We have officially completed our first month. 31 days in and apart from a few tiny slips, lots of celebrations and a couple of mistakes I think we have done quite well so far.
To recap, I am on a 8 week sugar detox. No sugar, including fruit just lots of good fats and proteins to keep me off the white stuff. My children are on a reduced sugar diet, so they can have whole fruit but trying my best to keep hidden sugars out of their everyday diet. The husband he is tagging along for the ride, his diet consists mainly of sugar free meals but I am pretty sure he is sneaking the odd chocolate square into his mouth when I am not looking 😉
The shocking things I have discovered is that you can guarantee that sugar is in almost everything. We had burritos at the weekend, everything was homemade apart from the wraps, which unknowingly contained 1/4 teaspoon of sugar per wrap. When shopping I went to pick up a pack of guacamole to save time preparing dinner as it was getting late. Would you believe a dish which is made of avocado contained 3 teaspoons of sugar! Sugar was the next ingredient after avocado!!
So I thought I would take a look at a couple of items that we used to consume quite readily. Firstly ‘Ellas Kitchen’ fruit pouches, my daughter loves the strawberry flavoured one. Being a ‘good’ mum I would read the ingredients and see it was all fruit and nothing else added plus it was organic. Before this adventure I didn’t pay too much attention to the sugar levels, why would I, it is fruit after all??? Now I understand that the goodness of fruit is lost once blended such as the fibre and that it is basically purely sugar once it is mush. Reading the label today it stated there are 2.5 teaspoons of sugar per pouch! My daughter could easily have two of these, so she was consuming 5 teaspoons of sugar in a matter of minutes!
Next was gravy – pretty harmless right??? Why would you need sugar in gravy??? Well apparently we need 5 teaspoons in that nice little red tub. Aaaah!
Shocking isn’t it. This is just a few things that I have looked up, I am pretty sure if you went through your shopping list and compared the sugar content and added it up, you would be just as surprised as I am.
When I saw that Heinz produced a 50% reduced sugar tin of beans, I actually quite excited. Wow I thought, my children can still enjoy a few beans without worrying that their usual tin contained 6 teaspoons of sugar. Here is a tin with only 1 teaspoon per 1/2 a can. So when my daughter ate her beans today and I enquired as to what they tasted like, she responded they tasted the same as the normal ones….
Interested to see why they tasted the same, because I at least expected some comments that they tasted yucky or weird, I inspected the label more closely.
Apparently yes there are only 4.7 g of sugar per half can, just over 1 teaspoon, but it also contains ‘Stevia’ – a natural sweetener….this according to the label is a herb….
Upon reading more about Stevia the jury is still out in my opinion. Some websites state it is perfectly natural, a herb grown in Japan and used for years with no side effects. Other sites state that it causes stomach upsets, cancer and infertility.
I plan to read more about Stevia to gain a better understanding of the product. I personally would not want to subject my children to a product which is not fully understood or sold as ‘natural’ when it would have been very clearly processed to be added to the product in the first place. At this moment in time I would say that Stevia is another marketeers dream product, zero calories, little research on its long term use and they get to use a pretty leaf as a picture to convince us it was a natural product at some point in its life.
Anyone want 3 cans of baked beans???
Sugar Free Family 