I was explaining this to my daughter in quite simplified terms the other day- we evolved to taste sugar and enjoy it because finding a sweet edible plant meant we had a source of energy to help us hunt that day. Pretty useful if you’re a hunter-gatherer.
So we seek out sugar. Now we can get it whenever we want it, in much more massive quantities than we are supposed to be processing. Most of us are addicted. I’m not an exception.
Check out how much sugar they put into frozen pizza. It’s basically a sweet.
If you eat Siggis yogurt, there is a full-fat option with barely any sugar that is way, way, better. I don’t typically like yogurt, but like it. Add honey if needed.
I happen to be eating it right now.
And don’t forget bread. So much sugar in the US…
Subway bread is considered cake in Ireland.
I think some years back there was a lawsuit in New York about whether it should be classified as cake
The oats and honey you add makes up for the lower carb count.
I was going to say there’s a lot of variation within brands.
Most yoghurts have a “greek” variant with about 5g per 100g carbohydrates.
Honey is more or less flavoured sugar IMO.
Berries are a great combo with yoghurt, also chopped nuts.
Is that added sugar, or sugar from the other ingredients?
That seems about right for sugar contents for such foods, especially since the yogurts have berries in them. I dont quite get what point is getting made, most fruits and berries have a good bit of sugar in them. There isnt anything inately bad about sugar, maybe when its high fructose corn zyrup but thats kinda its own thing. Also tomatoes are a berry.
Berries like raspberries blackberries blueberries and even strawberries don’t have lots of sugar, maybe 5g per 100g. That’s one level teaspoon.
The lactose in milk is almost all consumed in the fermentation process, so maybe a few more grams per 100.
The rest of the sugar in those glasses is just sugar manufacturers include to make their product more appealing.
One of the problems with sugar is that it represents empty calories.
Given my age, weight, and activity levels maybe I need x calories per day, any more and I’ll gain weight. I also need protein and fibre and micronutrients. As you get older (like me) you get less good at extracting nutrients.
The challenge is, getting enough nutrients in few enough calories to avoid gaining weight.
In this context sugar is just dead weight.
There isnt anything inately bad about sugar
Well in moderation sugar isn’t too bad. The problem comes when food manufacturers start adding sugar to foods so it will taste better and if you are not paying attention to the content you can consume a significant amount in a day.
Fair enough, though I was mostly commenting on the above meme. The sugar content seems about right for everything involved, maybe on the higher end but not by a massive amount.
Also added sugar is usually in an ideal situation would be for preservative and manufacturing reasons. But then again I dont actually get cooking as a whole, I can cook meat and thats about it.
stares in European
I’ve heard of one of those brands but have never tried it myself (Chobani) and who impregnated the tomato sauce? 🤨
Yoplait is actually French.
Fair. Still not available in my particular part of Europe, though.
Here in Denmark we have so many domestic variants of yoghurt (big dairy producer per capita) that most grocery stores simply don’t have room for/incentive to offer any imported ones, except for Greek yoghurt for the purists 😄
In fact, there’s a great Scandinavia and the World comic about how much we love yoghurt 😁
Makes sense. The only reason I know Yoplait is because I live in a neighboring country and speak French.
Eh preggo tomato sauce!
I might advise not downing an entire pound-and-a-half jar of spaghetti sauce in one go.
Stay away from me and my Prego Traditional chug jug.
gf is prego
we like to get kinky anyways
one night things get particularly saucy
i’m sticking my noodle in her when I notice weird fucking chunks coming out, so I turn on the lights
wtf it’s red everywhere and she’s obviously not on her period
i look up at her, she’s got a glassy, jarred look on her face and she’s not answering
ohshitohshitohshitohshit
i rush her into my car and speed all the way to the hospital
she’s still bleeding everywhere
by the time we get there, she’s not bleeding much anymore, but all the color has drained and she looks colorless and almost transparent
oh shit, she looks like she’s in a vegetative state
storm into to the emergency room, cary her to the nearest doctor and explain eveything
he takes one look at ther and says
“sir, i’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do”
“WHY THE FUCK NOT???”
“we don’t operate on empty jars of spaghetti sauce”
The actual spaghetti you add it to has an even higher percentage of carbohydrates - in the form of starch which the human body easily turns into sugars - than the sauce so paradoxically you’ll end up with less sugar in your blood stream by downing that sauce by itself than if you eat it with spaghetti.
(That said, this is for uncooked spaghetti: when you cook it it grows by absorbing water which reduces the fraction of carbohydrates in the final product, so depending on the type of spaghetti it might or not end up with more carbohydrates than the sauce).
