[asgfoi]

How sad it is that the can of coke is used as a comparison. It almost makes it look like a reasonable drink.

The World Health Organization has recently suggested cutting the recommended sugar intake for adults in half, to about 25 grams, around 6 teaspoons, of sugar for a normal weight adult a day.

Here is my favorite site that shows the amounts of sugar cubes in various unhealthy food: http://www.sugarstacks.com/

According to that information you can drink a half can of coke (most left one in the picture in the link) to satisfy that daily need. That implies that all other food you eat that day will not include any sugar! That is an impossible standard to reach. Solution, don't drink drinks with sugar.

[maxerickson]

I think it's the other way around; people have begun thinking of soda as problematic because of the sugar. So making it clear that a drink exceeds a coke in sugar puts the drink over in the problematic bracket.

[merraksh]

An initiative here in the UK has an app for counting how much sugar is in any product with a barcode:

http://www.nhs.uk/change4life/Pages/change-for-life.aspx

[tracker1]

I think that's referring to refined sugars... as a diabetic, I tend to pay more attention to glycemic load... making an effort to keep it under 40 (max) at any meal, and under 100 per day, which is hard... iirc, the sugars/day should be around or under 100g for most people, with at least half of that coming from natural, unrefined sources (fruit/veg).

Absorption is a big piece... fruit smoothies are much easier to absorb, for example than whole fruit, which contains fiber which inhibits absorption.

For the most part, if you don't get more than half your calories from any macro source (carb, protein, fat, alcohol), and have some variety to your diet, once you get enough protein to support your body, calories are calories. Some people have medical conditions that mean they should limit some sources... but that's the exception.

The issue is that people don't pay attention to these things.. or consider the calories of drinks and snacks in their daily input... if most people wrote down everything they consumed for a week, calculated the macros, and tracked their weight a couple times a day, it would be eye opening. I tend to reach for water more often than not (2-3 liters or so a day) and about 1 liters of other beverages a day.

[tenpies]

> The World Health Organization has recently suggested cutting the recommended sugar intake for adults in half, to about 25 grams, around 6 teaspoons, of sugar for a normal weight adult a day.

The interesting thing about this sort of guideline is how quickly you exceed it with fruit. The most popular fruits are all packed with sugar: an apple has ~10 grams; a banana, ~12 grams; an orange, ~9 grams.

[rdancer]

Since I entered the workforce a few years ago, I have gone from underweight to obese, and with no spontaneous trend-reversal in sight, I have recently decided to consciously monitor my intake. Four weeks and two negative kilos later, the most striking realization is precisely what you are saying, but viewed from two different perspectives:

A banana is about 105 kCal, 14g of sugars, 13g of complex carbs, and not much else[1]. My daily caloric budget is 19 bananas. I need 90g+ of protein a day, and I need some oil for cooking, so the discretionary budget is about a half. If I eat normally and budget the calories well, I will have about two bananas' worth of snacks which I can eat outside of my three main meals. That's the extent of my freedom. A banana is a big deal.

On the other hand, if I hypothetically only had bananas in my pantry, I would need to eat 19 of them to hit my calories (more if I didn't want to lose weight). That's not fun. It's hard work after the first five or six! In a less hypothetical situation of protein and fiber intake, I would need 400g+ of chicken breast meat and 1kg+ of kale (each being a good source of one and the other respectively). My stomach is turning just thinking that, and I really had to learn to balance my diet on many different foodstuffs.

In isolation, it can be crazy how much or how little of particular nutrient a food contains.

[1] http://www.fatsecret.co.uk/Diary.aspx?pa=fjrd&eid=2165694177...

[noondip]

There isn't any problem with naturally occurring sugar in fruit. The trouble comes when there's added sugar only.