Quantcast
Environmental News for a Healthier Planet and Life

Help Support EcoWatch

nutrition

18 Foods and Drinks That Are Surprisingly High in Sugar

Healthline
Jun. 27, 2020 11:22AM EST Health + Wellness
18 Foods and Drinks That Are Surprisingly High in Sugar
EvgeniiAnd / iStock / Getty Images Plus

By Helen West, RD

Eating too much sugar is really bad for your health.

It has been linked to an increased risk of many diseases, including obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

Many people are now trying to minimize their sugar intake, but it's easy to underestimate how much you're actually consuming.

One of the reasons is that many foods contain hidden sugars, including some foods that you wouldn't even consider to be sweet.

In fact, even products marketed as "light" or "low fat" often contain more sugar than their regular counterparts.

The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends that women limit their added sugar intake to 6 teaspoons (25 grams) per day, while men should limit their intake to 9 teaspoons (37.5 grams).

Here are 18 foods and drinks that contain way more sugar than you'd think.

1. Low Fat Yogurt

Yogurt can be highly nutritious. However, not all yogurt is created equal.

Like many other low fat products, low fat yogurts have sugar added to them to enhance flavor.

For example, a single cup (245 grams) of low fat yogurt can contain over 45 grams of sugar, which is about 11 teaspoons. This is more than the daily limit for men and women in just a single cup of "healthy" yogurt.

Furthermore, low fat yogurt doesn't seem to have the same health benefits as full fat yogurt.

It's best to choose full fat, natural, or Greek yogurt. Avoid yogurt that has been sweetened with sugar.

2. Barbecue (BBQ) Sauce

Barbecue (BBQ) sauce can make a tasty marinade or dip.

However, 2 tablespoons (around 28 grams) of sauce can contain around 9 grams of sugar. This is over 2 teaspoons worth.

In fact, around 33% of the weight of BBQ sauce may be pure sugar.

If you're liberal with your servings, this makes it easy to consume a lot of sugar without meaning to.

To make sure you aren't getting too much, check the labels and choose the sauce with the least amount of added sugar. Also, remember to watch your portions.

3. Ketchup

Ketchup is one of the most popular condiments worldwide, but — like BBQ sauce — it's often loaded with sugar.

Try to be mindful of your portion size when using ketchup, and remember that a single tablespoon of ketchup contains nearly 1 teaspoon of sugar.

4. Fruit Juice

Like whole fruit, fruit juice contains some vitamins and minerals.

However, despite seeming like a healthy choice, these vitamins and minerals come with a large dose of sugar and very little fiber.

It usually takes a lot of fruit to produce a single glass of fruit juice, so you get much more sugar in a glass of juice than you would get by eating whole fruit. This makes it easy to consume a large amount of sugar quickly.

In fact, there can be just as much sugar in fruit juice as there is in a sugary drink like Coke. The poor health outcomes that have been convincingly linked to sugary soda may also be linked to fruit juices.

It's best to choose whole fruit and minimize your intake of fruit juices.

5. Spaghetti Sauce

Added sugars are often hidden in foods that we don't even consider to be sweet, such as spaghetti sauce.

All spaghetti sauces will contain some natural sugar given that they're made with tomatoes.

However, many spaghetti sauces contain added sugar as well.

The best way to ensure you aren't getting any unwanted sugar in your pasta sauce is to make your own.

However, if you need to buy premade spaghetti sauce, check the label and pick one that either doesn't have sugar on the ingredient list or has it listed very close to the bottom. This indicates that it's not a major ingredient.

6. Sports Drinks

Sports drinks can often be mistaken as a healthy choice for those who exercise.

However, sports drinks are designed to hydrate and fuel trained athletes during prolonged, intense periods of exercise.

For this reason, they contain high amounts of added sugars that can be quickly absorbed and used for energy.

In fact, a standard 20-ounce (591-mL) bottle of a sports drink will contain 37.9 grams of added sugar and 198 calories. This is equivalent to 9.5 teaspoons of sugar.

