For example, most fruits have around 10-20g of sugar per cup of fruit. How is this sugar any different than if I were to eat a granola bar with 10g of added sugar? Or have a drink with added sugar? The USDA says to limit added sugar consumption, but says nothing about limiting regular sugar consumption. Is added sugar chemically any different from sugar found in natural foods?
In: Chemistry
Even ignoring all the healthful components of fruit (fibre, vitamins, antioxidants), it is less bad as a source of sugar due to its natural portion control. Fresh fruit contains fibre and water which fill you up meaning it’s pretty much impossible to eat too many fruits.
Even if you take relatively sugary tropical fruits like bananas they have about 12g of sugar. To get 50g of sugar you’d have to eat 4-5 bananas which is pretty hard to do as you’ll get full after the first couple. For non tropical fruits it’s even harder.
Meanwhile if you take milk chocolate, that’s got about 50g of sugar per 100g bar, which I could easily eat in one go (and have done several times in the past lol)
Plus, studies have shown that giving people more fruit is associated with reduced diabetic markers and reduced obesity, even though it does contain sugar. Which could be for many reasons, maybe getting full up from fruit makes you less inclined to eat junk food/snacks. Or maybe the fact that the sugar in fruit is packaged with fibre and water means it doesn’t contribute to diabetes like white sugar does.
Pretty much they are the same. Sugar in fruit is tied up in fibre. It is slower to digest and you can only eat so much fruit. Processed sugar can be consumed in much higher quantities and will spike in your blood much faster.
Sugar in fruit isn’t refined sugar, it’s natural sugar and fruit is organic, natural to the earth, much more natural than eating granola.
So a lot of people have covered a lot of things. The one interesting thing I was listening to. I think it was a podcast on NPR. They said that the biggest problem we have right now isn’t is the food we eat but the portionings of the food that we eat.
Prior to modern times, calories density was largely dependent on the amount of food you actually consumed. Nowadays that’s not true. Like a honey bun is 500ish calories. You can eat that honey bun in 5 seconds. Your body doesn’t understand that you’ve already consumed 500 calories, so it still feels hungry.
Before modern times it took time to chew food. It took time to consume food so that by the time you finished your meal and over the course of your meal, you would slowly begin to feel full.
That doesn’t really happen anymore. Drinking a soda is 1/8 of the calorie needs of an average human. But it’s not going to make you feel full until your body has time to process some of what it’s gotten.
This is one of the reasons why I add fiber to anything and everything that I eat. You end up reducing the amount of food you consume.
Sugar is good for you. Your body uses it to make energy. Your body knows sugar is good for it, so it makes sure your brain thinks sugar is good by making it tasty.
When you eat fruit, your brain is told by your body that this is good, you should eat as much as you can, since you might not have sugar again later.
There is a lot of sugar in fruit, compared to other foods. Because of that, we are drawn to fruit, knowing that we get that happy feeling when we taste the sugar. Fruit also has lots of nutrients, as are most tasty natural foods.
A long time ago, we figured out how to separate sugar from sugary food (in most cases, sugar cane). We started making a lot of sugar so it was easier to get it without having to collect and store fruit.
When people started making food with sugar, we started adding it to other things to make them tastier. We added a little bit, and it was great. After a while, we got used to having sugar in all our food, instead of just the fruit we only got once in a while. We got used to the taste of sugar, and became less sensitive to it.
So they started adding more. And more. And more. Every time we got used to how much sugar was in our food, they added more to make it special again.
Now, there is so much sugar in our food that it’s unhealthy. It’s too easy to get too much sugar, one of the most important nutrients our bodies need. The food is made to be as tasty as possible, without any of the other nutrients that we need. A few bites of food is like eating enough strawberries to make you feel full.
There’s too much sugar for your body to use, but your body hates throwing things away. It still treats all the sugar you get like it might not get it later, and could never throw away something so important for life. So, it stores it. It takes that sugar and bundles it up and stores it as fat. It will only use that fat if it has to.
Eventually, the sugar collection becomes a sugar hoarding problem. Your body never imagined it’d ever have so much extra sugar that there’d be this much fat stored. It isn’t prepared to throw it out. The fat starts piling up. It builds up around your organs and weighs you down so much that your body has to work much harder just to keep your heart beating.
If you had only eaten fruit, you’d never be able to eat enough to have health problems. You’d get nutrients as you went, and you’d fill up before it was too much sugar. Maybe if you only ate fruit, but even then your weight wouldn’t reach a dangerous level.
As long as we’re talking about this, how am I supposed to interpret the nutrition label on this
Like taking this as [an example](https://www.fda.gov/files/addedsugars_label_1_0.png) the total number of carbs is 27g, with 25 grams of sugar but 23 grams of it is added sugars that’s 46% of my daily value of carbs or is that 46% of my recommended intake of sugar?
Added sugar is fructose. Glucose is the sugar in fruits. Every cell in your body can process glucose. Fructose needs to be broken down by the liver. The liver can’t process the fructose sugar that fast so the sugar hangs around in your blood until it does.
Fruit contains fiber. Fiber makes you feel full so you eat less. Fiber slows down the sugar’s entry into your bloodstream.
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