Thinking about healthy habits in the new year? January has no shortage of health-related news items, so just to get the ball rolling I\u2019m going to share an item from a British newspaper, an item that surely applies as much to Saipan as it does to the Atlantic. <\/p>\n
The items comes via Jan. 4 article in the (U.K.) Telegraph: \u201cChildren aged 5 eating own weight in sugar each year as parents urged to check products with free app.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, apps, or no apps, it\u2019s not only British kids who are on the sugar express, of course. It\u2019s just a part of modern life. <\/p>\n
I was curious about how much sugar Americans consume. What we call \u201csugar\u201d is a broad term, as it turns out, and the sweeteners tallied include cane and beet sugar, high fructose corn syrup, glucose, and dextrose.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s some good data from a U.S. Department of Agriculture report, \u201cSugar and Sweeteners Outlook,\u201d dated June 18, 2014: \u201cOn a per capita basis, U.S. sweetener deliveries for 2013 were 128.3 pounds, down 1.0 pounds from 2012 and 20.6 pounds from the 149.0 pounds in 2000.\u201d<\/p>\n
On an older report I saw that per capita U.S. sugar consumption rose from 1950 through 2000, but then, as the above quote indicates, there\u2019s been a fall from 2000 to 2013. <\/p>\n
Anyway, since we\u2019re all familiar with the standard heft of 5-pound bags of sugar, they make convenient benchmarks. So we can note that, on average, Americans consume the equivalent of a 5-pound bag every two weeks. <\/p>\n
Seen in those terms, that seems like a lot of sugar to me. <\/p>\n
If you want to get really detailed about it, you can shave the data down by accounting for things like spoilage that drive a wedge between sugar that is sold for consumption and sugar that is actually ingested. So \u201cconsumption\u201d to an economist, and to a public health expert, would probably have different meanings here, as the economist considers the transaction, but the health expert would be more concerned about the actual ingestion. <\/p>\n
Of course, for most of us, the important thing isn\u2019t fancy data about national averages, but is, instead, how much of the stuff we\u2019re shoveling into our yappers. It\u2019s not an easy thing to know. Sugar has a knack for sneaking in over the transom. <\/p>\n
Here\u2019s an example of how sneaky it can be: When I was in college, the standard dash-to-class breakfast was two small containers of yogurt and a large glass of orange juice. I\u2019ll note that eggs, butter, and fat (such as bacon has) were considered big no-no\u2019s at the time. So this was a case where convenience and conventional wisdom seemed magically aligned. <\/p>\n
Like all magic, of course, there was an illusion at work. During one of my annual and random looks at labels, I eventually realized that my \u201chealthy\u201d quasi-breakfast carried a payload of 85 grams of sugar.<\/p>\n
A gram doesn\u2019t mean anything to me. I can\u2019t picture it. So I\u2019ll revert to my 5-pound bag benchmark and note that a daily dose of 85 grams of sugar adds up to more than one of those bags every month. The tally is 5.6 pounds in 30 days. Wow.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, since college, it seems that attitudes toward eggs, butter, and bacon-fat have softened, at least in some circles, while sugar seems to get sharper scrutiny across the board.<\/p>\n
Of course, I\u2019m no health expert, I\u2019m just a slob trying to get by in life without being too stupid about things. When it comes to sugar, then, over the decades I\u2019ve eased toward giving it a bit of a look instead of a blank check. <\/p>\n
When I\u2019m bored and don\u2019t have any money to buy lottery tickets, I\u2019ll reach for my calculator to put fuzzy things (\u201cgrams per serving\u201d) into more meaningful terms (\u201c5-pound bags per month\u201d). Yep, the little things sure do add up, and the results carry some heft when they\u2019re put in familiar terms. <\/p>\n
I try to swing by this subject once a year or so in this space. It\u2019s an issue that deserves regular scrutiny. After all, Saipan and sugar have a long history together, both on the production, and on the consumption, sides of the equation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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