The other side of reducing sugar in foods

I agree Monica ....sweeteners are monstrous ,and the taste lingers for hours. I have sugar in my tea but would rather drink it without than have sweeteners. I've just cut down my tea consumption from a boy 8 to 4 cups a day. Hot bovril In between the tea.

I'm re-educating mine too Quickdraw . It's possible. Water is the best thing to drink. Maybe half juice/water would work for some.
I use brown stevia. any views?

Years ago I bought my first - and last - box of a well known make of small apple pies. ( Rudyard Kipling writes some good stuff - clue.) I bit into one and couldn't believe the contents.; somewhere in there was apple, but the shade was pistachio green and the gloop surrounding the 'apple' was 100% sugar syrup. Never again. Certainly a most effective and cheap 'bulker' trisher! Artificial sweeteners are so bad for us and again this morning my paper had a warning about the sweeteners that people use in drinks being carcinogenic. I've drunk tea, and more often tap water for the past few years.

Just decided on my New Year's resolution.... to re-educate my palate and cut down sugar intake thanks for the inspiration!

Read about Aspartame Anja.

Why is sugar used in so many foods? Well basically it's because it's reasonably cheap and bulks things out, and it's addictive, and like most addictive things the more you get the more you want. So from the food manufacturers point of view it's a win-win situation. You try something, you like the taste cause it's sweet, you want it again. Result!

Or even rubbish!

Artificial sweeteners are deadly ribbish!

I normally agree, except that recently I have not minded the taste of a few sweetenered products too much - e.g. ginger beer, some yoghurts.

I'd say that between cane sugar and artificial sweetener that the latter is certainly worse for your health.
I used to have 2 sugars in my ( strong ) tea but have now reduced it to half a teaspoon.
A slow reduction in sugar will wean you off the stuff in time. I don't drink pop or cordials only freshly squeezed fruit as a drink. Natural sugars.

I've always remembered that a glucose solution is used in some scans to detect cancer and deep down have wondered what sugar really does to the body.

Perhaps David you could make your own version of tinned baked beans.
My husband and I were talking about this yesterday after the sugar/children news item.
I'm now going to do a "when we were young"...
We had three meals a day- rarely anything in between ( maybe an apple). At weekends or in summer we went off to the park and survived with a drink from the water fountain. Almost everything was freshly made. Mum baked at the weekend and we had treats then- not every day. We've all become addicted to sugar and need to get off it. Fresh food - we wont need to check labels. I have had to cut sugar and feel better for it. And yes sweeteners especially aspartame are bad for you.

Artificial sweeteners are deadly. It is preferable to eat sugar if you go easy with it.
Unfortunately I have a sweet tooth and love dark chocolate, and biscuits especially fig biscuits and Garibaldis. No sugar in tea and only one in coffee. But at 77 who cares?

Having over many years re-educated our palates to want little sugar, DH and I are still trying to find baked beans which are low in sugar and also have no artificial sweeteners. (We both hate sweeteners.) The Sainsbury's ones use to taste good but now (to us) have a funny taste. We've become expert readers of labels on foods. The best beans I've found (to fit this description) are an organic brand, but (understandably) they cost four times as much.

Yes Pittcity we did that when we lived in America and it does work.

One other thing is that we are buying sweeter and sweeter fruit and vegetables. The sugar content of the most popular varieties is very high. The sweetest tomatoes, grapes and apples sell best. Likewise grapefruit- no one eats the sort of grapefruit we had in our youth.
I read an interesting paper on this about three years ago and it seems that sweetness sells so well that farmers are growing the sweeter and sweeter varieties - giving us less choice and making sweetness the new "normal".
I never knowingly buy foods with artificial sweeteners in though as they are generally unpleasant, however I do sometimes long for tangy apples and sharp oranges of the sort that in my childhood would have been offered with sugar!

Our local council advise putting tapwater in a jug with no lid in the fridge for a few hours. Apparently the chlorine dissipates....

MawBroon and CarlyD7 that is exactly what Prue Leith said yesterday. If you reduce the sugar content you re-educate your palate and you won’t want as much.

I hate the taste of Aspartame and it is toxic. It exacerbates conditions such as Fibromyalgia so I always check labels and avoid it like the plague. We fitted a filter tap in the kitchen so use water from that tap for drinking and cooking. The filters last for 3 years so are more cost effective and convenient than filter jug.

Anything with carbohydrates in has “sugar” in it. Fruit, spuds, pasta, all add sugars to your system. The trick is to limit carbs and eat more protein. Whoops, that’ll mess up your cholesterol.
I think we should be careful of added sugar be it refined sugar, fructose, honey or whatever else they call it. That will probably mean cooking from scratch judging by the ingredients list on the back of a packet!

For health reasons, I've given up sugar (for nearly a year now), including anything that contains more than 5% sugar, e.g. baked beans (!) and can't bear anything sugary now. had one bite of a mince pie at Christmas and that was more than enough for me. Yuck. We can train our palates to like less sugar - surely that's a more sensible approach than using artificial sweeteners.

Lots of scare stories out there about artificial sweetners. Most not true. Rumour has it they were started by the likes of Tate & Lyle.

Some years ago it was said aspartame was bad for us.

The answer is a nice cup of tea.

Ooh yes please - white with two sugars for me

The answer is a nice cup of tea.

seacliff Do you rinse your mouth out well after the PLJ? I drank that a lot in my 20s and eroded all the enamel on my front teeth and had to have expensive crowns. No one (or certainly not me) knew about acid erosion in those days. The same applies to drinking apple cider vinegar in water.