Today Tonight does occasionally have a purpose. Parent A, Parent B, and Offsping B (myself) caught wind of one of last night's stories - 1 of the 750 diet-related stories they broadcast throughout the week - this one being all about the "hidden" sugars in foods and beverages, and that it's this sweet, delicious culprit that actually makes us little fatties.
The story wasn't exactly revolutionary, but they were talking about how many teaspoons of sugar there are in certain things and that in turn caused me to Google how many grams are contained in one teaspoon of sugar, to put things in perspective - afterall, food labels (assuming of course that you ever read them) give it to us in grams, not teaspoons.
Drumroll please... the magic number is about 4.2 grams per teaspoon.
That's a freaking lot. I sized up a punnet of low fat yoghurt in our fridge this morning to find that it contains 26 grams of sugar per punnet, which is about 5-6 teaspoons. That's a heck of lot. And is particularly humourous considering that I sometimes balk at having a teaspoon of sugar in my tea, yet I'll slurp down that yoghurt thinking I'm all like Jen Hawkins and stuff. For some reason those granules just appear more threatening in raw form.
Today Tonight talked about the hidden sugar in stuff like beer and juice. Those are quite obvious ones, but I'm sure they really made heads spin when they mentioned chocolate bars among the list of foods with possible hidden sugars. Mmm, yeah, totes, sooooo many sneakily disguised sugars in my Mars bar, how was I ever to know?
Anyway, I raise this not to be a killer of all that is good and yummy. But it's good to have a number, you know? For those 10 out of 365 days per year when we actually decide to stick to our diets.
Image: One. Two.
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