Maybe it’s saying instead of eating yogurt just slam 1.5 lbs of tomato sauce instead?
Come on now, spaghetti always begs for excessive consumption.
Now you tell me.
I tried it once and vomited on my sweater
Was it mom’s?
But did you remember your notes after?
?
Have I lost track of what memes are? Or is it the children who are wrong?
Yeah, you’ve probably grown accustomed to most memes using high fructose corn syrup which is clear and easier to hide.
Meme = a picture with some text
An element of culture which is passed on through society through non-genetic means.
Remember when those were called image macros?
Okay grandpa
We need more child abuse
Try making tomato sauce without sugar. Get back to me when you’ve tasted your horror.
This is ridiculous, I hardly ever make tomato sauce with (added) sugar and it tastes delicious. I suppose if you’re used to sugar being in everything it may taste odd, but it is far from horrendous
Nah, a small amount of sugar improves tomato sauce. It cuts the acidity.
After reading the other comments for a bit, it may depend on the tomatoes. The tomatoes I tend to use don’t need to balance out as much, I suppose
The tomatoes used for sauce often time have a higher acid content so you want a little sugar.
Some tomatoes, especially older heirloom varieties have more sugar than modern varieties and actually will make candy sauce if you’re not careful.
I spent the summer growing Cherokee purple just to make spaghetti sauce and it was like fucking dessert, no sugar added.
If you can afford it, using good quality Italian tomatoes really make a difference.
I don’t add any sugar in my sauce and it is pretty good and the acidity is at a good level.
What makes a tomato from Italy better?
I only use Cento san marzanos as the base for my sauce. And i learned to make sauce from my italian grandfather. A small amount of sugar always improves the sauce.
Do they contain more sugars by default perhaps?
I’ve never tried stevia in tomato sauce. I’ll give it a try sometime. I’d worry about making it too sweet though since a lot of sweeteners are thousands of times sweeter than sugar.
I haven’t either, but I think it would work pretty well. The nice thing about stevia is that there are different products to buy with different levels of sweetness. I always put a stronger stevia extract in my tea at home that I get from Amazon because the stevia packets they have in restaurants next to the other sweeteners do not even come close to as sweet.
Then I have to use the tiny little cocaine spoon that comes with the extract to put some in my tea, and less than a full spoonful because it’s so sweet.
I’ve also seen stevia products made specifically for baking, so that might be worth a try since I’m guessing they tried to get it 1:1 with sugar.
No.
Why?
I know there are people who aren’t supposed to eat sugar, but there really isn’t anyone who doesn’t like sugar. Maybe I’m wrong. If there are, probably very few. I know a ton of people who dislike stevia, it tastes like a chemical to them not a sweetener. I am one of them and I am not alone.
Edit to add: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120531102334.htm
I guess it’s like cilantro.
Yes. And I love cilantro. Taste buds can be weird. If you’re just feeding yourself I’d say stevia recipes count but I wouldn’t serve it to a group of people.
I have done that, it’s not bad, a bit bitter but still pleasant in my opinion.
Though I do like my coffee black so maybe I just have a liking of bitter tasting items.
Explains part of the reason why Rao’s tastes better than those other brands. I wish it had no sugar though.
Rao’s actually has the appropriate amount of sugar. That’s very little per serving.
It’s pretty common to add a bit of sugar to tomato sauce tho.
I don’t think you can make tomato sauce without any sugar… Tomatoes have a fair amount.
Which kind of begs the question is this added sugar or?
(Please god stop adding sugar to your red sauces people. Fruits/vegetables bring their own)
People will lose their mind when they learn that vegetables have sugar.
As long as the sugar isn’t separated from the fibers, that’s fine.
One of them does say no added sugar
To be fair, if you make pasta sauce from scratch you’re going to be using a fair amount of sugar to balance the acidity of your tomatoes, so I don’t find pasta sauce a useful demonstration.
But you’re still making a good point. Once you start making stuff yourself, you really see what isn’t required.
My pasta sauce doesn’t have any sugar in it, but it does have tomatoes, browned onions and wine, all of which contain natural sugar.
I have never put any sugar in my from scratch sauce. But that’s probably why I don’t like jar sauce.
You get it from different sources. Breakdown of onions and as someone else mentioned, carrots. Balsamic vinegar has some. There’s other sources as well, I’m just blanking on them.
But agreed, I rarely add actual plain sugar to my pasta sauces.
I don’t pit anything like that in my sauce. Tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, herbs and spices.
I think cooking it for hours tends to lower the acidity a bit.
But I think I just like it that way.
