Last week, a good friend and I sat down together for a long overdue lunch and catch up chat. We have a lot in common, both advocates for healthy eating, so naturally our discussion turned to nutrition. In particular, sugar. Like me, she watches how much of the evil white granules she consumes, and keeps a close eye on her kids' consumption, too. She often tells her girls when they have a sweet treat that they have had their sugar for the day. Well one day, before a game, her softball player had chosen a sweet treat to enjoy while they were out for lunch before heading to the ball park. My friend told her daughter, "Okay but now you can't have a treat from concessions after you play." Okay. Fair game. Off to ball park. As you mothers out there can imagine, after the game, here comes the softball player wanting to buy something from concessions because all her friends were. Mom of course reminds the child of her lunchtime indulgence. Child screams, "You are the ONLY mom I know who says You've had your sugar for the day!!!" And my friend admitted to me that she wonders if she should back off a little, let them eat how their friends eat, which mostly is whatever they want.
Later that day, I thought a lot about that discussion, and I wish I had said, "Absolutely not. Do not back off, not even a little." She is teaching her daughters a valuable lesson in balancing their diets, especially where sugar is concerned. The World Health Organization is now recommending for an adult in a normal body mass index range, no more than 25 grams of added sugars in their daily diets. That's about 6 teaspoons. There are up to 10 teaspoons in one can of soda! One can, friends, and I know teenagers who guzzle down 4-5 cans a day. In fact, it is now estimated that the average American child consumes 32 teaspoons of sugar daily. That's WAY more than the recommended 6 teaspoons.
So why does it even matter? Why should we be concerned about the amount of sugar our children consume? Well, because it's not just in their Snickers bars anymore. It's being added by the heaping spoonful to every processed food on the shelves. It's in fast food French fries, canned soup, frozen pizzas, crackers, peanut butter. It's the number one ingredient that has replaced the fat in all the fat free goodies in the stores. Sugar is wreaking havoc on the health of our youth because they are consuming so much more of it than their bodies can handle. We have young children and teens now seeing diseases that in the past have only been seen in adults, and it's gotta be our Standard American Diet, people. SAD, isn't it? Our refined sugar habit has been linked to obesity, acne, nervous tension, hypertension, high blood pressure, diabetes, hypoglycemia, skin irritation, headaches, stiffening of arteries, fatigue, and violent behavior. And yes, these health problems are affecting more and more of our youth population.
Let's talk about insulin. Insulin is a hormone we produce that helps our bodies decide how to derive energy from the foods we eat. Dr. Sara Gottfried explains how this works in the following quote from her book, The Hormone Reset Diet. "Your body runs on glucose, and insulin is one of the master switches. When serving you properly, insulin takes the glucose from the occasional cupcake you eat and stores it in the cells of the liver and muscles as glycogen - a storage form of glucose that can be broken down readily when you need fuel. You are filling up your tank with the gas it needs to run, and sometimes an aggregate of several thousand glucose molecules are kept in the glycogen storage space, like stacking Legos, depending on your fitness. But the catch is that you can only store a small amount of glycogen at any given time. When you eat a cupcake or two every day, there may not be room left in your tank to store the glucose as glycogen. Then insulin turns devious, transforming from a fat-burning hormone into a fat-storage hormone once the glycogen tank is full." In this example, cupcake can be interchanged with any refined sugar filled food, be it bread, a donut, a coke, whatever. So when you make several junky food choices per day, your storage fills up fast and you're stuck converting those carbs into fat instead of using them for fuel, and your body gets sicker and sicker and sicker.
Sugar scares me. The amount of sugar my own children consume daily terrifies me for their future health and I know I harp on them about it too much because of this fear. But I know their diets are just different now than children's diets used to be and the foods they eat are more processed than ever before. I don't want my children facing issues like diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure, etc. at a young age, or any age for that matter. So I've got to follow my friend's lead and remind them, maybe a lot more gently than is my nature, to count their sugars daily. To quietly say to them, "I think you've had your sugar for the day" while they are young may save them a lifetime of health problems later. I'm willing to 'be that mom' for their well-being. Thank you, Tricia, for the reminder.
