Sugar With the average person consuming more than 32 teaspoons of sugar each day - we are storing up a massive health problem for the future. Dr Harriet Doyle explains…

A recent report following a long review of childrens development found that 19.8% of children in year 6 (aged 10-11) were obese and a further 14.3% were over weight. Of children in reception (aged 4-5), 9.3% were obese and another 12.8% were overweight. This means a third of 10-11 year olds and over a fifth of 4-5 year olds were overweight or obese. Results for adults for the same year showed that 62.9% of them were overweight or obese.

This is obviously a significant problem today but is also storing up a massive health problem for the future. Obesity is associated with increased cardiovascular risk and with cancer, disability during old age, decreased life expectancy and serious chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis and raised blood pressure.

Increasingly the culprit for this is being identified as sugar and in particular added or free sugar. On food labels this can be identified as a recommended daily dose - approximately 5 teaspoons a day for a child and 7 for an adult, but the average Briton consumes roughly 32 teaspoons of sugar each day and generally without knowing it.

The food industry loves added sweeteners, as they make every type of food more pleasurable, from soup to cereal, ketchup to bread. A third of a jar of pasta sauce may contain 3 teaspoons of sugar, a portion of ketchup, half a teaspoon and a glass of apple juice will have 17 teaspoons. A bowl of breakfast cereal could have 3 teaspoons of sugar. In particular, free sugar is used in low-fat foods which would otherwise taste like cardboard! The introduction of low fat products in the 1970s coincides with the rise in obesity and related diseases.

Of course not all sugar is bad. Naturally occurring sugar in whole fruit or milk comes in small quantities and is important for growth and development, providing a ready form of energy to fuel your muscles and keep your brain active. It seems that the total number of calories you consume is irrelevant. It’s the specific calories that count. Where people ate 150 calories more every day, the rate of diabetes went up by only 0.1 per cent. But if those 150 calories came from a can of fizzy drink, the rate went up 1.1 per cent. Added sugar is 11 times more potent at causing diabetes than general calories.

A further challenge is the addictive nature of sugar; the instant lift we get from it is one of the reasons we turn to it in times of celebration, or when we are in need of comfort or reward. But after the high, there is a tendency to crash - triggering a craving for more sugar. This series of highs and lows provoke unnecessary physical stresses making one anxious, moody and exhausted. And instead of satisfying us, free sugars fool our brains into thinking we are not full, so we tend to overeat.

So the key might be to turn label detective; there are many different ways added sugar can be listed in ingredients: sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, fruit juice, molasses, hydrolysed starch, corn syrup and honey are all forms of ‘free sugar’. Nutrition labels will also tell you how much total sugar a product contains. So 22.5g or more per 100g is a high sugar product whereas 5g or less is low in sugar. The recommended daily intake is 30g or 7 teaspoons, and to achieve this one needs to be really focused on identifying, and avoiding the hidden additions. Cutting back on your daily sugar intake may be a physical challenge in the short term but the medium and long term health benefits will be huge.