Reduce Refined Sugar |
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For an 'average' person, this would mean reducing your consumption of refined sugar by about one third, from the present average of about 24 per cent of your daily energy intake to about 15 per cent. The easiest way to make this reduction is to stop or at least reduce adding refined sugar to your food and drink, because that's under your control. Instead, learn to appreciate the natural flavor of the foods. Add sweetness by adding fruit (but remember it does contain natural fruit sugar), or add flavor with spices. Despite some controversy fanned by the sugar industry we feel quite safe using artificial sweeteners, like saccharin and cyclamate. The International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded that there was no convincing evidence to link these artificial sweeteners with cancer in humans at the levels of use likely to occur in normal eating and drinking. Honey, brown sugar and 'raw' sugar and are alternatives to refined sugar, but they contain just as many kilojoules. You may prefer to use honey for its flavor, but beware of any other claims for magical properties. Honey is about 78 per cent sugars and 20 per cent water. Anything else in there is in very small amounts, meaning you would need to eat a lot of the sugars to get much of those other substances. There is nothing special about honey. It is essentially a sugar and water food for baby bees, that can be enjoyed in moderation by humans. The other important possibility for reducing your intake of refined sugar is through your choice of processed foods. It is staggering, when you read the labels, to discover just how many processed foods have added sugar, sometimes disguised as fructose, glucose, sucrose, lactose or maltose. They are all sugars and, although they vary in their digestibility, they will all ultimately give you the same number of kilojoules. Get into the habit of reading the labels and choosing processed foods with no added sugar. The more people buy them, the more the manufacturers will produce them. The carbohydrates that are both complex and digestible are the starches. Rice, potatoes, wheat and corn are rich sources of digestible starch. Like the simple carbohydrates they are good energy sources and can reduce hunger and fatigue. But they have the added advantage, because of their complex structure, that they take time and energy to be digested. So they provide less surplus energy and they give a slow and steady release of blood sugar, preventing hunger, which will help you not want to snack unwisely.There have been popular myths about the short-term effects of eating simple carbohydrates. Sports coaches and confectionery manufacturers have been fond of suggesting they are a quick source of energy. They suggest you swallow some glucose or munch on a chocolate bar to get going. Researchers have now found the exact opposite to be true. The main effect of eating a lot of carbohydrate by itself is sedating, calming and quieting. In some people it tends to induce sleep. This sedating effect can be avoided, if you want to, by eating even a small amount of protein along with the carbohydrate. In other words, if you'd like to relax and maybe doze off, eat a carbohydrate-rich meal. If you'd like to enjoy some carbohydrates but not get sedated, eat a balanced meal. If you want energy for sport, especially sustained energy, eat a balanced diet all the time. Like the sugars, some starches are processed out of their natural food sources to be used as processed foods alone or added to other foods. The best example of this is refined flour. just as refining sugar removes most of the nutritional value of the original plant leaving just its energy content, so milling grain to produce refined flour removes most of the nutritional value of the original grain, leaving just its energy content. These refined starches are still complex carbohydrates rather than simple ones and so will require time and energy to digest. But they are poor nutritional substitutes for the unrefined, wholemeal flours that have retained more of the other nutrients in the original grain. But we are again suggesting reduction, not elimination. |
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