Many people worry about too many calories, fats, and carbs in their diet. However, the newest villain in the health war is sugar. Learn the benefits of having less sugar in your diet and how you can narrow down your daily sugar intake. For the full article, visit http://accent.chubb.com/truth-about-sugar-intake-daily-diet. For more tips to keeping your health going strong and staying healthy during this new year, check out http://accent.chubb.com/health.

1. The Truth About Sugar
Find the right balance in your daily diet.

2. Remember how fat was vilified in the 1980s, and a
trend toward fat-free foods had people using salad
dressings, cookies and other foods with more sugar
and salt to compensate for the lost taste?
Well, now the latest villain in the health wars is
sugar. Among other things, it’s been blamed for non-
alcoholic fatty liver disease (a disease caused by
overloading the liver with fructose); insulin
resistance, the gateway to diabetes; sugar addiction;
heart disease; and even cancer.

3. A study last year from the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) found that the
average American diet contains enough added
sugar to increase the risk of heart-related death
by nearly 20 percent.
Of course, it’s impossible to give up on all sugar.
After all, many of the sugars we eat naturally occur
in foods. And humans are hardwired to like sweets
(after all, science tells us that carbs stimulate the
release of feel-good serotonin in our brains).

4. On the other hand, though it may seem like sugar is
being singularly targeted, the American Heart
Association (AHA) does say that we’re eating and
drinking far too much sugar right now.
In fact, the latest studies show Americans consume
about 20 teaspoons—almost a half-cup—of added
sugar each day, in contrast to the AHA’s
recommendation of six teaspoons per day for
women and nine for men. All that sugar adds up to
an average of 152 pounds of sugar per year for
most Americans.

5. According to the CDC study, about 37 percent of the
added sugar in our diets comes from sugar-
sweetened beverages. One 12-ounce can of regular
soda contains nine teaspoons of sugar; that one can
is the AMA’s recommended max for men.
Other obvious culprits, of course, are cakes, pies
and dairy desserts, but added sugar can be found in
many foods that aren’t thought of as sweets, such as
bread, ketchup, “healthy” breakfast cereals and
yogurt, which can come with as much
sugar as candy.

6. To give some perspective on how to visualize a
gram of sugar on a nutrition label, about ¼ teaspoon
constitutes a gram. So each teaspoon of sugar you
add to your coffee, for instance, is four grams.
And as most know, sugars such as high-fructose
corn syrup and brown rice syrup may sound
healthy, but in fact they’re almost chemically and
nutritionally identical to table sugar. (Corn syrup is
cheaper to make than sugar, which is why it
appears on so many labels.) When you’re checking
ingredient labels, perhaps the simplest hack is
looking out for ingredients that end in –ose.