravings once and for all, by showing you how to hit your sugar reset button.