The Truth About Sugar

The average American woman eats 70 percent of her body weight in added sugar each year. How much is too much and what effect does it have on your body?
Donna Thorpe

Sugar is the James Bond of food: It has code names, appears where you least expect it and leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. Oh, and we kind of have a thing for it. "It tastes good, and the more that's produced, the more we eat," says George Bray, M.D., chief of the clinical obesity and metabolism division at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Since 1970, the amount of sugar in processed foods has nearly doubled, largely because sugar is cheap and readily available. Today it's pumped into pretty much everything to make food products more enticing—even ones that are already sweet, such as fruit juice. As a result, the average American gobbles up 43,800 more calories from added sugar (meaning sweeteners, like high fructose corn syrup and honey, that are added to packaged foods) per year than we did in 1977.

Thayer Allison Gowdy

Trouble is, our body isn't equipped to handle this amount. If a woman's intake of added sugars increases by more than 20 percent, her body-mass index rises 2 to 3 points, which is enough to shift from the normal weight to the overweight category or from overweight to obese, a 27-year study from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has found. Research has also linked increased sugar consumption to higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and metabolic syndrome.

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But before you envision a sad existence devoid of chocolate, know that we at SELF would never suggest such a thing. (We love chocolate, too!) Besides, "cutting out sugar completely isn't necessary or even possible," says Suzanne Farrell, R.D., of Denver. What is: indulging wisely, by curbing cravings and eliminating hidden sources. On these pages, we make eating a lot less sugar a cakewalk.

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