Tag Archives: obesity

Should we eat any added sugar?

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Sugar word cloud concept

Do we need extra sugar in our diet? I don’t think so.

Recently, Public Health England (PHE) reported that children have “exceeded the maximum recommended sugar intake for an 18 year old by the time they reach their tenth birthday”. I am horrified by this statistic, especially as much of this sugar comes from sugary breakfast cereal, fizzy drinks, juices and yogurt.

Recommendations

In 2015, the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN)  made some  recommendations on maximum sugar intake ranging from 19g (5 teaspoons) for a 4 year old to 30g (7 teaspoons) for 11 year olds and older. In the same year the World Health Organization recommended that the calories derived from added sugar should not exceed 10% of the body’s calorific daily requirement and ideally less than 5%. For an ‘average’ person this is about 25g of added sugar per day.

Certainly, everyone should be cutting down on the amount of added sugar they eat because it has no nutritional value. Reducing sugar will benefit everyone both in terms of not being overweight and being healthier.

Actions

What can we all do to reduce added sugar? I think we need to regard sugar as a treat for special occasions only, not an everyday commodity.

If you have babies and toddlers, it is probably easier to limit sugar than if you have older children who will be used to sugar. Here are my suggestions:

  • Start as you mean to go on with babies and toddlers: water is the drink of choice.
  • Cook porridge or make muesli if you’d like something with more flavour possibilities.
  • Cook from scratch so that you know what’s in the food you are eating.
  • Avoid processed food as much as possible because it’s got lots of sugar in it.
  • If you buy processed food become an avid label reader so that you know just what is in it.
  • Don’t serve puddings or desserts on a regular basis. Make them treats.
  • Remove cakes, biscuits and crisps from the snack menu. Replace with fruit or nuts.

I know this is rather uncompromising but it’s how we are really meant to eat. Even following one suggestion will help.

In the same vein, Change4Life, an English social marketing campaign to reduce obesity which dates back to 2009, suggests making swaps to reduce sugar. The website https://www.nhs.uk/change4life looks fun and has quizzes that will appeal to children.

There is also a Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/change4life/

Most importantly, when children’s health is involved it’s vital to guide them into good habits that will last their whole lives.

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5 Easy Ways to Prevent Obesity

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girls

Today, 11 October, is World Obesity Day. Its aim is to raise awareness and take action to reduce childhood obesity.

Obesity is an increasing problem throughout the world and is a cause of physical diseases such as impaired glucose tolerance which can lead to type 2 diabetes, type 2 diabetes with all its awful complications, high blood pressure, fatty liver and some cancers. Obesity often causes low self-esteem, embarrassment and social isolation. Mobility is reduced and so exercising is difficult. Obesity leads to unnecessary early death.

Unfortunately obesity is increasing in children; in the UK over 27% of children between the ages of five and 17 are overweight or obese. This epidemic is caused by the food children are eating and insufficient exercise.

Anyone who is involved with raising children needs to consider how they can help children to live healthier lives. I have a few suggestions to share with you and, of course, we can all benefit from these tips.

  • Make water the drink of choice. You can add a slice of orange or lemon to make it tastier. Avoid having squash or soft drinks in the house, even low or no calorie ones. Artificial sweeteners release the pleasure hormone dopamine and can create a craving-type dependence on getting more and more. It’s an appetite that can never be satisfied.
  • Cut down on added sugar. Sugar is nutritionally empty. It provides extra calories and can lead to cravings that are difficult to beat. It lurks in many unexpected places such as pasta sauces, yogurt, salad dressing and bread, as well as in cakes, biscuits and popular breakfast cereals.
  • Get to know your labels. When you buy packaged food read the label. There is so much useful information there. Sugar is hidden under many different names such as dextrose, maltose, fructose, hone, agave syrup, evaporated cane juice and many more. It’s all sugar. Stabilisers, flavourings, thickeners, emulsifiers are often chemicals and they may affect hormones in the body. I have found that reading food labels stops me from buying processed food. Even a simple sandwich may contain 2–3g of salt which is 33–50% of the recommended daily amount.
  • Cook from scratch. If you make meals from the basic ingredients you know exactly what you are eating. It will take longer than buying something prepared from the supermarket but the time you spend shopping will be less because you won’t have to go along all the aisles full of processed food. You can also make larger quantities and freeze meals for when you don’t have time to cook. Now that the cooler weather is here, soups are quick, easy and nutritious.
  • Make exercise a family event. Join in exercise with the children. Go swimming or walk regularly. The children will build a good habit for life and you will benefit from the exercise and by being in nature you will reduce your stress. Lead by example and have fun.

