Always keep this in mind, always try to obtain sugars naturally which should be primarily from fresh, whole fruit.

Here are 7 Ways To Reduce Sugar Intake

1. Fruit juices, even if they are 100 percent fruit juice, are all-natural sugar but they are very high in calories–it’s best to avoid beverages with high calories, including fruit juices, sodas, lemonade and other sweetened beverages. Learn to enjoy your iced tea for its natural flavor, rather than for the flavor of the sugar that you pour into the glass.
2. Rather than adding syrup or honey to foods like waffles or pancakes, try topping them with sliced fresh fruit and a dollop of vanilla yogurt.
3. Look for whole-grain cereals without added sugars, and top with sliced bananas, berries or other fruit that appeal to you. This applies to both cold cereals and hot. Oatmeal is delicious with some mashed banana stirred in for sweetness.
4. Keep healthy snacks around, like whole fruits, cut vegetables, whole-grain crackers, low-fat yogurt and low-fat cheese, so you won’t be tempted to eat sweets instead.
5. Help your kids develop healthier habits–if they are old enough to read labels, give them a list of all the names for sugar and ask them to become “sugar detectives.” They will enjoy finding the hidden sources of sugar in foods, and it will help to educate them as to how much sugar is added– sometimes where you least expect it.
6. Instead of baked goods for desserts, try fresh fruit with a bit of chocolate syrup. One great trick is to take ripe bananas, peel and place them on a foil-lined tray in the freezer. Frozen bananas taste just like ice cream and will satisfy your sweet tooth for significantly fewer calories.
7. If you add sugar to cereals, beverages and fruits routinely, try to gradually reduce the amount you use. You may not really know the true flavor of these foods because you have “masked” the flavour with sugar. Fresh fruits in season should be deliciously sweet–no added sugar necessary

We are easily surrounded by sugars. To avoid sugar, instead look for protein. Since we live in a carbohydrate-rich society, it’s not always easy to find low-calorie, healthful foods, which are generally expensive and have a short shelf life. This is all too obvious when travelling. Whether it’s the airport or a gas station, high-protein foods that are low in sugar are difficult to find. The next time you walk into a gas station, a food stop, or a snack bar in the airport, look around. You will see lots of chips, candies, crackers, doughnuts, muffins and plenty of soda. Generally, the only protein is beef jerky, almonds and milk. Now protein bars are coming into fashion, but they are not widespread.

The problem with snacking on these sugary foods is the empty calories. You want to make your calories count, and sugar doesn’t help much. Pre-packaged foods that are high in sugar generally do not have a high-nutrient density.

Protein is the nutrient of interest for most of the current diets. In the 1980s, the high carbohydrate diet was king, but this diet has proven deleterious to most people. We do need carbohydrates–remember, it’s like the fuel you add in the gas tank of your car–but unless you’re training for a marathon, you do not need that much. Generally, about 40 percent to 50 percent of your daily calories can come from carbohydrates, which means that on a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet, that is approximately 800 to 1,000 calories, which translates into the typical Western breakfast of a large latte and a muffin. Under these conditions, you’re usually tapped out by 10 a.m. with all the carbs you need for the day. Now imagine adding some pizza, a hamburger and a soda, a mid-afternoon coffee, a bag of chips and then maybe some bread with dinner.

It’s not hard to quickly accumulate 4,000 calories. Cutting carbohydrates out of the diet is the basis of most, if not all, of the popular diet programs today.

The idea of a low-fat diet has changed, and now a diet rich in healthy fats–such as monounsaturated fats from nuts, avocados and olive oil, and polyunsaturated fats from fish oil and flaxseed–is popular. The percentage for dietary protein can vary widely, but most experts target around 30 percent.

Here are a listing some of the Healthy Snacks That Are Under 100 Calories that can help you in choosing your snacks. Remember, reduce sugar when it is not necessary like drinking sodas, fruit juices that are pre-package, sweets…

But what do you think? Do you have other ways to reduce sugar intake? You can let me know by leaving a comment below.

