Foods with added sugar are everywhere, even in surprising places like supermarket bread and ready meals. One journalist discovered this first-hand during a six-week challenge to eliminate added refined sugar from her diet, avoiding honey and fruit juice but continuing to eat natural sugars in whole fruit and complex carbohydrates.
From the outset, she noticed changes to her energy levels, with the post-lunch slump disappearing. However, she often felt listless and found herself searching for something sweet to eat as if she was missing out. The challenge highlighted just how much sugar is added to foods: a deli sourdough sandwich contained 5.7g of sugar, a bolognese ready meal 9g, and a slice of common supermarket bread about 1.2g of sugar per slice.
Overconsumption of sugar is extremely common in modern diets and is linked to cavities, inflammation, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer. Dietary guidelines in the UK recommend less than seven teaspoons (30g) of added sugars per day, but many adults exceed this. Research shows high-sugar diets can increase insulin resistance and the risk of type 2 diabetes, with sugar also found to raise fat levels in the liver.
Professor Ashley Gearhardt from the University of Michigan noted that humans are born liking sweet tastes, but food manufacturers have become adept at delivering sweetness cheaply. Fructose, particularly from corn syrup, is toxic to mitochondria, the cellular machinery that powers the body, according to professor Robert Lustig, a leading expert on the harms of sugar.
The journalist's experience underscores the difficulty of avoiding added sugars in a typical diet and the potential health benefits of reducing intake. While giving up sugar is not easy, her experiment suggests that breaking the daily sugar habit is possible and can lead to noticeable changes in wellbeing.
