Re-set your Sweetness Thermostat
From toddlerhood to adulthood, we consume too much sugar. Shockingly, the National Diet and Nutrition Survey showed that toddlers are consuming daily more than the recommended amount of sugar for adults; 32.6 grams of sugar. And by the age of 10, children have exceeded the recommended sugar intake for an 18-year-old.
From 11 years and older, the recommendation is that we consume no more than 30g sugar daily, however teenagers consume 67g per day and adults 57g. Added sugar is the sugar found in all foods and drinks except for fresh fruit and vegetables and plain milk. An apple isn’t added sugar but a glass of apple juice is. As is that found in smoothies, sauces and oat/ almond and other milk alternatives.
The fact that we consume so much sugar is hardly surprising. We’re given it from weaning, we get a sweet pudding every day after school lunch, we’re rewarded with sweets and it’s even added to savoury foods to make it more palatable. Sugar makes us happy. It acts on the region of the brain that controls reward, craving and addiction, and the food industry use this to make a huge amount of money. Millions of pounds is put into research on how to overstimulate the taste buds and the pleasure circuits in the brain that make us crave sugary foods and drinks and keep coming back for more.
Just look at the evidence – go into any supermarket and you will find that most of the sugary snacks and biscuits have between 35-50g of sugar per 100g. Could it be that around 38% sugar is the ‘bliss point’ that is just enough sugar to get us coming back for more, but not too much sugar that it’s sickly sweet.
So what should we do? There is lots of good tips and advice about how to tame a sweet tooth – chew gum, brush your teeth, have a piece of fruit, eat more protein, go for a walk… the advice is endless. However most of them address the symptoms and don’t tackle the cause.
There is only one thing that we can do to tame a sweet tooth, and that is to re-set what I call your ‘sweetness thermostat’.
Re-set your Sweetness Thermostat
What is sweet? It depends. What is sweet to me may be not sweet to you, and what is sweet to you may not be sweet enough for someone else. Sweetness is subjective. However the food industry try very hard to make sweetness objective, by offering, and introducing more and more sweet products on the market with the same range of sugar mentioned earlier – 35-50% sugar.
Just look at any packet of biscuits in the supermarket or confectionery snack. We consume these overly sugary products, accepting that this is ‘sweet’. But imagine if as children, we had only been given sweet snacks and confectionery of no more than 20% sugar, instead of Milky Bars which are 52.6% sugar, Milky Ways which are 66.2% sugar, Chocolate Buttons which are 56% sugar, and Jaffa Cakes which are 52.6% sugar. All of these ‘treats’ are marketed at toddlers. Even Farley’s Rusks, given to babies when weaning, are 29% sugar. So it’s no wonder that we get used to these overly sweet snacks – we have been conditioned to believe that this is what constitutes sweet. Our sweetness thermostats have been set at ‘high’.
So how do we reset our thermostat and reduce it to ‘low’. What can we do so that ‘sweet’ is defined at 22.5% or lower. Why this figure? Because 22.5g sugar per 100g is the figure given by Public Health England as to what constitutes a high-sugar product. So it’s sensible to set this number as your maximum, because any lower will be in the medium zone.
And it doesn’t mean a life of deprivation and only bananas and tangerines for snacks. There’s loads of choice if you fancy something chocolaty, nutty, chewy, crunchy, or to dunk in your cup of tea. Here are just a few examples:
What you will find is that these snacks contain more protein and nutrients, and have a lower glycaemic index (GI), thereby filling you up for longer and giving you a more satisfying snack. They might contain the same or even slightly more calories than the sugar-laden snacks, this is because they often contain almonds or peanuts, which are high in fat, but don’t be alarmed. These fats are good fats that will bring down the GI. Remember, the body does not treat all calories equally. A gram of sugar is 4 calories and will raise insulin levels, and gram of fat is 9 calories and will not have any effect on insulin. And when insulin is not released, the body can burn fat.
You can occasionally go for higher than 22.5%. Suppose that your favourite chocolate snack is a Bounty Bar? Yes you can succumb to the temptation, but what you might find after you’ve successfully reset your thermostat, is that a Bounty, at 47.8% sugar is just too sweet for you.
So don’t settle for the widely accepted level of sweetness that you find in many high-sugar foods like breakfast cereals, snacks and biscuits. When sugar is combined with fat and salt it becomes almost impossible to resist. Sugar salt and fat are ingredients that are very cheap, they make us hungrier, and they override the body’s fragile controls on overeating, making us gain weight.
But don’t get me wrong, I love a chocolate cake as much as you do, however I have devised cake recipes that use a fraction of the sugar of most recipes, but are just as, if not, more pleasing to the palate.