Sneaky Sugar

You + Sugar = Fat.

I’m sorry. There’s no other way around it. If you eat a lot of sweets, you’re not going to lose weight. You might maintain weight, and you definitely might gain weight, but you’re not going to lose weight. 

Okay, you probably know this. And you think you’re watching out for sugar. You eat yogurt, not cupcakes. You’ve switched to natural sweeteners like agave or stevia in lieu of the white stuff. 

But look again at that yogurt. Check out how much sugar it has. Chances are, if it tastes really good, it’s probably not all that good for you. I’m not saying that something has to taste bad to be healthy, but that sweet yogurt? It’s probably filled with sugar. I was foraging for a decent snack at my parents’ this weekend, when I found some yogurt my mom had bought. It was low-fat, and it had something like 23 grams of sugar. (And my dad has diabetes!) 

I showed my mom the nutrition facts and explained to her some stuff you might not know if you’re new to this healthy thing. (This applies to all food, not just yogurt.)

• If it’s “low-fat”, especially if it proclaims so on the label, it’s probably making up for it elsewhere. It might have more sugar or more of something else.
• Brown rice syrup or high fructose corn syrup (and really, anything that ends in -ose or “syrup”) are probably not ingredients you want to see on ingredient lists, or at least not in the first few ingredients.
• If your fruit is in a cup, it probably has syrup in it. Syrup has sugar in it.