Welcome to the Eat This Not That Podcast. I'm John Hammond and this is Megan Murphy.

Hello everyone. And this week we are going to help, well hopefully help, help you tackle one of the

biggest nutrition challenges that I think we all face at some point in time and a lot of us

are kind of focused on it. Now it's sugar, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've talked about the need to cut back on added sugars as it affects so

many health and weight loss challenges that we all have, but while many of us know that we should

be cutting back on all the added sugars in our diet, it's how we should do that. That becomes the

hard part. And now very recently, for the first time, actually, our government has issued added

sugar guidelines recommending that we keep our sugar consumption to no more than 10%

of overall calories.

So to put it into perspective, that's not a lot.

That's not a lot, exactly.

That's about 180 calories or 45 grams a day for a woman and 200 calories or 50 grams for men. And to put that into perspective, the average American eats or consumes every day 82 grams of added sugar.

The average on average, right? So you're probably a little bit above or a little bit below. Like, we're kind of like, amortes out is 82 grams. But you're way higher than what's recommended. And the crazy part is it's an easy thing to miss added sugars because as we've talked about in other episodes, it's in everything from bread to pasta sauces. The places that you really aren't expecting to find it. So you're not really looking for it. So you're probably not accounting for it there. Certainly you know if you're getting it from your snacks, your snack bars, your sodas, if you're adding it to your coffee, like all those kinds of things. It's when you try and tell, I mean, I would challenge anyone listening to try and tally the added sugars, by the way here.

I mean, everybody, it's so easy to make quote unquote sugar the villain and sugar in and of itself.

Not the bugaboo here.

It's added sugars.

So sneaky ones.

The ones that don't need to be there, right?

And it's if you look at it and, you know, we're a long way from getting there, it feels like still. But hopefully I think like the latest is like by 2020, according to the FDA, the new food labels will be out. And they'll have to list out the added sugars. Right now everything is just, it's just sugar. So I don't know if a food I'm eating has, if it has 10 grams of sugar, are those naturally occurring?

Are those chemical sugars? Right. Are they two grams of naturally occurring? Which means eight grams are just added. So that's eight grams of sugar added. We have to have no nutritional value in being there at all and negatively impact that total amount

that I'm going to consume for the course of the day. And I think that's the kicker. And so,

so here's the thing. It's, it's hard to kind of nail down. It's challenging nail down. I would,

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