The Sneaky Sugar In Your Energy Bars

by | Sep 18, 2013 | Diet, Food Choices, Snacks, Sugars | 0 comments

Candy Bar Unreal Eats is Healthy Living’s original video series, where we go behind calorie counts and health claims to examine what’s really in the processed foods that scream loudest in our food environment.

You’ve hit the 3 p.m. slump, you’re searching for a snack and you know that the candy bar you really want will provide no nutritional value and cause a spike of energy followed by a crash. So what do you do? If you’re one of the people contributing to its $700 million marketshare, you grab an energy (or “sports” or “snack”) bar.

We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in our latest installment of Unreal Eats, we demonstrate that when it comes to a sugar rush, your energy bar doesn’t fare much better than a regular chocolate one. Some of the most popular bars in supermarkets — things like PowerBars and Cliff Builders — have more than 20 grams of sugar each, which is often the same as a packet of candy. What’s more, we discovered, the smaller brands you can find in health food stores and places like Whole Foods typically don’t provide less sugar. In fact, two of the top three bars for sugar content also touted holistic eating habits: Organic Food Bar’s Active Greens and Go Raw’s Apricot Bar both clocked in at 24 grams of sugar.

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Kids on Sweets: Are We Raising a Generation of Sugar Addicts?

by | Sep 11, 2013 | Carbs, Cravings, Sugars | 0 comments

Candy There are few joys in life as sweet as seeing our children smile. Thus, it is with the best of intentions that we cave to pleas for candy and tantrums over French fries in hopes of glimpsing those (rapidly decaying) pearly whites. After all, there are bigger threats to our children, right?

As it turns out, sugar isn’t as harmless as we once thought, at least not in the volume we’re consuming it.

[header 3]A Natural Drive on Overdrive[/header]

Children have a natural penchant for sweets; it’s part of our survival programming. But in this hyper-processed, convenience-obsessed age, that natural drive is now on overdrive. With about one-third of children overweight or obese, childhood obesity has more thandoubled in children and tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years.

The American Heart Association recommends that children consume 3 to 8 teaspoons of added sugar per day, depending on their age and daily caloric intake. Yet children as young as 1 year already consume three to four times the daily recommendation. By 4 to 8 years old, children are consuming an average of 21 teaspoons of sugar daily, and the average teenager consumes about 34 teaspoons each day — even more than the average adult.

Research has tied high sugar intake to a number of serious health problems, including obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and tooth decay. Once confined to adults, we’re now seeing the early signs of these conditions in young children. In the early 1990s, Type 2 diabetes accounted for 3 percent of new cases of diabetes in children; by 2004, that number rose to 45 percent.

Moreover, sugar may be addictive. Like cocaine and other drugs, sugar activates the reward system in the brain. Rats hooked on sugar show classic symptoms of addiction, including tolerance, withdrawal and cravings, and have been known to bypass cocaine in favor of their primary drug of choice: sugar.

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Soda drinks may make children more aggressive and distracted

by | Aug 20, 2013 | Artificial Sweeteners, Sugars | 0 comments

Softdrinks Soft drinks may cause young children to become aggressive and develop attention problems, according to a study published in The Journal of Pediatrics.

Researchers from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the University of Vermont and Harvard School of Public Health, studied around 3,000 children aged 5.

All children were enrolled in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study – a cohort study that follows mothers and children from 20 large cities in the US.

The researchers asked the mothers of the children to report their child’s soft drink consumption. Their child’s behavior in the 2 months prior to the study was reported through a “Child Behavior Checklist.”

Just over 40% of the children consumed a minimum of one serving of soft drinks a day, while 4% consumed four or more soft drinks a day.

The study results found that any level of soft drink consumption was linked to higher levels of aggressive behavior, as well as more attention and withdrawal problems.

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What are the health benefits of honey?

by | Aug 13, 2013 | Sugars | 0 comments

honey photo by alsjhcHoney is a sweet liquid produced by honey bees using nectar from flowers through a process of regurgitation and evaporation.

Honey has high levels of monosaccharides, fructose and glucose, containing about 70 to 80 percent sugar, which gives it its sweet taste – minerals and water make up the rest of its composition.

