Judy Foreman

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Are there guidelines or recommended “daily allowances” for sugar intake?

September 7, 2004 by

You would think so, but the federal government’s guidelines on sugar intake are vague to the point of uselessness and the World Health Organization’s aren’t much better.
Nutritionists agree that many of us eat too much sugar, as well as too many refined carbohydrates like white bread, white rice, white pasta and, potatoes, which are just as bad as sugar, found abundantly in soft drinks, cakes, cookies, ice cream, and candy. What they can’t seem to figure out is a simple formula telling us how much sugar is too much.

The World Health Organization recommends that no more than 10 percent of daily calories come from sugar. For most of us, that’s about 200 calories (or about 50 teaspoons), which is quite a lot, said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. Yet many Americans get double that. For example: A 20-ounce Coke contains 16 teaspoons of sugar.

Jo-Anne Rizzotto, a dietician at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, said federal guidelines used to specify how many teaspoons of sugar a person should consume per day. But the government’s 2000 Dietary Guidelines for Americans aren’t specific, noting simply that people should “moderate” their sugar consumption (www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines).

The bottom line, said Willett, is to keep sugar consumption as low as possible. “Basically, it contains nothing of nutritional value outside of calories, of which we usually have an excess,” she said. Sugar also has adverse metabolic effects, including lowering “good” cholesterol (HDL) and elevating triglycerides. “There’s really no need for any sugar in the diet,” Willett said. But so many prepared foods are so highly sweetened that many of us have been conditioned to expect foods to be unnaturally sweet. If you reduce sugar gradually, Willett said, you can “decondition” yourself from this expectation.

[PUBLISHED CORRECTION – DATE: Wednesday, September 8, 2004: > Correction : Because of a reporting error, the recommended daily sugar intake was inaccurate in the answer to a reader question in yesterday’s Health/Science section. The World Health Organization says that most people should consume no more than 200 calories a day in sugar, which equals about 12.5 teaspoons.]

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