As someone who has worked in food service for the past three years, I have heard some wild and often untrue allegations concerning “healthier” foods. Whenever my past or present jobs have worked with gluten-free or low-fat food I overhear, “Well, it has no gluten/fat so it must be healthy.” This is almost never true. In fact, those foods are usually packed with sugar to make them taste as good as “normal” food. And that’s where the real health hazards lie.
Many people are gluten-free because they have celiac disease, or eat low-fat to lower their risk of heart disease and obesity. It makes sense, since being mindful of what you put in your body and how much is the best way to remain healthy. Still, if your choices revolve around buying a product because it’s marketed to seem healthier, instead of looking up nutrition facts, then you are doing yourself a disservice.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that an eight-ounce serving of full-fat yogurt has 140 calories, 7.4 grams of fat and 11 grams of sugar. That same amount of nonfat yogurt has 130 calories, 0.4 grams of fat and 17.4 grams of sugar. So, what is the better choice?
Depending on your caloric intake, about 55 to 83 grams of fat should be consumed per day. Compared to the around 25 to 37.5 grams limit of sugar per day, products that are higher in fat instead of sugar are almost always the better choice.
The lack of this knowledge is not completely the fault of consumers. A little awareness goes a long way in terms of monitoring sugar intake, but how are we supposed to keep track of our sugar consumption when it doesn’t have a daily recommended value on nutrition labels? Furthermore, why don’t nutrition labels differentiate between added sugars and sugars that occur naturally in foods?
The truth is there’s more money to be made in offering consumers more options of the same foods with varying degrees of fat, sugar and calories. Soda drinkers in particular might stop their sweet habit if they realized that their 16 fluid ounces of sugary water had nearly 138 percent of their recommended sugar intake.
The scariest part of consuming sugar, though, is how addicting it is. Gary Taubes, author of “The Case Against Sugar,” wrote a piece for The Guardian this year titled, “Is sugar the world’s most popular drug?”
In the article, he writes about how addicting sugar can be for infants and obese adults. The most chilling part of the feature piece is when he writes, “Most of us today will never know if we suffer even subtle withdrawal symptoms from sugar, because we’ll never go long enough without it to find out.”
I encourage everyone to be more aware of how unhealthy sugar really is, and how much we consume it on a daily basis. When I worked at a bakery this summer, I often snacked on the gluten-free options after my co-worker made the claim that gluten-free desserts are better because they don’t make you “puff up” the same way desserts traditionally made with wheat flour do. In the moment, her preposterous claim made sense. So, over the course of a few weeks, I would unknowingly have about 100 grams of sugar in one or two sittings. It wasn’t until I opened up the bakery’s cookbook that I found out that a single brownie (of which I could easily devour two in one hour) had 45 grams of sugar.
After multiple acne breakouts, slight weight gain and an overall feeling of sluggishness that lasted for the same amount of time I was eating these sweets, the culprit was right there, hiding in plain sight: sugar.
It’s true that everything is good for you when consumed in moderation, but amid an obesity epidemic that has plagued the United States since the 1980s, when will sugar finally be regulated?
Haralambos Kasapidis is a senior majoring in English.