Big Sugar Versus Your Body

The sugar industry and its various offshoots, like the soda industry, have spent years trying to trick you.

Big Sugar has paid researchers to conduct misleading — if not false — studies about the health effects of added sweeteners. It has come up with a dizzying array of euphemistic names for those sweeteners. And it has managed to get sugars into a remarkable three-quarters of all packaged foods in American supermarkets.

Most of us, as a result, eat a lot of sugar. We are surrounded by it, and it’s delicious. Unfortunately, sugar also encourages overeating and causes health problems. As confusing as the research on diet can often seem, it consistently points to the harms of sugar, including obesity, diabetes and other diseases.

Virtually the only way to eat a healthy amount of sugar is to make a conscious effort. You can think of it as a political act: resisting the sugar industry’s attempts to profit off your body. Or you can simply think of it as taking care of yourself.

I’m one of those people with a raging sweet tooth. I consider ice cream to be a gift from the gods, and I stash small chocolates in too many drawers. A couple years ago, I realized that I needed to cut back. If the ice cream and chocolates were going to stay, other sweeteners had to go.

So my wife and I went cold turkey for one month: no added sweeteners. No sugar, no honey, no corn syrup, no stevia. It wasn’t easy, but it worked. We discovered which sugars we missed and would go back to eating — and which had needlessly snuck into our diets. Along the way, we also ate fewer processed foods and more vegetables, fruit, eggs, nuts, meat and fish.

In a column last year, I described this “month without sugar,” and I’m still hearing from readers who have done it themselves or are considering it. I highly recommend it. But I have also heard from readers who want to consume less sugar without first going cold turkey.

Fair enough. The sugarless month is just a means to an end, and there are other means. Working with experts and colleagues, I’ve now put together an online guide to cutting back on sugar without spending more money or losing the pleasure of eating. That last part is important. Done right, a less sweet diet can be more enjoyable than a sugar-packed one.

Our overarching suggestion is to choose a couple of simple rules. Don’t agonize over the sugar content of every single thing you eat. You’ll make yourself miserable and you will probably give up before too long. Instead, decide on two or three systemic changes, and stick to them. You can add changes later.

Your rules should revolve around added sweeteners, rather than the natural ones in fruits, vegetables and dairy. It’s not that the added ones are so much worse (despite what you may have heard about high-fructose corn syrup). Many researchers believe that sugar is sugar. But people don’t generally overeat natural sugars. Have you ever inhaled five apples in one sitting?

The online guide has many more details, but here are a few rules to consider:

The best news about sugar is that Americans are finally catching on. Sales of regular soda are plunging. Some food brands are starting to brag about not adding sweeteners. For a long time, we didn’t even realize what Big Sugar was trying to do us. Now we do — and we can fight back.