Added Sugar Blues: As Sweet At It Tastes, It’s Even Worse for You Than You Knew

How much sugar did you have today?

If you’re a guy, the American Heart Association says it should have been fewer than 9 teaspoons. For women, the number is six.

Although sugars are not harmful in small amounts to the body, our bodies don’t need added sugars to function properly. Added sugars contribute additional calories and zero nutrients to food.

To be precise, the heart guys aren’t talking just about actual teaspoons of yummy white or brown table sugar crystals or honey or molasses. Their concern is added sugar, a problematic culprit named seven years ago by a group of Harvard nutrition experts whose data in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine concluded that people who got 17-21 percent of their calories from sugar added to processed foods were nearly 40 percent more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than those whose sugar from sweetened foods was less than 10 percent of their total calories.

By 2020, food labels were updated with information about added sugars. Ever since, there’s been a constant barrage of sugar warnings leading to an equally dramatic increase in the use of no calorie sugar replacements such as sucralose (Splenda) Aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal), saccharin (Sweet’N Low) which promised to let you eat sweet and stay trim without affecting your health.

But guess what? Like most promises, there’s a catch. True, a 12-ounce can of sugared soda may contain as much as 10 teaspoons/100 calories sugar, but the Harvard guys found people switching to sugar-free drinks still put on the pounds and were at higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. The working theory is that artificial sweeteners trigger an increased longing for sweet (translation: high calorie) foods. Or maybe they just convinced people that pushing away the soda meant pulling in more food.

Worse yet, there’s the cancer conundrum. Based on its potential carcinogenicity, cyclamate, a sweetener still legal overseas, was banned here 54 years ago. Saccharin’s reputed cancer risk led to a warning label which was dropped in 2000. Aspartame has been studied and cleared for Americans but last year the French health study NutriNet-Santé reported that adults who consumed higher amounts of aspartame were slightly more likely to develop cancer.

The American Heart Association has these tips.

*Toss the table sugar (white and brown), syrup, honey and molasses. Cut back on the amount of sugar added to things you eat or drink regularly like cereal, pancakes, coffee or tea. Try cutting the usual amount of sugar you add by half and wean down from there.

*Swap out the soda. Water is best, but if you want something sweet to drink or are trying to lose weight, diet drinks can be a better choice than sugary drinks.

*Eat fresh, frozen, dried or canned fruits. Choose fruit canned in water or natural juice. Avoid fruit canned in syrup, especially heavy syrup. Drain and rinse in a colander to remove excess syrup or juice.

Compare food labels and choose products with the lowest amounts of added sugars. Dairy and fruit products will contain some natural sugars. Added sugars can be identified in the ingredients list.

By switching to ingredients such as stevia leaf and the sugar alcohols like erythritol found naturally in berries, cherries, plums, pears, and apples. Which was fine until last month when erythritol hit the headlines after researchers at the Cleveland Clinic suggested a connection to problems such as blood clots, stroke, and heart attacks. Stanley Hazen, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, was as surprised as anyone. As he told TIME magazine, “Our original intent was to see if we could find compounds in blood whose levels predict the future development of heart attack, stroke or death. When looking at the data, the very top-ranking compound...was erythritol.”

Which means that when you crave a sweet food AHA says it’s smart to read the label and choose products–even dried, frozen or canned fruits--with the lowest amounts of added sugars, something now clearly noted on the ingredients label.

So what to do when you crave something sweet?

Eat an apple. It’s low in fat, rich in vitamin C and heart healthy potassium. Better yet, its fiber, about 20 percent of your recommended daily requirement in each medium size fruit, slows down your body’s absorption of its sugars meaning you feel fuller longer as they convert to calories more slowly than plain sugar.

No wonder mom used to say one a day keeps the doctor away.