Sweet nothings in your 'healthy' diet

Secret ingredients in your otherwise healthy diet can lead you to eat a lot more sugar than required. Here's how you can control it

On the face of it, your diet pattern is perfect. You don't consume too much sugar, you are careful about your dessert intake and have practically given up fizzy drinks. Moreover, you also take pains to include only 'healthy' while you are grocery shopping. Granola bars with oats and honey, bread, tomato crisps, hummus, sandwiches, packet soups, biscuits etc might seem good choices but that's only until you know what they contain.

Fact is, even the seemingly healthy diet can be full of sugar or salt especially if you don't check the ingredients on the packet. For instance a granola bar contains sugar. Similarly, a packet of soup which is full of salt is equally unhealthy.

Why avoid sugar
While sugar from any natural source such as vegetables and fruits can never harm you, it's the processed sugar that you need to be wary of. Here is how you can tackle the sugar:

• The maximum amount of sugar people should have per day is 90g (22tsp) for women, 120g (30tsp) for men and 85g (21tsp) for children aged 5-10.

• Anything that ends in ‘ose’ maltose, glucose, sucrose, fructose - usually means a type of sugar. Also look for maltodextrin, any type of syrup and honey. Organic or brown sugar are no better than white.

• Use labelling on food packets to see how much sugar, salt and fat it contains. Generally, anything containing 12.5 gm of sugar or more per 100 gm is high sugar or a ‘red’ traffic light product. In contrast, anything with less than 5 gm sugar per 100 gm is considered to be low in sugar or a ‘green’ traffic light.

• Watch processed food and ready meals and always check their nutritional values. Some contain the recommended daily allowance of fat, sugar and salt in one sitting.

• The higher up sugar appears on the ingredients' list, the more the product contains.

• Go to a sandwich shop and have one made rather than buying a ready-made, which can be high in sugar, salt and fat.

• Don't add sugar to drinks or cereal. Artificial sweeteners are better but they only feed a sweet tooth so try to wean yourself off it altogether.

• Fruit juice is high in sugar so limit yourself to one glass a day.

• Cut out foods that are high in sugar, salt and fat like chocolate biscuits, crisps, cake and fizzy drinks, which contain minimal nutrients. For example, there are 140 calories but no nutrients in a can of cola.