I was at a party last week and someone made the alarming comment that over 50% of all our refined sugar intake comes from sugar-sweetened beverages, like sodas, “sports” drinks like Gatorade, sweetened fruit juices , and the sugar added to coffee and tea. So I decided to do a sleuthing on beverage consumption trends
My first search took me to a medical website confirming my friend’s neat little party statistic and showing that per capita consumption of sugar-sweetened cereals is steadily rising and casusing growing health problems. Between 1990 and 2000 across America there were 130,000 new cases of diabetes. 14,000 new cases of coronary heart disease directly attributed to sugar drinks. This in turn has resulted in an additional $350 million health care costs.
Some health experts, includng Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo of the University of California, San Francisco and Dr. Kelly Brownell at the Rudd Center for Food Policy at Yale University, recommend adding a 1 cent per ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, which they predict would decrease consumption by about 10%, saving about $35 million in health care costs and improving health dramatically.
The American Heart Association recommends that we limit sugar-sweetened beverages to 450 calories or less per week (36 ounces), based on a daily 2000 calorie diet. This means that we have a long way to go because our average refined sugar consumption is close to 400 calories per day!
High beverage consumption is particularly bad for increase levels of obesity. I don’t know how they do some of these research studies but one of them apparently demonstrated that consumption of just one sugar drink each day caused a 15 pound weight gain over 5 years, all other factors being equal.
Sugar beverages are also a growing problem with children. Recently the famous chef, Jamie Oliver, gave a talk on TED where he did a very impactful demonstration of the amount of sugar consumed by kids just by drinking chocolate milk in elementary school. I won’t spoil it by telling you what the demonstration was, but I highly recommend that you watch it (click here and hang on until minute twelve).
Jamie Oliver decided to come to North America to start a food revolution, focused on teaching kids how to eat. If you watch the video you will be shocked to see how little kids know about fruits and vegetables. Our director of Purchasing, Darren, saw the video and proudly proclaimed that because his 3 year old son James unpacks their spud! bin each week, he knows his fruits and vegetables better than most adults.
In his talk, Jamie said that every food retailer needs to educate its customers on how to cook healthy, tasty seasonal meals. This really resonated with me and I excitedly took this to our executive team to brainstorm how we could be this better at spud!. While we provide healthy recipes in our Garlic Press, and on our website, we can do a lot more to make it easier for our customers to plan healthy meals for their families. If you have any specific ideas on what we could do in this regard I’d love to hear from you.
I’ve started making my own sodas to cut the sugar I was getting from drinks. I use fruit juice (e.g. 2 key limes in 2l of water is tasty) and then carbonate them myself using a CO2 tank I got at a beer brewing supply store.
This also means that we don’t need to buy the carbonated water we like so much. Vanocuver’s tap water is good enough.
And HFC (and hence pretty much all processed food) is particularly bad.
Sugar: The Bitter Truth (Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
The above lecture is fairly technical and loaded with biochemistry.
My parents kept a food garden in the back yard when I was a kid, she also made her own jams and vegetable preserves. I grew up around real whole foods so I knew what they looked like and where they came from. Thanks Mom and Dad.
The Jamie Oliver TED Talk is awesome. I have met kids that didn’t know what an orange was, I was flabbergasted.
I think the overall problem is that we have become too separated from our food: most people don’t know what food is, where it comes from, or how it is made. Too many people see food as something that comes out of a box and it seems like hardly anyone knows how to prepare meals from a pile of ingredients anymore. Sad.
[...] Thanks Nikki for sending me this link. There are some interesting facts in here. Sugar: not so sweet for a healthy diet. [...]
I plan meals each week: breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. I create an excel spreadsheet to make it easier, which I print out and put on the fridge. An online planner with great recipe suggestions that can be printed would be great. If it somehow helped me create the shopping list, that would be fantastic.
I have two kids. There are several things that we do to food educate our kids. Here are a few…
1. I involve them in meal planning whenever I can.
2. We have a small vegetable garden here at home.
3. We also take them to farms during the growing season to pick our own fruits and vegetables.
4. We make meals together: homemade pizza is a great one.
5. We also make things like freezer jam in the summer when fresh fruits and vegetables are plentiful.
6. They come to the farmers’ market as well on occasion.
I grew up on a farm and healthy living is very important to me. Involving my kids in the food decisions that affect them, both educates them and gives us the opportunity to spend family time.
I’d love to hear other ideas.