Can you keep to six teasps of sugar a day..

I bet they'll find out that even water has sugar in it. I'm getting a bit fed up of being told what not to eat - especially at it keeps changing. Surely moderation is the key. Apparently a banana has seven teaspoons of sugar in it - I give up!

Granny23 in the title of Bags' post it says tablespoons but in the text it says teaspoons - typical media!

Ok: so we can eat as much sugar as we like as long as it's naturally occurring eg in fruit, carbs, veg, honey, milk and so on.

But we must take into account sugar that has been added during manufacture eg tinned beans, tomatoes, cereal, booze; and also sugar we add ourselves eg to tea, cereal, and in cooking. And all of this so-called added sugar shouldn't add up to more than 5 tbspoons?

Perhaps we could all start growing this

janeainsworth fructose being converted into fat and stored in the liver? Not glycogen?.... goes off to read wiki.... Not a chemist but squinting at the wiki entry seems to indicate that the primary metabolite is glycogen and after this is replenished in the liver the excess will form fatty compounds. So I guess it depends how much you consume, and when. I'm sure we agree its bad for your teeth!!!
bags the natural sugars in dried fruit are a much higher proportion if you calculate by weight or volume because so much of weight and volume in fresh fruit consist of water. A handful of sultanas = a small bunch of grapes.
If you make wholemeal bread with flour, water and yeast the only added sugar is that needed to activated the yeast. And this is then broken down chemically by yeasts.
It would be a start, wouldn't it, if we talked about added sugar. It is clear that most people in this country consume more than 6 teaspoonfuls a day. The kind that is included in cake, biscuits, soft drinks, many processed food. On the ingredients section of the labelling it will be listed as sucrose, lactose, fructose, corn syrup etc.
Me? Probably about 6 teaspoonfuls added sugar a week.

It's worth growing Sweet Cicely to add sweetness. It has a slight aniseed flavour so you would need to like that and, in addition it's easy to grow and looks pretty.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

I eat a varied mixed diet, almost entirely cooked from scratch and high in vegetables and fruit. All these silly rules, that divide foods in to 'good' foods and 'bad' foods and tell you not to exceed a daily dose of this food or to eat at least a daily dose of something else. They all medicalise food, remove pleasure, which is half the value of food, and lead to dangerous and obsessive eating patterns.

Ignore all these recommendations and just eat what you enjoy and what keeps you feeling well and active.

The trouble is though, that there is a sizeable group of people whose daily diet is composed of many cokes, cakes, biscuits, sweets and chocolate. It must be very hard to change if that is what your palette has been trained to from an early age. Trained in a good part, by the practice of adding sugar by manufacturers to many, many foods. If you have the time and inclination to cook everything from scratch as you do and I do, it's easy to eat enjoyably and healthily without fretting about added sugar. But for those who are pressed for time and have no interest or ability to cook (for whatever reason) then I think this advice is timely.

There is too, a great deal of sensational reporting of small scale studies which purport that this or that will give you cancer or something else nasty, and most of us are not scientifically or statistically trained to interpret these studies.

We all know that the war years and rationing years were the healthy years, perhaps what is needed is a robust Ministry of Food to provide scientifically sound advice and guidance. But I fear that is a vain hope.

Yes, jess, I know that about the concentration of sugars in dried fruit being higher than in fresh fruit because most of the water has been 'taken out'. But anyone with any sense (me!) knows that one doesn't need as big a volume of dried fruit compared to fresh fruit so it doesn't matter.

Well, it only matters if you over eat dried fruit so it's down to good sense again.

mice, I contend that the war and post-war rationing years improved the nation's health not because it reduced what people ate but becuase it supplied a more balanced diet to people whose diets had been, up till then, very bad due to poverty. Rationing and coupons allowed everyone to get basic vitamins and minerals that they had lacked before on very limited diets.

jess's point that the problem is added sugar is what this is really about.

