Sugar sugar

Glucose levels and waistline will determine whether a person should kick sugar all together.

Adam’s journal

We have a question this week from a reader: Dear Dr. Prescott, I exercise daily and try to eat healthily. I don’t eat dessert often, but I tend to eat a fair number of energy bars and other processed foods that contain added sugars. With all the bad press that sugar has been getting recently, I wondered whether I need to make a more concerted effort to avoid it?

Mary

Dr. Prescott prescribes

When it comes to sugar, less is definitely more. While no physician or dietitian I’ve ever known has recommended that someone increase sugar intake, that’s functionally what happened when health experts decided that dietary fat was the culprit behind heart disease.

Spurred by dietary guidelines first issued in the 1970s, fat became the Kryptonite we all sought to avoid. So, the food industry responded by creating new lines of low-fat and fat-free products. The problem was, the new products didn’t simply remove fat; to enhance flavor, they added sugar.

Manufacturers touted “healthy” low- and no-fat items like yogurt, granola bars, muffins and cookies. In the ensuing decades, those items flew off the shelves. But eating them often didn’t produce the intended results, with levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes skyrocketing.

It may seem obvious now, but the lurking villain was all the sugar we’d inadvertently added to our diets.

Sugar doesn’t come with any protein, vitamins, minerals or fiber. When we consume it, sugar either displaces more nutritious elements of our diet or simply piles on top of what we already eat to sustain our weight — thus, making us fatter.

For these reasons, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends limiting added sugars to no more than 10 percent of daily caloric intake. With a 2,000-calorie diet, that means no more than 200 calories, or roughly the amount of sugar found in a can of Coke.

But limiting sugar isn’t as simple as banishing soda from our diets. Added sugars also hide in a bevy of prepackaged foods you might not expect: salad dressings, pasta sauces, ketchup, even a jar of pickles.

In ingredient lists, they take on many different disguises, from healthy-sounding beet and apple juices to the notorious high-fructose corn syrup. Still, from your body’s perspective, they’re all the same empty calories.

If you have a sweet tooth, use fruits as a substitute for treats like ice cream, cookies and cake. It’s true that fruits contain naturally occurring glucose and fructose that are no better for you than added sugars. But fruits aren’t particularly calorie-dense, and they come with lots of vitamins, nutrients and fibers. So long as you stay away from fruit juices, which are caloriepacked and lack nutritional benefit, it’s tough to overdo it on oranges, berries and the like.

Like any other attempt to control our diets, limiting our intake of added sugars will only work if we pick strategies that we can live with over the long haul. That means manageable solutions that don’t leave us feeling constantly tempted.

For Mary, that might translate to switching out some energy bars for fresh fruit and spending a little time reading ingredient lists to weed out some sugar-rich processed foods.

In the long run, the best way to ensure we’re not OD'ing on sugar is to have our blood glucose levels tested regularly. And, of course, to monitor our waistlines. If either heads in the wrong direction, we may need to kick a sugar habit.

Dr. Stephen Prescott, a physician and medical researcher, is president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Adam Cohen is a marathoner and OMRF’s senior vice president and general counsel.