Sports drinks are therefore categorized as sugary drinks. Like soda and fruit juice, they've also been linked to obesity and metabolic disease.

Unless you're a marathon runner or elite athlete, you should probably just stick to water while exercising. It's by far the best choice for most of us.

7. Chocolate Milk

Chocolate milk is milk that has been flavored with cocoa and sweetened with sugar.

Milk itself is a very nutritious drink. It's a rich source of nutrients that are great for bone health, including calcium and protein.

However, despite having all the nutritious qualities of milk, an 8-ounce (230-mL) glass of chocolate milk comes with an extra 11.4 grams (2.9 teaspoons) of added sugar.

8. Granola

Granola is often marketed as a low fat health food, despite being high in both calories and sugar.

The main ingredient in granola is oats. Plain rolled oats are a well-balanced cereal containing carbs, protein, fat, and fiber.

However, the oats in granola have been combined with nuts and honey or other added sweeteners, which increases the amount of sugar and calories.

In fact, 100 grams of granola contain around 400–500 calories and nearly 5–7 teaspoons of sugar.

If you like granola, try choosing one with less added sugar or making your own. You can also add it as a topping to fruit or yogurt rather than pouring a whole bowl.

9. Flavored Coffees

Flavored coffee is a popular trend, but the amount of hidden sugars in these drinks can be staggering.

In some coffeehouse chains, a large flavored coffee or coffee drink can contain 45 grams of sugar, if not much more. That's equivalent to about 11 teaspoons of added sugar per serving.

Considering the strong link between sugary drinks and poor health, it's probably best to stick to coffee without any flavored syrups or added sugar.

10. Iced Tea

Iced tea is usually sweetened with sugar or flavored with syrup.

It's popular in various forms and flavors around the world, and this means the sugar content can vary slightly.

Most commercially prepared iced teas will contain around 35 grams of sugar per 12-ounce (340-mL) serving. This is about the same as a bottle of Coke.

If you like tea, pick regular tea or choose iced tea that doesn't have any sugars added.

11. Protein Bars

Protein bars are a popular snack.

Foods that contain protein have been linked to increased feelings of fullness, which can aid weight loss.

This has led people to believe that protein bars are a healthy snack.

While there are some healthier protein bars on the market, many contain around 20 grams of added sugar, making their nutritional content similar to that of a candy bar.

When choosing a protein bar, read the label and avoid those that are high in sugar. You can also eat a high protein food such as yogurt instead.

12. Vitaminwater

Vitaminwater is marketed as a healthy drink that contains added vitamins and minerals.

However, like many other "health drinks," Vitaminwater comes with a large amount of added sugar.

In fact, a bottle of regular Vitaminwater typically contains around 100 calories and 30 grams of sugar.

As such, despite all the health claims, it's wise to avoid Vitaminwater as much as possible.

You could opt for Vitaminwater zero, the sugar-free version. It's made with artificial sweeteners instead.

That said, plain water or sparkling water are much healthier choices if you're thirsty.

13. Premade Soup

Soup isn't a food that you generally associate with sugar.

When it's made with fresh whole ingredients, it's a healthy choice and can be a great way to increase your vegetable consumption without much effort.

The vegetables in soups have naturally occurring sugars, which are fine to eat given that they're usually present in small amounts and alongside lots of other beneficial nutrients.

However, many commercially prepared soups have a lot of added ingredients, including sugar.

To check for added sugars in your soup, look at the ingredient list for names such as:

The higher up on the list an ingredient is, the higher its content in the product. Watch out for when manufacturers list small amounts of different sugars, as that's another sign the product could be high in total sugar.

14. Breakfast Cereal

Cereal is a popular, quick, and easy breakfast food.

However, the cereal you choose could greatly affect your sugar consumption, especially if you eat it every day.

Some breakfast cereals, particularly those marketed at children, have lots of added sugar. Some contain 12 grams, or 3 teaspoons of sugar in a small 34-gram (1.2-ounce) serving.

