Sunday, October 12, 2014

Sugar, Sugar, Everywhere

I do love my sweet stuff, but have always been choosey about which sweet I eat. For example I don’t eat bargain pastries, cookies, ice cream or the like, but I will eat quality versions of these foods. The key here is that I “choose” rather than allow others to choose for me.
What I don’t choose is all the hidden sugar in just about everything commercially produced and sold in supermarkets. Bread is a great example of a food that has no need for sugar. Historically, for thousands of years, bread never contained sugar, but reading labels now will reveal that the vast majority of breads sold in supermarkets do contain sugar. Keep in mind that other ingredients such as corn syrup, raisin syrup, fructose, molasses, etc. are also sugars.
Other foods have, through the years, been alternately labeled as good for us or bad for us, such as coffee, eggs and the like, and these wax and wane with the season, seemingly. But sugar has always been marked as a villain, and keeping sugar intake low is universally believed to be a good and healthful goal. Sickeningly sweet breakfast cereals like Cap'n Crunch or Lucky Charms shouldn't be on anyone's menu, especially children's. The entire reliance on cereal as a now-traditional breakfast meal is an amazingly successful marketing ploy by that industry when you think about it. "Traditional" means "I do it this way because others tell me I should and I don't have a free will to make my own decisions."
Save your sugar intake for foods that would not be what they are without it, such as desserts. Reject foods containing sugar that would not suffer from the lack of it, such as commercially produced pasta sauces, frozen skillet meals, bread, crackers and a whole host of other foods that make you ask questions like, why does a salty cracker need sugar?

No comments:

Post a Comment