Roaming around the USDA website is an eye-opening experience. The agency was created to help farmers produce more food for U.S. citizens. Over the years, they have become more involved with American nutrition, and you can see this conflict when you go through the pages of their site. The USDA wants farmers to grow easy crops with high yields and good market prices. And, at the same time, they want Americans to “eat well.”
Therein lies the rub.
I was looking for recommended levels of sugar for Americans and came across the aggregate page of crop yields for corn, cane sugar, and beets. It’s pretty interesting to see how much we’re growing and how the farmers are doing yield-wise.
And if the USDA is helping farmers grow all this sugar, then they need to help them get rid of it, too. So how much do you think the USDA recommends for daily consumption of sugar for the average American?
10 teaspoons of added sugar per day; this does not include naturally occurring sugars such as fructose in your orange or lactose in your milk. Think about that for a second … 10 teaspoons of sugar is 168 useless calories. Over the course of a year, that translates to 17 1/2 pounds you need to figure out how to burn off. Or worse still, carry on your body and live withe every day.
Let’s compare those 10 added calories to the American Heart Association’s sugar recommendations:
- Men: 9 teaspoons total intake
- Women: 5 teaspoons total intake
- Children: 3 teaspoons total intake
While the difference between the USDA’s amount and the AHA-recommended amount for men might not seem like that much, keep in mind the second number is all sugars through all sources, not just added to a dish. The AHA sounds a whole lot more reasonable, doesn’t it?
By the way, one can of soda has, on average, 9 to 10 teaspoons of sugar in it.
Are we eating too much sugar? Yes! Do we need to cut back? Yes!
How do we do that? The usual ways. Eat a diet full of fruits and veggies, lean meats, and cut back on processed foods, one of the main ways that sugar sneaks into our diets. The more you cook from scratch, the better, too; you’re not likely to dump a pound of sugar into a home-cooked meal.
This isn’t my first time writing about how the USDA makes us fat; check out how the recently introduced “Food Plate” has been taken over by lobbyists.
Do you watch your sugar intake?