Annabel Karmel
parenting author
We are all programmed from birth to like sweet things. Scientists believe this is because poisonous foods such as some berries are naturally bitter, so sweet tastes are associated with food that is safe.
Not all sugar is bad. There are natural sugars that you can find in food such as fruit. These forms of sugar haven’t been played about with and are not bad for you as long as you don’t eat too much.
But sugar is added to all sorts of manufactured food, especially into savoury food you wouldn’t think had sugar added, from soups and sauces to pizza, crisps and ready meals. This means you can add much more sugar to your daily diet than you think.
A lot of breakfast cereals are also stuffed full of sugar, sometimes as much as thirty-five per cent. This is not a good way to start the day as it will not give you enough sustained energy to get you through the morning. There is a debate at the moment over whether these cereals should be moved to the biscuit aisle in shops! My rule of thumb is: if you look at the label of something and sugar is listed in the top three ingredients, put it back on the shelf.
There are a couple of reasons you get told not to eat too much sugar. For one, it is bad for your teeth. Have you ever done that experiment where you take a tooth that has fallen out and drop it into a glass of fizzy drink? (A 2p coin will also work if you have no teeth to hand.) See what happens to the tooth or coin even after just a few hours!
Sugar does the most damage to your teeth when you eat it frequently, so it’s best to eat sugary foods as part of your meals rather than as snacks between meals.
Sugar is also bad for other parts of your body if you eat too much every day. Eating sugar can change your behaviour. When you eat sugar, it goes into your bloodstream giving you a burst of energy, and your body produces something called insulin, to deal with this sugar. This spike in energy doesn’t last very long and you can feel very tired and wobbly once the sugar burst has finished. If you eat lots of sugar your blood sugar levels keep on going up and down and up and down. Your body doesn’t need all this sugar, so it stores the extra, which can lead to more weight gain than is healthy.