“Sugar is the next tobacco, without a doubt, and that industry should be scared. It should be taxed just like tobacco and anything else that can, frankly, destroy lives.”
—Jamie Oliver
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A celebration is incomplete without soft drinks, wouldn’t you agree? Consider the consumption of 16 sugar cubes in a single sitting. If you believe this is implausible, you may be mistaken, as you might have been unknowingly consuming this amount. This quantity is slightly less than what is found in a 20-ounce bottle of a well-known soft drink.
We have a penchant for sweet foods, which explains why many of our dishes are generously adorned with sugar – from biko to bukayo, and from leche flan to halo-halo. No gathering is truly complete without sweet pasta and sliced hotdogs, specifically referring to Filipino-style spaghetti.
You might be curious about the sugar content in these Filipino treats. A serving of three banana cues on a single stick can contain up to six grams, or one and a half teaspoons, of sugar, as reported by the FWD Life Insurance Public Company Limited.
That’s only for a starter. Two-medium sized puto may contain five grams or almost one and a half teaspoons of sugar. Two tablespoons of banana ketchup may contain up to three grams of sugar. A bowl of this famous Filipino “innovation” from a fastfood chain contains 19 grams – or almost five teaspoons of sugar.
Our country consumes around 2.5 million metric tons of sugar annually, thus making us one of the largest consumers in Asia, along with India, China, Indonesia, and Thailand. “(The sugar consumption) equates to 23.5 kilograms on a per capita basis, near its historic high,” said Chini-Mandi, India’s largest news and information portal for the sugar and allied industry.
How much sugar should we consume? The healthy level of sugar consumption per day, as recommended by the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO), is nine teaspoons for men and six teaspoons for women.
Perhaps not too many know that sugar used to be called “white gold.”
“Sugar was once a luxury ingredient reserved for special occasions,” wrote Tiffany O’Callaghan, an editor in the Opinion section at New Scientist. “But in recent years it has become a large and growing part of our diets.
“If you eat processed food of any kind, it probably contains added sugar,” she continued. “You can find it in sliced bread, breakfast cereals, salad dressings, soups, cooking sauces and many other staples. Low-fat products often contain a lot of added sugar.”
Just like salt, eating too much sugar is doing us no good. In fact, sugar is now touted as public health enemy number one: as bad if not worse than fat. It’s no wonder why health bodies around the globe are waging “a war on sugar.”
But is sugar really that bad?
Sugar is the generalized name for a class of chemically-related sweet-flavored substances, most of which are used as food. They are carbohydrates, composed of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. There are various types of sugar derived from different sources. Simple sugars are called monosaccharides and include glucose (also known as dextrose), fructose and galactose.
The table or granulated sugar most customarily used as food is sucrose, a disaccharide (in the body, sucrose hydrolyzed into fructose and glucose). Other disaccharides include maltose and lactose. Chemically-different substances may also have a sweet taste but are not classified as sugars. Some are used as lower-calorie food substitutes for sugar described as artificial sweeteners.
Mounting evidence suggests that flooding your system with sugar-sweetened beverages – such as soft drinks, fruit drinks, iced tea and sports drinks – may increase your risk of diabetes.
A recent study published in the journal Diabetes Care examined more than 310,000 patients and found that those who drank 1-2 servings of the sweet stuff a day were 26% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those who drank it once a month or not at all.
The Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) wants people to cut sugar consumption radically. In the United States, doctors and scientists are pressing food companies to reduce sugar and be more open about how much they add.
In Asia, the Philippines is the first country to introduce a landmark tax measure which imposes a tax on all sweetened beverages, depending on the type of sweetener used.
“Sugar is sugar, so it’s best used in moderation no matter what form it takes,” pointed out American dietitian Andrea D’Ambrosio.
To consume or not to consume, that is the dilemma for some people. “If God hadn’t meant for us to eat sugar, he wouldn’t have invented dentists,” said Ralph Nader, an American activist and author.
But Luc Tappy, a physiologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, disagrees: “You cannot live without essential fats. You cannot live without protein. It’s going to be difficult to have enough energy if you don’t have some carbohydrate. But without sugar, there is no problem. It’s an entirely dispensable food.”
