We have spent this week on what the claims on the front of a pack actually mean. This post is the practical end of it.
Before anything else: this is not a post about cutting sugar out. Sugar is not a moral category and I am not going to hand you a list of things to feel bad about.
It is simply useful to know where most of it is coming from, because for a lot of us it is not where we assume. The sweet things we eat on purpose are rarely the surprise. The surprises are the things we never thought to turn over.
Yoghurt
This is the big one, and it catches people out because yoghurt sits firmly in the healthy category in most of our heads.
A flavoured tub can carry a fair amount of sugar, and the fruit in it is contributing less of that than the sugar added alongside it. Plain yoghurt with your own fruit stirred through gives you the same thing with the sweetness under your control, and you can dial it down over a few weeks without really noticing.
Worth knowing that plain does not mean unsweetened on every pack, so it is still a per 100g check rather than a rule.
Breakfast cereal and muesli
The second big one, and the health-sounding shelf is not automatically the lower-sugar shelf.
Toasted muesli usually sits higher than untoasted, because the toasting generally involves something sweet to make it clump and brown. Granola higher again. Plenty of cereals marketed on their fibre or their wholegrain content carry a good deal of sugar alongside it, and both things are true at once.
None of which makes them bad breakfasts. It is worth knowing because breakfast is the meal most of us repeat, so it is the one where small numbers add up. We wrote about building a breakfast you can actually repeat if that is useful.
The savoury things nobody checks
This is where people are most often surprised, because these are not sweet foods, so they may not get the cautionary eye you would turn on something sweet.
Pasta sauces and simmer sauces. Marinades. Salad dressings. Barbecue sauce, sweet chilli, plum, hoisin, teriyaki and most stir fry sauces. Some chutneys and relishes. Tomato sauce, obviously, though most people expect that one.
A few of these are used in small enough amounts that it hardly matters. Others go in by the half jar. The per 100g figure plus a rough sense of how much you actually use is the whole calculation.
Drinks
Liquid sugar is worth its own mention because it arrives without fibre and without anything to slow it down, which is a different experience for your body than the same sugar inside a piece of fruit. We went through why a carbohydrate on its own behaves differently previously.
Juice, cordial, flavoured milks, iced teas, sports drinks and the sweeter coffees. Not things to eliminate, just things to count, because a drink tends not to register as eating. We went into why what you drink alongside a meal behaves differently previously.
What to actually do
Not very much, which is rather the point.
Pick one thing this week, ideally something you buy every shop, and turn it over. Read the per 100g sugar figure. That is the whole task.
You may find it is perfectly reasonable and you carry on exactly as you were. You may find one product where an easy swap exists. Either outcome is a good one, because you now know what you are working with instead of guessing.
The takeaway: Most of the sugar people are not expecting comes from flavoured yoghurt, toasted muesli and granola, savoury sauces and dressings, and drinks. None of it needs to be cut out. Check the per 100g figure on one regular purchase, and decide from there rather than from the front of the pack.
The science behind this post:
- Food Standards Australia New Zealand. Sugar labelling. Total sugars in the nutrition information panel include both naturally occurring and added sugars. foodstandards.gov.au
- National Health and Medical Research Council. Australian Dietary Guidelines. Guidance on limiting foods and drinks containing added sugars. eatforhealth.gov.au
- Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, Standard 1.2.8: Nutrition information requirements. foodstandards.gov.au