Check the label and try choosing a cereal that's high in fiber and doesn't contain added sugar.

Better yet, wake up a few minutes earlier and cook a quick healthy breakfast with a high protein food like eggs. Eating protein for breakfast can help you lose weight.

15. Cereal Bars

For on-the-go breakfasts, cereal bars can seem like a healthy and convenient choice.

However, like other "health bars," cereal bars are often just candy bars in disguise. Many contain very little fiber or protein and are loaded with added sugar.

16. Canned Fruit

All fruit contains natural sugars. However, some canned fruit is peeled and preserved in sugary syrup. This processing strips the fruit of its fiber and adds a lot of unnecessary sugar to what should be a healthy snack.

The canning process can also destroy heat-sensitive vitamin C, although most other nutrients are well preserved.

Whole, fresh fruit is best. If you want to eat canned fruit, look for one that's been preserved in juice rather than syrup. Juice has a slightly lower amount of sugar.

17. Canned Baked Beans

Baked beans are another savory food that's often surprisingly high in sugar.

A cup (254 grams) of regular baked beans contains about 5 teaspoons of sugar.

If you like baked beans, you can choose low sugar versions. They can contain about half the amount of sugar found in regular baked beans.

18. Premade Smoothies

Blending fruits with milk or yogurt in the morning to make yourself a smoothie can be a great way to start your day.

However, not all smoothies are healthy.

Many commercially produced smoothies come in large sizes and can be sweetened with ingredients like fruit juice, ice cream, or syrup. This increases their sugar content.

Some of them contain ridiculously high amounts of calories and sugar, with over 54 grams (13.5 teaspoons) of sugar in a single 16-ounce or 20-ounce serving.

For a healthy smoothie, check the ingredients and make sure you watch your portion size.

The Bottom Line

Added sugars aren't a necessary part of your diet. Although small amounts are fine, they can cause serious harm if eaten in large amounts on a regular basis.

The best way to avoid hidden sugars in your meals is to make them at home so you know exactly what's in them.

However, if you need to buy prepackaged food, make sure you check the label to identify any hidden added sugars, especially when buying foods from this list.

Reposted with permission from Healthline. For detailed source information, please view the original article on Healthline.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
health food nutrition diet

EcoWatch Daily Newsletter

birds

Bald Eagle Takes Out Government Drone

Animals
A bald eagle flies over Lake Michigan. KURJANPHOTO / iStock / Getty Images Plus

A Michigan bald eagle proved that nature can still triumph over machines when it attacked and drowned a nearly $1,000 government drone.

Read More Show Less
birds wildlife animals endangered species technology
fossil fuels

Australia Pro Cycling Race Connections to Fossil Fuel Money Under Scrutiny

Climate
The peloton ride passes through fire-ravaged Fox Creek Road in Adelaide Hills, South Australia, during the Tour Down Under cycling event on January 23, 2020. Brenton Edwards / AFP / Getty Images

A professional cycling race in Australia is under attack for its connections to a major oil and gas producer, the Guardian reports.

Read More Show Less
fossil fuels oil and gas australia climate crisis wildfires heat waves
plastic pollution

Seafood Study Finds Plastic in 100% of Samples

Food
UQ study lead Francisca Ribeiro inspects oysters. The study of five different seafoods revealed plastic in every sample. University of Queensland

A new study of five different kinds of seafood revealed traces of plastic in every sample tested.

Read More Show Less
plastic pollution seafood oceans plastics public health
wind

For Species That Rely on Wind, Climate Change Won’t Be a Breeze

Climate
Cottongrass blows in the wind at the edge of Etivlik Lake, Alaska. Western Arctic National Parklands / Wikimedia Commons / CC by 2.0

By Tara Lohan

Warming temperatures on land and in the water are already forcing many species to seek out more hospitable environments. Atlantic mackerel are swimming farther north; mountain-dwelling pikas are moving upslope; some migratory birds are altering the timing of their flights.

