It’s not easy to keep a track of how much sugar you might consume every day. Who really checks the packaging and keeps a sugar tally?! The World Health Organisation advises that to maintain optimum levels of health we should limit sugar to 6 teaspoons a day. Would this be easy? We’ve decided to mimic what the nation tend to eat in a day on average and tally up the sugar intake.
For your information – 4grams of sugar is equivalent to 1 teaspoon.
1) 2 slices of toast with Nutella for breakfast – Each bread slice contains 1.5g each of sugar (so that’s 3grams in total for 2 slices) and 21grams for 2 table spoons of Nutella spread on your toast. That’s 24grams in total – 6 teaspoons. Shoot, that’s it, we may as well stop this article right here as we’re already at the limit!
2) Mid-morning tea and 2 digestive biscuits. Unfortunately, having sugar in your tea is what half the nation do and we’re no exception here at Infruition HQ! If we have 2 teaspoons and add that to the sugar in two digestive biscuits it’s an extra 5 grams (1.25 teaspoons) of sugar. So for a little mid-morning snack we’ve had 3.25 teaspoons bringing our tally to 9.25 teaspoons thus far.
3) Lunch. By this point, we rustled up a quick ham & cheese sandwich (as it’s the second most popular lunch for office workers based on a study of 2000 by Lurpak). Now the good news is that you’re not going to get any sugar from the cheese or ham… but again, 2 slices of bread equals 3grams… So ¾ teaspoon of sugar. Right – so now we are at 10 teaspoons of sugar and we’ve only just broken into lunchtime. This is tough!
4) A small packet of wasabi nuts for a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. No added sugar here, thank goodness!
5) After work drinks – whoop – let’s get the party started!! We unwound with 2 glasses of wine (3 teaspoons of sugar) so our tally is now at 13 teaspoons. We’re over double the amount and we haven’t even thought about dinner. But, we're having fun and the impact to our health is a real distant memory.
6) For dinner - it was a quick and convenient pizza from the freezer. Disaster, it turns out that an average slice contains around 5grams of sugar, but that went up to 6grams as ours was covered in pepperoni…. And we had 3 slices! It’s also worth noting that pizza sauce can be a big culprit of sugar, as it can have up to 1.1 grams of added sugar per 1/4-cup serving.
So at the end of the day we reached a grand total of nearly 18 teaspoons of sugar, and that’s without any additional unplanned snacks! It’s scary how easy it is to go waaaaay over the recommended daily allowance (by 3 times in our case!), and the importance of finding alternative foods and drinks which are low in sugar. Thankfully there are lots of tips out there on how to cut down. One idea is to increase your consumption of water which will lower your appetite, hydrate you, and give you plenty of other benefits at the same time. If you need some tips to help you drink more water, check-out our article 5 Life Hacks to help you drink more water.
What tricks do you have to moderate how much sugar you consumer? Let us know below - and all tips welcome!
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