Sugar Awareness Week: 3 Simple Ways to Reduce your Intake
In light of sugar awareness week, I’m giving you 3 top tips on how you can cut down your sugar intake this year:
Switch to water: instead of drinking sugar-sweetened beverages (this also includes juices too), opt for water and drink this as much as you can throughout the day. It is recommended we should be drinking between 1.5-2 litres of water daily, however this might vary dependant on your physical activity levels, age and / or gender.
Start to become ingredients-savvy: look at the labels on your food packaging and start to look at the ingredients list on foods you are eating, buying or cooking with. As a rule of thumb, if the first ingredient is sugar (or any derivative which can typically be titled as ‘glucose’ ‘maltose’ ‘dextrose’ ‘cane sugar syrup’, for instance), that food is likely to be high in sugar. This is because ingredients are listed in descending order based on their quantities in that food item (the higher up, the more of it there is!). Similarly, when you read the nutrition label on an item, look for the carbohydrate content based on the serving size amount. A low sugar food would typically have less than 5g total sugars per 100g, versus a high sugar food that would contain more than 22.5g of total sugars per 100g.
Be aware of ‘free sugars’: this is sugar that we can most easily spot and reduce in our diet, because it refers to the sugar that is added to food or drink, such as table sugar we add in our tea or coffee, and even honey or syrups we add to our morning porridge. Free sugars also refers to sugars that food manufacturers add to foods such as biscuits, cakes and cereals. Our daily energy intake of free sugars should be less than 5% of our total energy intake (which is no more than 7 teaspoons daily).
Let me know some of your top ways of reducing your sugar consumption this January in the comments below!