Added sugar is a large part of the American diet and is becoming more and more of a problem. Almost everything that you can buy has some kind of added sugar in it and most of the time people are not even able to recognized it. According to a 2014 article written by Julie Corliss for the Harvard Medical School, eating too much added sugar increases peoples risk of heart disease tremendously. People need to gain an understanding of what all of this added sugar can do to there health not only now but also later in life. Americans need to start paying attention to food labels before they buy things and also develop ways to recognize different sugars in the foods that they are consuming. The average American is supposed to have thirty grams
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Americans are often fooled by the ingredients that are listed because most people do not know that there are at least sixty-one different names used on food labels for sugar. According to the LA times, the FDA is pushing for there to be a separate label on foods to show the added sugar in the food items. The food industry has become very good at tricking people and making them think that what they are eating is not bad for them. They are good at spinning things around and blaming people on not exercising enough rather than accepting blame for the problem a lot of people have. According to the documentary Fed Up, in an average American grocery store there are over 600,000 food items and 80% of them have added sugar. The food industry has also been very good at making junk food so appealing to kids by adding characters on them. Taking it a step further, a lot of formulas also have sugar in them because the food industry knows the earlier you can introduce someone to sugar the more addicted and branded they will be to …show more content…
Natural sugars come in all sorts of foods such as: fruit, potatoes, honey, organic syrups, etc. These natural sugars are not necessarily bad for you, they just need to be consumed in moderation. When getting natural sugar such as fruit, you are also getting the fiber which mitigates the negative effects that sugar can cause. When it comes to fruits, the USDA recommends that the average person eats only two cups of fruit per day which equals around the thirty grams of sugar that a person should have. If Americans followed the sugar “rule” it would lead to a much healthier diet. Around the 1980’s people began to see the importance of being healthy and exercising. Between the years of 1980 and 2000 fitness club memberships more than doubled, but so did the obesity rate. Since a lot of people were wanting to become healthier, around 1988 the food industries began promoting reduced fat or low fat products. The food industry understood that the reduced fat products did not taste very good so they had to do something to make it taste better, to make it worth eating, so what did they do? They added a lot more sugar. When products say "half the fat" it really means "double the
Americans are often fooled by the ingredients that are listed because most people do not know that there are at least sixty-one different names used on food labels for sugar. According to the LA times, the FDA is pushing for there to be a separate label on foods to show the added sugar in the food items. The food industry has become very good at tricking people and making them think that what they are eating is not bad for them. They are good at spinning things around and blaming people on not exercising enough rather than accepting blame for the problem a lot of people have. According to the documentary Fed Up, in an average American grocery store there are over 600,000 food items and 80% of them have added sugar. The food industry has also been very good at making junk food so appealing to kids by adding characters on them. Taking it a step further, a lot of formulas also have sugar in them because the food industry knows the earlier you can introduce someone to sugar the more addicted and branded they will be to …show more content…
Natural sugars come in all sorts of foods such as: fruit, potatoes, honey, organic syrups, etc. These natural sugars are not necessarily bad for you, they just need to be consumed in moderation. When getting natural sugar such as fruit, you are also getting the fiber which mitigates the negative effects that sugar can cause. When it comes to fruits, the USDA recommends that the average person eats only two cups of fruit per day which equals around the thirty grams of sugar that a person should have. If Americans followed the sugar “rule” it would lead to a much healthier diet. Around the 1980’s people began to see the importance of being healthy and exercising. Between the years of 1980 and 2000 fitness club memberships more than doubled, but so did the obesity rate. Since a lot of people were wanting to become healthier, around 1988 the food industries began promoting reduced fat or low fat products. The food industry understood that the reduced fat products did not taste very good so they had to do something to make it taste better, to make it worth eating, so what did they do? They added a lot more sugar. When products say "half the fat" it really means "double the