How on earth do I figure out how much sugar is in my food

Week 3 is here!!!!  I have to admit there have been many occasions in the last few weeks where I didn't actually think I'd make it to week 3, but here I am, I have done 1/4 of the time of the sugar free program, I can't quit now!  I did have some massive sugar cravings on the weekend.  It started on Friday night when, out of the goodness of my heart (and my inability to throw out good food), I found myself making a banana bread that I knew I was going to be able to eat NONE of.  When I stood with the banana in my hands I thought, I would give anything in the world to eat this right now.  After about 10 mins of an argument between good and bad Morag on my shoulders, good Morag won and I didn't eat the banana (yay me).  However, it was the start of 24 hours of imagining literally everything in the whole world was a bloody banana and literally drooling while having conversations with people as I thought they looked so banana like....luckily that passed!  Also just realised this was the second time I have discussed my massive love of bananas in a blog.....never realised til now how much of an impact that little bit of yellow amaziness has on my life!!!

Apart from the strange banana cravings in my life, I have to admit it's going really well.  I have had so many people say...you've inspired me, but I don't think I could do it.  To be honest it's actually not that hard to do, once the first few weeks have passed.  I am finding it easier and easier everyday to just eat real food.  I even ate plain greek yogurt the other day and thought it tasted good (I usually consider that stuff to be what "healthy" people eat), so my taste buds must be starting to change and I must be turning into one of those healthy people as well.

During the week I was very excited to get a blog request, meant that at least one person was reading my blog and finding it interesting, and it wasn't even my mother.  Luckily it's something that I have increased my knowledge ever so slightly in over the last few weeks, and that is figuring out how much sugar is in the food we eat from reading food labels.  I say "ever so slightly" because food manufacturers don't want to make it easy for us, so even though I have read more nutrition labels than I ever have in my life recently, it's still very confusing.

I should probably start by telling you how much added sugar (does not include fruit intake) you are recommended to eat per day by the World Health Organisation (WHO) (who are pretty much the world gurus on what we should and shouldn't do to make sure everyone is healthy and happy and living long and fantastic lives across the world).  The recommendations state that you should have 6 teaspoons (or 24g) of sugar per day, which isn't really a whole lot considering they reckon they average Irish person consumes about 24 teaspoons a day, and in Australia it's about 18 teaspoons (I blame the rain for the extra sugar intake in Ireland!).  At this stage, I would like to set a challenge to you the reader, to track your sugar just for one day to see how close you are to the WHO recommendations.  You may be either pleasantly or not so pleasantly surprised, but either way I'm sure it will be interesting.

Right, so back to the complicated nutrition label thing.  The guidelines I am currently using are:
<4.0g sugar per 100g, or <6g if it's dairy as there is naturally occurring sugar in lactose which must be accounted for.

I have put an example nutrition label below, no idea what it's from to be honest, lets say some sort of bananay strawberryish milk drink based on the ingredients.  The first thing to look at is how much sugar per 100g, which in this case is 12.4g (or 3 teaspoons, which is nearly half your daily recommendations and that's not even for a whole serving size, and lets be honest, knowing my obsession with bananas, whose seriously going to only have one serving of this yummy goodness!).

Last week, in order to see how much sugar was in foods I previously enjoyed regularly, I pulled a few items out of the fridge and had a look, and I was shocked to see how much sugar per 100g was in some of them.  My favourite chilli sauce - 65 g per 100g (no wonder it was my favourite, it was like having chocolate on my vegetables), mayonnaise - 21g per 100g, my favourite salad dressing - 26g per 100g (I know I probably wouldn't have put 100g of salad dressing on my dinner, but still even a 25 g serving contains about 2 teaspoons of sugar or something at this rate), Balsamic Vinegar - 15g per 100g.  In the end I had to give up looking, it was depressing me!  I could not believe how much sugar were in these products that I genuinely did not know about.  Again, another challenge, have a look in your fridge, and figure out how much sugar you may be accidentally consuming!!

Now that's the easy part about reading food labels.  Now for the complicated part, trying to read the ingredients and from that get an idea of how much added sugar that there is in food.  Now that's something I think you literally need a degree in, the food manufacturers do not want to make this easy.  As you may be aware, the ingredients are listed from start to finish in order of how much is added.  So in the nutritional information above you would see sugar is the third ingredient, and so you can assume that a large amount of the sugar in this product is added (especially given it's listed before the various fruits, which would contain natural sugar).

The ingredient list above is pretty easy to read, but to be super confusing and make sure we have no idea what we are consuming, there are 61 + different names for sugar.  Now I don't know about you, but I struggle to remember my own name on a day to day basis, and regularly call the dog my boyfriends name and vice versa, so to remember 61 different names for sugar, that's crazy!  That and how on earth does anyone have the time to pull out their list of 61 + sugar names in the shop and read ingredients listed to see what may have been added to your food.  No wonder we find it so hard to figure out what to eat!

So, unfortunately, for my first blog request, I have not been able to answer the question asked, as it isn't all that clear on the food labels to begin with.  Luckily though there is some work being done by the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand to have some changes made to nutrition labels to include added sugars, so hopefully in the future it will all make a little more sense.

Thanks for reading, until next time:)