Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This


Imagine that you sit down for breakfast one fine morning to a heaping bowl of about 46 sugar cubes. It would probably make even the least health conscious among us gag with that much sweetness all at once. Yet, this is about how much sugar a lot of us will eat during the day.

Now, imagine two 1 lb bags of sugar plopped on your table and being told that it's part of your diet for the week. Think you would start to get an idea of why it's difficult to lose weight and stave off diabetes?

Imagine up to 150 of those one pound bags each and every year.

It's easy to let sugar slip into our diet. There is sugar in everything. Lots of foods have sugars in them naturally..but food manufacturers aren't content to leave well enough alone and dump more in the form of syrups to make it more tasty, therefore attractive, so as to make money. You can't even get away with foods that declare "low sugar or no sugar added" since the alternative is artificial sweeteners that either have the same effect on your body or may do far worse damage in the long run.

It even appears that the more "healthy" a particular food product is touted as being, the more sugar it has. I was looking around in the grocery yesterday for some breakfast bars that I could slip into my desk for a quick meal when needed. All the healthy and diet bars had a sugar content roughly twice as much as a Snickers candy bar....and I'm willing to bet a Snickers would taste better, it would certainly be cheaper. It is an ongoing struggle to find foods that are convenient and cheap without being loaded with sugar.

Or sodium....but don't get me started on that.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow now that's a post that makes you think.
Bet I did 46 sugar cubes for breakfast.
So glad I found you on BlogExplosion.

YANZ said...

sigh... i know sugar is bad, but i can't help myself... i blame it on my sweet tooth, but i'm just... greedy??

*guilty*guilty*

thanks for the info though, maybe the guilt would help me cut down on the sugar... soon... soon

LindaBee said...

Last year I went on a really successful diet, where I cut out salt, sugar, and dairy. (I DO have this sweet tooth, so I did/do have SOME sugar.) Basically, I tried this, which is a lot like a diabetic diet ...

6-week body makeover ...
http://www.mybodymakeover.com/

The secret is to cook from scratch, with raw food. It takes some planning. I've found that cooking quantities of food ahead works best.

I also found that healthy convenient foods are rare. I've found only one snack (protein) bar that isn't loaded with sugar or salt.

The benefits are fantastic. If you can stick with it, the inches/pounds just disappear and you can focus your attention easier when your blood sugar stabilizes. My SIL ate this way when we traveled to Ireland, and she stopped having dizzy spells.