The sugar in the orange is contained within the cells of the fruit, so your body actually has to expend more energy to process and digest it than it does digesting added sugar. The fiber in the orange also slows down the digestive process. As a result, you do not experience the rapid spike in blood sugar that added sugars cause. Also, a similar weight of orange simply contains much less sugar than say, an orange sherbet with a lot of sugar added to it. The fruit is also packed with other nutrients which added sugar completely lacks.
“If we eat a peach or if we eat an apple, we are also eating all the other nutrients encompassed in that food, including water, fats and proteins,” says Dana Hunnes, a registered dietitian and adjunct assistant professor in the department of community health sciences at UCLA . “When we take the sugar out of context, that sugar is devoid of all the heath-enhancing properties of the original food it was sourced from, losing all of its nutrient properties except for the sweetness and the calories.” Many types of sugar, like rice sugar and agave nectar, are technically natural sugars, but they’re extracted and processed in very high concentrations and then added to foods where they’re very easy to digest and absorb. The natural sugars in fruits and vegetables never exist in such a high concentration as added sugars, and they’re always accompanied by healthy components like fiber, which slows the absorption of natural sugars into the blood.
The Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans suggest consuming less than 10% of your daily calories from added sugars, which would fall somewhere around 50 grams of added sugars per day for a 2,000 calorie diet.
No comments:
Post a Comment