Numerous studies have tracked these shifting ranges, looked at the importance of wildlife corridors to protect these migrations, and identified climate refugia where some species may find a safer climatic haven.

"There's a huge amount of scientific literature about where species will have to move as the climate warms," says U.C. Berkeley biogeographer Matthew Kling. "But there hasn't been much work in terms of actually thinking about how they're going to get there — at least not when it comes to wind-dispersed plants."

Kling and David Ackerly, professor and dean of the College of Natural Resources at U.C. Berkeley, have taken a stab at filling this knowledge gap. Their recent study, published in Nature Climate Change, looks at the vulnerability of wind-dispersed species to climate change.

It's an important field of research, because while a fish can more easily swim toward colder waters, a tree may find its wind-blown seeds landing in places and conditions where they're not adapted to grow.

Kling is careful to point out that the researchers weren't asking how climate change was going to change wind; other research suggests there likely won't be big shifts in global wind patterns.

Instead the study involved exploring those wind patterns — including direction, speed and variability — across the globe. The wind data was then integrated with data on climate variation to build models trying to predict vulnerability patterns showing where wind may either help or hinder biodiversity from responding to climate change.

One of the study's findings was that wind-dispersed or wind-pollinated trees in the tropics and on the windward sides of mountain ranges are more likely to be vulnerable, since the wind isn't likely to move those dispersers in the right direction for a climate-friendly environment.

The researchers also looked specifically at lodgepole pines, a species that's both wind-dispersed and wind-pollinated.

They found that populations of lodgepole pines that already grow along the warmer and drier edges of the species' current range could very well be under threat due to rising temperatures and related climate alterations.

"As temperature increases, we need to think about how the genes that are evolved to tolerate drought and heat are going to get to the portions of the species' range that are going to be getting drier and hotter," says Kling. "So that's what we were able to take a stab at predicting and estimating with these wind models — which populations are mostly likely to receive those beneficial genes in the future."

That's important, he says, because wind-dispersed species like pines, willows and poplars are often keystone species whole ecosystems depend upon — especially in temperate and boreal forests.

And there are even more plants that rely on pollen dispersal by wind.

"That's going to be important for moving genes from the warmer parts of a species' range to the cooler parts of the species' range," he says. "This is not just about species' ranges shifting, but also genetic changes within species."

Kling says this line of research is just beginning, and much more needs to be done to test these models in the field. But there could be important conservation-related benefits to that work.

"All these species and genes need to migrate long distances and we can be thinking more about habitat connectivity and the vulnerability of these systems," he says.

The more we learn, the more we may be able to do to help species adapt.

"The idea is that there will be some landscapes where the wind is likely to help these systems naturally adapt to climate change without much intervention, and other places where land managers might really need to intervene," he says. "That could involve using assisted migration or assisted gene flow to actually get in there, moving seeds or planting trees to help them keep up with rapid climate change."


Tara Lohan is deputy editor of The Revelator and has worked for more than a decade as a digital editor and environmental journalist focused on the intersections of energy, water and climate. Her work has been published by The Nation, American Prospect, High Country News, Grist, Pacific Standard and others. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis. http://twitter.com/TaraLohan

Reposted with permission from The Revelator.

From Your Site Articles
wind climate change biodiversity forests trees plants seeds pollinators
extinction

Climate Change, Not Humans, Likely Eliminated Woolly Rhinos, New Study Shows

Animals
An illustration depicts the extinct woolly rhino. Heinrich Harder / Wikimedia Commons

The last Ice Age eliminated some giant mammals, like the woolly rhino. Conventional thinking initially attributed their extinction to hunting. While overhunting may have contributed, a new study pinpointed a different reason for the woolly rhinos' extinction: climate change.

The last of the woolly rhinos went extinct in Siberia nearly 14,000 years ago, just when the Earth's climate began changing from its frozen conditions to something warmer, wetter and less favorable to the large land mammal. DNA tests conducted by scientists on 14 well-preserved rhinos point to rapid warming as the culprit, CNN reported.