I hope you found these tips useful.

If you want to know more about World Obesity Day and beating childhood obesity, visit:

http://www.worldobesity.org/what-we-do/world-obesity-day-2016/

http://www.obesityday.worldobesity.org/

 

What causes overweight and obesity? It’s not just food!

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EmotionsThe government is rightly concerned about people, and children especially, being overweight and obese because these conditions affect health and wellbeing. There is lots of advice on healthier diets and the importance of exercise but, as far as I can see, the emotional factors that cause us to overeat or to eat the wrong sorts of food are never considered in government advice

There is a local initiative to fight the rise of obesity; it offers nutritional advice as well as tailored exercise programmes for inactive adults who have health conditions. Incredibly, there is no mention of how emotional factors can affect weight loss.

I know that eating the right food and taking exercise are important in maintaining health but, if the emotional factors are not addressed, advice on diet and exercise is just a sticking-plaster solution. Remove the cause and the problem can be solved permanently. I have the tools to do just this!

Drop me an email to find out more.

Best wishes, Jenny

Welcome back butter and cheese!

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The world of nutrition is a confusing one. Research and fashion (a strange combination!) mean that foods go in and out of favour.

It may be time to think again about saturated fats, according to Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist at Croydon University Hospital, London.

The campaign against fat has been waged for the last three or four decades but it may have been misguided. Removing fat from food makes it tasteless and something has to be added: sugar. As you probably know, processed foods contain a lot of sugar and this may lead to the high levels of obesity seen in the Western world.

Fats have been lumped together, good and bad; we know that transfats are bad and are now being phased out of processed foods. Dr Malhotra has recently written in the British Medical Journal: ‘Recent prospective cohort studies have not supported significant association between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular risk’ and: ‘Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective’. Saturated fats are found in meat and dairy products and the latter contain important nutrients such as vitamins A and D, calcium and phosphorus.

Much of the pressure towards eating less fat came from the hypothesis that cutting down on fat would mean that cholesterol levels would drop and there would be a reduction in heart disease. Only 25 per cent of the cholesterol in our bodies comes from diet; the rest is made in the liver. Recent studies have found that only one type of low density cholesterol (LDL, regarded as bad cholesterol) causes heart disease and it’s not one that can be altered by less saturated fat.

As you might expect, not everyone supports Dr Malhotra’s views; both the British Heart Foundation and Public Health England disagreed. Rightly they say that studies on diet and disease often produce conflicting results owing to the difficulty of conducting properly controlled and randomised studies.

The American Heart Association considers that sugar is much more harmful than saturated fats and, unsurprisingly Robert Lustig, author of Fat Chance: The Truth About Sugar, agrees.

What should we do? Trust our bodies and eat real home-cooked food with plenty of vegetables, nuts and pulses and a little of what you fancy, perhaps butter and cheese, is the best way, I think.

 

Tony the Tiger

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It is rumoured that the mascot for Kellogg’s Frosties brand may be retired soon. There seems to be a growing awareness that sugar is not good for us. I was looking at the packaging on some processed food and saw that the recommended daily amount of sugar is 90 grams for a woman and 120 grams for a man. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that people eat no more than 10% of their calories as sugar which is roughly 50 grams or 12 teaspoons a day. A can of soda contains about 40 grams (10 teaspoons) so that would use most of your daily allowance! And, of course, there is the sugar that occurs naturally in fruit (fructose) and dairy (lactose).
Sugar plays a large role in both obesity and diabetes which are hazards of modern life so it is beneficial to try to limit the amount you eat.
There is worse to come: sugar is added to many processed foods that you would probably not guess. There’s sugar in tomato ketchup to counteract the natural acidity of tomatoes; in baked beans; in bread; in canned vegetables and soup to increase their shelf life; in low-fat yogurt, peanut butter, health bars and ready-made salad dressings. Even when you read the food labels, the presence of sugar is often disguised, being described as dextrose, modified starch, sucrose, molasses, etc., so it’s not easy!
What can we do? First, I think becoming more aware of hidden sugar means you have a better idea of how much you are actually eating. Second, try to prepare your food from scratch so that you know exactly what is going into your meals. It’s easy to start with plain yogurt (which may already have some sugar in it) and add fruit and perhaps a little honey. You are then more in control of how much sugar you are eating.