I think that's true, Bags. It's amazing what necessity and compulsion can do. Nowadays, it would be politically impossible to reintroduce rationing but authoritative advice and an adjustment of the taxation system - for example a tax imposed on all foodstuffs every time they undergoe a process and the resulting revenue used to subsidise fruit, vegetables, good quality meat, fish and dairy foods would would have a beneficial effect.

Not just the diet in the war years, everyone got a lot more exercise, walking to work (miles in a lot of cases), and with no aids to housework, beating the rugs etc.

The only added sugar we have is in home-made marmalade and chutney and we make that with a low proportion of sugar. We have never really eaten biscuits, cakes, puddings or sweet drinks and the only processed food we have is tinned tomatoes.
So I think probably about six teaspoons a week here too and OH doesn't use sugar to start the yeast for the bread. In an effort to beat his pre-diabetes we have been having a bash at low carb (pearl barley salad is really very nice) and we have both lost a little bit of weight, so we will see if anything changes at the next blood test. If not, then I think we can do no more.

And, thinking about this, it really is a lot about training the palette. I'm old enough to remember rationing and I remember the word going round our street when sweets came off the ration. My father came home with a Mars Bar and various other stuff and I remember being quite disappointed because I didn't like them! It's what you get used to. But then, my mother was French and cooked well and our food was regarded as funny and foreign when I wa a child.

I hadn't twigged that thing about sugar in dried fruit being more concentrated. Although it's obvious when you think about it.

I make my own bread. 5ml sugar, my own yoghurt no sugar. The only person who goes into my sugar bowl is my cleaner. Dd nicks consumes all the honey in my house when she visits including my local medicinal honey!

I think we are fine as almost everything we eat is home made and we don't have puddings unless others come to eat with us. I suspect the odd glass of wine doesn't amount to much either.

We used to take sugar in hot drinks but trained ourselves not to and after about 10 days it tasted horrid if it had got sugar in.

Hi Jess I am not a biochemist either, but I first read about the difference ibetween gluicose metabolism and fructose metabolism via Robert Lustig's famous lecture a few years ago.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
It's quite a long lecture but this article summarises it
articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/01/02/highfructose-corn-syrup-alters-human-metabolism.aspx
This is an extract:
"Every cell in your body, including your brain, utilizes glucose. Therefore, much of it is "burned up" immediately after you consume it. By contrast, fructose is turned into free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL (the damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which get stored as fat.
The fatty acids created during fructose metabolism accumulate as fat droplets in your liver and skeletal muscle tissues, causing insulin resistance and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). Insulin resistance progresses to metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes.
Fructose is the most lipophilic carbohydrate. In other words, fructose converts to activated glycerol (g-3-p), which is directly used to turn FFAs into triglycerides. The more g-3-p you have, the more fat you store. Glucose does not do this.
When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose results in 40 calories being stored as fat. Consuming fructose is essentially consuming fat!"

I'm not sure that cooking from scratch does take that long. I always say I do not have time to fiddle around with ready meals making them palatable.

When i worked I just hurled frozen meat, veg, stock cube and herbs in a casserole shoved it in the oven on the delay cooking option and hey presto , supper all cooked when I arrived home. It took me less than ten minutes to do that

I think the problem is a TV chef has to be seen to be doing thinks properly so if you do not know how to cook, cooking from scratch seems complicated and time-consuming. But in the secrecy of the kitchen you can cut all the corners, break all the rules, providing the resultant meal is edible and enjoyed, who cares whether you chopped and fried onions, browned the meat etc.

Nigella says there is no need to brown the meat FlicketyB

Thanks jane - hence the horribleness of corn syrup which is rich in fructose?

Absolutely Jess.
It made me rethink my diet.
No more smoothies, and my fruit juice consumption reduced to about 80mls of tropicana with breakfast.
I stopped buying fruit yoghurt and creme fraiche.
I rarely buy cakes and biscuits and never eat them, but MrA still likes the odd biscuit to nibble on!

I don't understand that bit about "if you eat 120 cals of glucose, only 1 cal is stored as fat." I thought any calories that you consume without burning up, either by staying alive or moving about, get stored as fat, no matter where they come from.

So, drinking Lucozade is ok? You won't get fat on it? Really?!