"Humans are well known to alter their environment and so the assumption is that if it was a large animal it would have been useful to people as food and that must have caused its demise," says Edana Lord, a graduate student at the Center for Paleogenetics in Stockholm, Sweden, and co-first author of the paper, Smithsonian Magazine reported. "But our findings highlight the role of rapid climate change in the woolly rhino's extinction."

The study, published in Current Biology, notes that the rhino population stayed fairly consistent for tens of thousands of years until 18,500 years ago. That means that people and rhinos lived together in Northern Siberia for roughly 13,000 years before rhinos went extinct, Science News reported.

The findings are an ominous harbinger for large species during the current climate crisis. As EcoWatch reported, nearly 1,000 species are expected to go extinct within the next 100 years due to their inability to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. Tigers, eagles and rhinos are especially vulnerable.

The difference between now and the phenomenon 14,000 years ago is that human activity is directly responsible for the current climate crisis.

To figure out the cause of the woolly rhinos' extinction, scientists examined DNA from different rhinos across Siberia. The tissue, bone and hair samples allowed them to deduce the population size and diversity for tens of thousands of years prior to extinction, CNN reported.

Researchers spent years exploring the Siberian permafrost to find enough samples. Then they had to look for pristine genetic material, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

It turns out the wooly rhinos actually thrived as they lived alongside humans.

"It was initially thought that humans appeared in northeastern Siberia fourteen or fifteen thousand years ago, around when the woolly rhinoceros went extinct. But recently, there have been several discoveries of much older human occupation sites, the most famous of which is around thirty thousand years old," senior author Love Dalén, a professor of evolutionary genetics at the Center for Paleogenetics, said in a press release.

"This paper shows that woolly rhino coexisted with people for millennia without any significant impact on their population," Grant Zazula, a paleontologist for Canada's Yukon territory and Simon Fraser University who was not involved in the research, told Smithsonian Magazine. "Then all of a sudden the climate changed and they went extinct."

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
extinction climate change animals science scientists climate crisis
oil spill

The Mauritius Oil Spill: An Environmental Catastrophe That Could Have Been Much Worse

Energy
A large patch of leaked oil and the vessel MV Wakashio near Blue Bay Marine Park off the coast of southeast Mauritius on Aug. 6, 2020. AFP via Getty Images

The environmental disaster that Mauritius is facing is starting to appear as its pristine waters turn black, its fish wash up dead, and its sea birds are unable to take flight, as they are limp under the weight of the fuel covering them. For all the damage to the centuries-old coral that surrounds the tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean, scientists are realizing that the damage could have been much worse and there are broad lessons for the shipping industry, according to Al Jazeera.

Read More Show Less
oil spill marine life coral reefs wildlife endangered species

Trending

clean energy

Clean Energy Needs Women and People of Color to Drive Social Change

Business
A quality engineer examines new solar panels in a factory. alvarez / Getty Images

Transitioning to renewable energy can help reduce global warming, and Jennie Stephens of Northeastern University says it can also drive social change.

For example, she says that locally owned businesses can lead the local clean energy economy and create new jobs in underserved communities.

"We really need to think about … connecting climate and energy with other issues that people wake up every day really worried about," she says, "whether it be jobs, housing, transportation, health and well-being."

To maximize that potential, she says the energy sector must have more women and people of color in positions of influence. Research shows that leadership in the solar industry, for example, is currently dominated by white men.

"I think that a more inclusive, diverse leadership is essential to be able to effectively make these connections," Stephens says. "Diversity is not just about who people are and their identity, but the ideas and the priorities and the approaches and the lens that they bring to the world."

So she says by elevating diverse voices, organizations can better connect the climate benefits of clean energy with social and economic transformation.

Reposted with permission from Yale Climate Connections.

From Your Site Articles
Related Articles Around the Web
clean energy renewable energy environmental justice