Did you know that every single carbohydrate you eat gets broken down into sugar inside of our body? No matter what the source, whether its bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, cereals, grains, yogurt, juices, sodas, or table sugar, our body breaks down carbohydrates for one main purpose, to be used for energy.
Look, our body doesn’t discriminate between these sources either. Although refined and processed sugars are broken down much more rapidly than naturally occurring sugars, the end result is the same if over consumed. If your body doesn’t use the carbohydrates (sugars) you consume for energy and your reserves are full, which is usually the case unless you’ve just performed some majorly strenuous physical exercise, all those sugars will be shuttled off to be stored as saturated fat in your body.
To give you an example of how much sugar a typical person needs on a continual basis, consider this, the human body is continually circulating on average four to five liters of blood, depending on one’s body size. Within that blood we need only about 4 grams of sugar per hour for all our normal energy, activity, and body functions.
Now, to give you a better perspective of how much sugar is in the products we’re actually consuming on a daily basis, one single 12 oz. can of Coca-Cola contains 39 grams of sugar. That is nearly 10 times the amount of sugar our body needs for normal functions.
So let’s take a look at a typical American meal in order to get a better understanding of how much sugar is in our diet.
- Turkey Sandwich: whole wheat bread, turkey, tomato, lettuce and mayo – Serving size: one sandwich, Calories: 389, Fat: 3g, Carbs: 31g, Protein: 14.5g
- Rold Gold Classic-Style Tiny Twist Pretzels – Serving size: 1oz package, Calories: 110, Fat: 1g, Carbs: 23g, Protein: 2g
- Dannon Light ‘n Fit Nonfat Strawberry Banana Yogurt – Serving size: 6oz, Calories: 80, Fat: 0g, Carbs: 14g, Protein: 5g
- Snapple Iced Tea With Lemon – Serving size: 8oz, Calories: 80, Fat: 0g, Carbs: 22g, Protein: 0g
This one meal, (which for the majority of Americans) would be consider fairly healthy, has 80 grams of (net carbs) or digestible sugars and nearly 2/3 of it comes straight from added sucrose (table sugar), high fructose corn syrup (HSFC), and refined processed starch. Consuming two more meals equal to this throughout the day calculates to approximately half of a 2000 calorie/day diet coming straight from multiple sugar sources.
A typical non-athlete who does light to moderate daily physical activity requires about 4 grams of sugar per hour. That’s the equivalent of just 64 grams per day considering the individual is up for 16 hours and asleep for the remaining 8.
Now, even if we double the daily allotment to include an even more active group that’s still only 128 grams of sugar per day.
As I’ve pointed out earlier, in the typical American diet, at least half of all those 2000 calories are coming straight from various forms of sugar.
So let’s run through some easy math:
There are 4 calories in every gram of starch or sugar
So 1000 calories divided by 4 calories per gram = 250 grams of sugar per day
Now let’s subtract the 250 grams/day we’re ingesting from the very generous 128 grams needed by the body to perform and function.
250 grams per day – 128 grams per day = 122
This leaves the average American with an alarming 122 grams of excess sugar per day.
So how does this add up over the course of one year?
122 excess grams of sugar X 365 days/year = 44,530 excess grams of sugar per year.
Remember there are 4 calories in one gram of sugar. So let’s find out how many extra calories our body isn’t using.
44,530 grams of sugar per year X 4 calories per gram = 178,120 excess sugar calories per year.
Does that sound alarming? Just wait; let’s convert that into fat pounds.
There are 3500 calories in one pound of fat.
178,120 excess sugar calories / 3500 = 50.89 fat pounds.
You’ve just gained over 50 pounds of fat over the course of just one year.
The example I ‘ve laid out here should help you better understand what is actually going on and what we as a society are doing wrong. It’s not the calories per say; it’s where they’re coming from that’s killing us. Trust me when I say it’s not completely your fault, we’ve been misled and misinformed for decades by our trusted resources.
What we truly need is a retooling of the mindset on how we look at the foods we choose in relationship to how they work and react with our body. Once we can grasp this concept we will be able to eat our way back to being a lean and healthy society.