The health benefits of consuming honey date back to Greek, Roman, Vedic, and Islamic texts. The healing qualities of honey were referred to by philosophers and scientists all the way back to ancient times, such as Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) and Aristoxenus (320 BC).

Honey possesses powerful antiseptic and antibacterial properties. In modern science we have managed to find useful applications of honey in chronic wound management.

However, it should be noted that many of honey’s health claims still require further large scale scientific studies to confirm them.

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Sugary Drinks Tied to Preschoolers’ Extra Pounds

by | Aug 8, 2013 | Artificial Sweeteners, Sugars | 0 comments

Drink Preschool children who regularly have sugary drinks tend to pack on more pounds than other youngsters, a large study of U.S. children suggests.

Researchers found that among the 2- to 5-year-olds they followed, those who routinely had sugar-sweetened drinks at age 5 were 43 percent more likely to beobese than their peers who rarely had those drinks.

In addition, 2-year-olds who downed at least one sugary drink a day gained moreweight over the next few years than their peers.

The results, reported online Aug. 5 and in the September print issue of the journalPediatrics, add to evidence tying sugar-laden drinks to excess pounds in older kids. And although the study cannot prove it’s the beverages causing the added weight, experts said parents should opt for water and milk to quench preschoolers’ thirst.

“We can’t say for sure that cutting out sugar-sweetened beverages would prevent excess weight gain,” said lead researcher Dr. Mark DeBoer, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

“[But] there are healthy sources of calories, and there are less healthy sources,” he said. “Sugar-sweetened beverages don’t have other nutritional benefits.”

Water, on the hand, is a sugar-free way for kids to hydrate. “And milk,” DeBoer said, “has vitamin D, protein and calcium.” Plus, he added, the protein and fat in milk make young children feel full, so they may eat less than they do when their diets are filled with sugary — but less satisfying — drinks.

Plenty of factors influence childhood obesity, including genes, overall diet andphysical activity, said Dr. Anisha Patel, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Why Are We So Addicted To Sugar?

by | Jul 30, 2013 | Artificial Sweeteners, Sugars | 0 comments

Candies From childhood memories of penny sweets to office chocolate binging and coffee mornings laden with home-baked cakes, sugar is an inextricable part of our lives. But recent studies have shown that this addictive substance isn’t actually made of all things nice and could be poisoning us. So why can’t we stop eating it?

Rich Cohen has examined our love affair with sugar by examining America’s relationship with the sweet stuff in “Sugar Love” in the August issue of National Geographic, from which the following excerpt and images are taken.

Candy is dandy, particularly to Americans, who spent $32 billion on sweets in 2011; per capita consumption was 25 pounds. Formerly a luxury item for the rich, candy became affordable with the decline of sugar prices and rise of mass production in the 19th century. The word itself comes from qandi: Arabic for a sugar confection.” – Rich Cohen

Recently the American Heart Association added its voice to the warnings against too much added sugar in the diet. But its rationale is that sugar provides calories with no nutritional benefit. According to Johnson and his colleagues, this misses the point. Excessive sugar isn’t just empty calories; it’s toxic.

“It has nothing to do with its calories,” says endocrinologist Robert Lustig of the University of California, San Francisco. “Sugar is a poison by itself when consumed at high doses.”

Things go better with bubbles—or so it was thought by spa-goers, who often drank sparkling mineral water as part of the cure for what ailed them. The 18th-century discovery that carbon dioxide put the fizz in fizzy water led to systems for producing soda water, then to sweet drinks like root beer, ginger ale, and cola. Today’s 12-ounce soda typically contains around ten teaspoons of sugar.” – Rich Cohen

We know that eating excess amounts of sugar is bad for us. The list of ailments associated with sugar intake is endless and we’re taught from a young age that it rots the teeth, causes weight gain, lethargy, diabetes and heart problems, yet it’s never stopped me from reaching for the toffee or polishing off a bag of fruit gums in record time.

Scientists have claimed that we’re primed to crave sugar on an instinctive level as it is connected to our basic desire for survival, meaning that our sense of taste has evolved to desire the molecules necessary to live like salt, fat and sugar.

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