What is wrong with the American diet?

The Americans are eating food which is far too sweet. That people toad up with more sugar than ever is unquestionable B 156 pounds of added sugars per person last year, up from 144 pounds in 1994, which in turn was up from 127 pounds in 1986. The average American now consumes more than 20 teaspoons of added sugars a day, twice the amount recommended by health experts worldwide.
    In the frenzy to cut back on fats, people have turned 1o sugar with a vengeance as a feel-good food. The consumption of fructose alone has risen tenfold since 1975.
    By squeezing out more nutritious foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy products that can help to prevent disease, a high-sugar diet might be making an important contribution to such problems as osteoporosis, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and, of course, tooth decay.
    And by contributing so many easy-to-consume empty calories to our daily diets, added sugars are undoubtedly a major factor in the precipitous rise in obesity among both children and adults. To make matters worse, most heavy sweetened foods are also high-fat foods.
    In recent decades sugar has become a pervasive added ingredient in many processed foods, including some that most people think are food for them. These include fruit snacks, flavored yogurt, frozen yogurt, granola bars, frozen fruit bars, juice drinks, sorbet, bran and fruit muffins and breakfast cereals. Yet, because food labels now list only total sugars—a combination of sugars naturally in foods and those added by processors—most people have no idea how much extra sugar they consume.
    Looking at the ingredients list may offer few clues to the amount of caloric sweeteners that have been added to the product, since manufacturers can list separately items like high-fructose corn syrup, honey, fruit syrup, molasses and barley malt, and not ever use the word "sugar".
    Sodas are the largest single source of added sugars—33% of the total—and re- cent studies have linked the frequent consumption of sugar-sweetened soft drinks to obesity. People apparently do not compensate for the excess calories they consume as liquids as effectively as they do for the calories in solid foods. One 12-ounce can of soda supplies 160 sweet calories—or 40 grams of sugar. Nearly a tenth of the calories consumed by American teenagers come from nutritionally empty soda, which they drink at the expense of calcium-rich milk and vitamin-rich fruit juices. As a result, many young Americans today are reaching the age of maximum bone growth with bones highly prone to osteoporosis.
    A nutritionally sound diet should derive no more than 10% of its calories from added sugar; American children now consume nearly twice that amount. The average teenager derives 19% of calories from added sugar, with the average boys consuming 34 teaspoons and the average girls consuming 24 teaspoons of added sugar daily. Younger children, too, have diets far sweeter than desirable: 6- to Il-year-olds get 18% of their calories from added sugars.
    The usual argument against listing added sugars on food labels is that the human body makes no distinction between the sugars that occur naturally in foods and those that are added in factories or at the table. It processes all sugar in pretty much the same way, whether it was formed in fruit as it ripened or was added when it was canned.
    But this metabolic fact ignores important nutritional and health concerns. The sugars naturally present in fruit and milk, for example, come in a package laden with essential nutrients. The sugar added to canned fruit or frozen yogurt brings in nothing but calories. And if enough added sugar calories are present in a person’s diet, there is less room for the nutrient-rich foods that can help to prevent serious chronic diseases.
    As things now stand, the consumer has no way to know how much sugar was naturally present in a food or drink before it was processed and how much sugar the manufacturer added. Look, for example, at the nutrition information on a container of skim milk. It states that an 8-ounce serving contains 11 grams of sugar, which may create the impression that it is no worse for a person, in terms of sugar content, than a sweetened breakfast cereal with the same amount of sugar per serving.
    But the sugar in milk is put there by the cow, along with calcium, protein and other nutrients; the sugar in the cereal, which amounts to nearly a tablespoon of sugar, was added by the manufacturer and serves only to dilute the nutrient value of the grain, which contains little or no sugar.
    Don’t be fooled by products that claim to contain "all natural" sweeteners. Added ingredients like brown sugar, raw sugar, fruit sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, honey or maple syrup are treated no differently from table sugar once they enter the bloodstream.