THE TRUTH ABOUT SUGAR

Iwas sitting in the audience at the recent symposium “The Cost of Sugar” held at Auckland Hospital, when a fellow attendee shared a story with me. For a long time, she said, she hosted jam-making workshops at a community garden in Auckland. They were well-attended until recently, but now she struggled to fill the course.

“People are scared of the sugar,” she said. “When I run the workshops now, people always ask, how can we make jam without the sugar?”

As a hot nutrition topic it shows no sign of cooling. We’re more conscious of the sugar in our food than ever before. There’s good reason for this: emerging research and worldwide health recommendations have highlighted its harmful effects — it is implicated in the rise of obesity, dental decay and diabetes — and the fact our food supply is full of it.

How much sugar Kiwis are eating is tricky to determine. There’s a lack of data on consumption.

Professor Elaine Rush of AUT co-authored a paper in 2014 that looked at what has been recorded. It stated: “In the last 10 years … imports of ‘centrifugal cane sugar’ (sugar) into New Zealand have averaged more the 220,000 metric tonnes each year.

“For the New Zealand population of 4. 2 million this is equivalent, each year, to 52kg of sugar for every person, or one kilo a week.”

Not all this is sugar we’re eating or drinking. An unknown amount is used in producing beer and bread as part of the fermentation process. We export some sugar in refined form, and as an ingredient in processed food. And some may be used in the biofuels industry.

Beer, bread and exports aside, these numbers still suggest many probably consume a lot more than is good for us. How much sugar we should consume is far more clear.

The World Health Organisation recommends we get no more than 10 per cent of our energy (calories or kilojoules) from free sugars. In practical terms, that means around 11tsp (a tsp is 4.9g) a day for an average adult. For added health benefit, the WHO recommends we aim for half that — or no more than 5 per cent of energy — 5½ tsp a day.

It ’s important to note that reference to free sugars. These are added to foods in processing, by the cook or by the consumer, and also syrups, fruit juices and honey.

Professor Jim Mann of Otago University, who helped formulate the WHO guidelines, says it ’s important to note the difference between free and added sugars — and to focus on the former.

“It ’s really important to use the term free sugar, because there’s quite a lot of free sugar that doesn’t necessarily qualify as added sugar.

“Fruit juice in New Zealand is a very obvious example”.

The other type of sugars occur naturally — known as intrinsic sugars — in foods such as fruit, vegetables and dairy.

Intrinsic sugars are encapsulated by a plant cell wall. This means they tend to be digested more slowly because the cell wall must be broken down first. They take longer to enter the blood stream than free sugars, and tend to come in foods that have other health-giving elements such as fibre, vitamins and minerals. The WHO hasn’t placed any limits on intrinsic sugars.

It ’s easy to see why many of us are still unsure about what counts as sugar and where it hides. And marketers are seizing on our growing interest in sugar and coming up with products and packaging claims that are not helping.

A quick scan of the supermarket aisles reveals new front- of-pack claims ranging from a straightforward “no added sugar’” to the emphatic “absolutely no refined sugar”. But products bearing these claims are not always what we might expect.

Nutrition Foundation nutritionist Sarah Hanrahan says such claims could mask sugar by other names. “The sugar could be replaced by another ingredient that behaves in essentially the same way”.

Read the packet, she suggests, and often you’ll find honey, syrup, coconut sugar or fruit juice.

“That’s incredibly misleading. Saying ‘no refined sugar’ is nonsense,” says Mann.

Hanrahan says there’s another problem: by focusing on sugar in isolation we risk similar mistakes to those made in the past, when manufacturers gave us a wide array of fat-free processed foods in response to demand for less fat.

Products were laden with sugar and other refined carbohydrates. They were highly processed and often sugary foods no healthier than the ones they replaced.

Mann agrees, and says the new Health Star ratings system isn’t helping. “It needs radical revision, particularly with regard to sugar, because you can have four stars [on a product] loaded with sugar, provided it hasn’t got