Remember Your Teeth After that Extra Halloween Sugar!
Most folks eat more sugar than they realize—150 pounds per year average. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, many of them children. Doctors predict that this obesity epidemic will be followed by an epidemic of diabetes.
You can lose the sugar bowl and still consume your share of sugar in cakes, cookies, and pies.
And, even if you give up Halloween candy and desserts entirely, your sugar intake would still remain high. That’s because sugar is added to salad dressings, meats, condiments like mayonnaise, steak sauce, and ketchup, breakfast cereals, canned fruits and vegetables, soups, gravies, cough drops and syrups, and such “health foods” as granola bars, yogurt, and whole wheat bread.
And the beverages—sodas, fruit juices, sport drinks, smoothies, even vitamin drinks, all add sugar to your intake.
So what can you do to combat all these extra sugars? Well, besides working on your self control around sweets, make a habit to read labels and learn sugar’s many aliases: brown sugar, raw sugar, corn syrup, molasses, sorghum, dextrose, glucose, and fructose. Like a rose, by any other name these are just as sweet—and just as harmful to your health.
Sugar intake—in its many forms—has been linked to heart disease, high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, diabetes and tooth decay. Coupled with low mineral levels, it’s suspected of contributing to cancer and aging.
