Why an ‘Added Sugar’ Label is Coming and How it Might Help You Lose Weight
We all know there is too much sugar in our diets. Nutritional experts at the World Health Organization say that sugar should account for less than 5 per cent of our daily energy intake.
But North Americans currently have it hovering at a whopping 14 per cent of their total daily calories.
Wow, that’s high.
Where is all the sugar coming from? Drinks like pop, energy drinks, and fruit drinks, baked snacks and candy are the major culprits in our mouths. It seems we’ve lost the habit of drinking mostly water, and reaching for a pear when our body has the munchies.
We’re going for treats, instead.
And so, all those extra calories are making us fat. But who, really, is to blame? Part of it is habits and the onus is on the consumer to make better choices than they are.
But other issues are also at stake.
Research has proven that sugar can be highly addictive-as much so as cocaine. And it’s everywhere. Try telling yourself that you can’t buy anything with added sugar in it the next time you’re grocery shopping. You’ll be surprised at how many of the products you want to buy have piles of sweetness locked in.
(Trust me, we’re inundated. I’ve tried. I found myself relegated to the fresh produce section and the meat counter, alone).
It seems that companies have knowingly packed sugar into our food, making packaged items so chemically delectable that we keep coming back for more, and we can’t stop.
It’s this belief that may have driven the Food and Drug Administration to take a stance in an act of seeming retaliation amidst a North American epidemic of obesity.
The FDA is now requiring the amount of sugar added in a packaged product to be displayed on the side of a package, along with other nutritional information. Currently, sugar can be listed in the ingredients, but added sugar doesn’t have its own platform.
The hope, it seems, is that in revealing the sugar added to our food, consumers will be more informed and make different choices in what they buy, and food producers will be shamed into reducing how much sugar they add to it in the first place.
And so, the label changes will go into effect by July, 2018.
Which is great. But, I’m not convinced.
Here’s my beef: concise labeling sounds like a great place to start, but will it make a difference? Are those individuals with the worst habits actually reading nutritional content labels? Maybe.
Research, however, indicates (not surprisingly), that the group consuming the largest amount of added sugar is 12 to 19 year-olds. Companies have them addicted, and I’d bet they’re going for taste and most have never bothered to bat an eye at the label on their soda bottle.
That being said, I’ll agree that change does start with education. And perhaps anyplace is a good place to start when a problem gets to be this big. It’s a group effort and change needs to come on multiple fronts to have an affect.
And it is. It’s great to see some supermarkets putting out baskets of free fruit for kids to snack on while their parents shop. Get them early, and you’ve got ‘em for life.
This is the lesson that most marketers already know and we’ve got to play the same game as the big guys if we’re going to win this battle and regain our health, which should have been ours- always- to begin with.
We’re more than too many donuts.
So, show us your sugar. Feeling nervous about the whole thing? Then maybe you’ve put in too much.
Photo Credit: Ekaterina_Minaeva/Shutterstock