• Do your calculations
Our supermarkets are full of sugar and this can be found in the most unexpected items such as ready meals, gravy powder, spice blends, bread and even pizza. Awareness is the first step. Food labelling can be tricky to decipher, with food manufacturers constantly trying to trick us into thinking their product is healthier than it really is. The general rule of thumb is to look at the sugar content on the nutritional information and compare this to the serving size the values refer to. 4g of sugar is the equivalent of a tsp. The World Health Organisation recommends no more than approx. 6 tsp per day for an adult (25g) and 12g (3 tsp) for a child aged 4-11 years and zero for under 2 years old. When some low-fat yoghurts can contain up to 7 tsp of sugar, pasta sauce up to 11 tsp of sugar, bread up to 1 tsp per slice, it can be a real eye-opener to calculate our daily exposure. There are lots of tools to help, including phone apps, including Change4life tips. If you would like to reduce sugar for the whole family, I can offer lots of delicious recipes, including cakes, biscuits and even confectionary in my book The Sugar Free Family Cookbook
2• Get savvy.
Food manufacturers like to baffle us with science. Your body doesn’t differentiate between refined or unrefined sugar, honey or agave, grape juice or cane juice, dates or Muscovado sugar – it is all converted in exactly the same way. It all spikes your blood sugars and all contain the more detrimental fructose. There are a huge number of names for sugar, here are just a few: agave nectar, cane juice crystals, barley malt, panocha, molasses syrup and trechalose.
• Switch.
You can switch to using a natural sweetener that has no impact on blood sugars or insulin and contains zero fructose. This would be Xylitol (sounds unnatural but it is made from a wood bark). This is available in most supermarkets and the most popular brand is Total Sweet. You can also use Stevia, made from natural stevia leaf, but this is about 300x as sweet as sugar so not so easy to use in recipes. I find buying in liquid form is useful as it only needs a few drops. You can also use erythritol. Again, this sounds like a scary unnatural sweetener but it is made from an alcohol. It does not affect blood sugar or cause an insulin response and, just like xylitol, you can use it just as you would sugar. I like the brands Sukrin and Natvia.
• Reduce.
Whether you are opting for natural sweeteners listed above or simply want to reduce your sugar intake, it is much easier than you think. I did an experiment with a school and we reduce sugar in all recipes by 10% every week or two. We took it to over 40% before it affected the taste or texture of the food – no one noticed. That means we are consuming 40% of unnecessary sugar! Remember as you cut out sugar, your palate changes and you require less and less sweet things.
• Eat Real Food
Remember every time you eat or drink you are either feeding disease or fighting it. Your health will dramatically improve if you cook from scratch and cut out the food manufacturer. Processed food is often full of sugar, salt and unhealthy fats. Eating real food is packed with nutrients, antioxidants and is colourful (not beige coloured like most man-made food). If you read the label and don’t recognise the ingredients, move on. You should not need a chemistry degree to decipher your food.