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One of the most important skills you can master is being able to read  food labels in order to figure out exactly what you are getting from your foods. Let’s look at the example from the picture in this blog post and take the information from top to bottom…

Ready to learn reading food labels? Let’s move on…

Serving Size and Servings per Container:

Pay attention to this closely. Many people assume that small packages of cookies or crackers, or medium-sized beverage containers are single servings. But this may not be the case. An “official” serving of a beverage is 8 ounces, but many drinks are packaged in 16 oz. containers or larger. All the nutrition facts on the label are for one serving. If you drink a 16 oz. beverage, you will be drinking twice the number of calories on the nutrition facts panel, since you’ll be taking in two servings. You will need to double all the information on the label to determine exactly what you are taking in.

Calories, Fat, Carbohydrate and Protein:

As with all the other nutrients, these are the amounts per serving. In the example above, one cup of Chunky, Cheesy, Rich and Creamy Broccoli Soup has 250 calories. But if you consume the whole package (two servings), you will have taken in 500 calories. In addition to the total fat per serving, the label also tells you the calories from fat, so you can do a quick calculation in your head of what percentage of calories you are eating from fat. In the example, there are 135 calories from fat out of a total of 250 calories. You can see right away that more than half the calories in the soup come from fat. The label also tells you how much of the fat is saturated fat or trans fat. “Total Carbohydrate” tells you, again, how much carbohydrate per serving. Keep in mind that this includes natural sources, such as the natural sugars in milk or fruit, so it’s not always easy to tell from the line labeled “Sugars” where the sugar is coming from without looking at the ingredients list. If a cereal has little added sugar–but contains raisins–the sugar content may look high, but it’s just from the natural fruit sugar. Look at the ingredients list for sugar: sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, beet sugar, corn syrup, corn syrup solids, brown rice syrup, dextrose, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, high fructose corn syrup, honey, invert sugar, maltodextrin, molasses, raw sugar, turbinado sugar and sucrose are all added sugars. Sometimes food manufacturers use a number of sweeteners in a product–each in small amounts–so the ingredients are “sprinkled” throughout the ingredients list, but taken together they can sometimes add up significantly.

Fiber and sugars are part of the total carbohydrate count. A food with 5 grams or more of fiber per serving is a good source of fiber.

% Daily Value:

Daily Values are standard values developed by the Food and Drug Administration for use on food labels. They are standards used to compare the amount of a nutrient in a food to the amount that is recommended per day, but is based on a 2,000 calorie diet that may not apply to everyone. Even if you know that you don’t require that many calories, you can still look at these values to see if a particular food is high or low in a nutrient that you are interested in. In the example above, one serving of the soup provides 30 percent of the Daily Value for calcium, which is quite a bit. But it also has 25 percent of the Daily Value for fat–that means that one fourth of the recommended fat for the day is packed into 1 cup of soup–that’s a lot of fat per serving!

Here are some things to visualize when you are looking at a food label:

Every 5 grams of fat is a teaspoon of fat (or a pat of butter). In the example above, each cup serving of soup has 15 grams of fat–that’s three teaspoons (or one tablespoon), or three pats of butter per serving! If you consume the whole can (two servings), then you are consuming six pats of butter!

Every 4 grams of sugar is a teaspoon. The soup above has very little sugar–only 2 grams per serving, or about a half a teaspoon. But a 16 oz. bottle of sweetened tea might have 30 grams per serving (and remember, the bottle is two servings of 8 ounces each). If you drink the whole bottle, you’ll be drinking 60 grams of sugar–that’s 15 teaspoons, or five tablespoons, or just under 1/3 cup!

Anyway, it always worth taking a good look at food labels each time you are at the supermarket to choose the kind of food to buy.

Don’t you think that reading food labels is such a useful skill to master?

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