Your sauce will still have less sugar than others, but if I understand correctly, simmering for hours will break down the more complex sugars in tomatoes into simpler sugars resulting in a somewhat sweeter taste
I think cooking does also dull the percieved acidity of food though, hence lemon juice or other acids often being added at the end so as to keep the brightness. But I’m not actually sure if the pH changes or if it’s just a change in the tartness we associate with acidity, maybe someone can chime in with more information :)
But is the sugar of broken down (caramelized) onions the same sugar? As in, would the jar with sugar next to my meal to show me how much sugar I’m eating fill up as the onions caramelize?
Yes, but aren’t those sugars much different (read: better) than refined cane sugar (or worse: HFCS)?
Sugar is sugar, but it’s better that you’re getting vitamins and fiber from those plants as fiber will slow the rate of absorption.
Fair and excellent point.
What I failed to articulate originally was that a lot of food already naturally contains sugar in some form, so adding in more sugar (like cane sugar or HFCS) is what makes it bad for you.
Carrots?
Username almost checks out 😁
I’m a fraud
Carrots are common as a sweetener and thickener in some veggie based sauces. Melinda’s hot sauce uses them too
My grandma’s old recipe was just letting them soak in it all day and then taking them out rather than leaving them in. They’re a very nice snack after soaking in there. Very interesting flavor.
Nope.
Add me to the team that at least almost never adds sugar to any pasta sauce. In very rare occasions, I might add a tiny bit of honey, but I can’t remember the last time I did that.
If you let the sauce simmer for long enough, 4-5 hours, or pressure cook it the starches of the tomatoes will break down and you won’t need to add sugar. The acidity will also go down the longer it’s simmered too.
If you can grow your own tomatoes, give Amish Paste Heirlooms a try.
They grow small, but a single plant can produce hundreds of low acidity balanced tomato fruits that are perfect for pasta sauce.
I have literally never once added a single granule of sugar to a pasta sauce. Heat and time on the stove are the only 2 things required to balance tomato acidity, and even this can be cheated with tomato paste. If you are putting sugar in pasta sauce, you don’t now how to cook pasta sauce. It’s shocking that your comment has upvotes…
i guarantee im not eating any of that sugar
Fage is definitely my favorite yogurt. I’m always like “how the fuck is this so God damn good? It has virtually no sugar or anything added”
Also in case you didnt know, for many reduced fat items they just end up adding more sugar.
Fage 2% with some low sodium mixed nuts and low sugar dried cranberries is one of my favorite breakfasts these days. No joke.
I love fage, mixed with some roughly chopped cherries is so good. I’ve switched to making my own yogurt recently but the original starter I used was fage and it hasn’t let me down
Both yogurt and pasta sauce are extremely easy to make from scratch, and sugar doesn’t belong as an ingredient in either. Yogurt literally makes itself. Stop buying processed foods that are designed by teams of people to be addictive?
A bit of brown sugar really helps bring a red sauce together and yogurt is good sweet or savory (granted I like my sweet yogurt to just be sweetened with fruit and no pure sugar added but that’s a preference thing)
As per usual in my responses to comments like this, just because it is easy for you to make these things doesn’t mean it is easy or practical for everyone to. From scratch takes longer, requires more knowledge which takes time to acquire, makes more dishes, requires more types of equipment, and in the case of yogurt can be a safety thing
It is on the companies making these products to do better not on the individual seeking to make a part of their life easier
It is on the companies making these products to do better not on the individual
I mean, it’s literally not… What will make or pressure the companies to do “better”? If the answer to that question is something that does not exist or is not happening in real life, then no, it’s genuinely not on the companies, you just wish it was.
Reminder: grocery stores and industrial processed food are a very recent invention
Anything that exceeds the difficulty of a assembling a sandwich or put something on and off a grill, is something I’m gonna leave to the pros.
If you are capable of operating a motor vehicle to drive to buy sandwich ingredients or safely lighting a grill, then you’re just being lazy.
I love a biscuit breakfast Sammy. I can buy one for 3 bucks, or spend 20 dollars and 2 hours making a less good one
Pro-tip: Wal-Mart’s BAGGED, frozen buttermilk biscuits (Great Value brand) are proper biscuits. They’re really good, especially if you put a little butter on top and bottom before baking. And after baking. And while eating.
Fruit yoghurt is pretty much yoghurt with fruit jam added, so it ends up with quite a lot more sugar than the natural stuff which has no added sugar, so ever since I’ve had to start watching out for my sugar intake I’ve started only eating the natural one and adding cinnamon or vanilla extract for flavour.
It’s amazing how after a while of cutting sugars from your food you get used to it, don’t feel the need for it anymore and even start finding the most sugary stuff (like certain kinds of sweets) unpleasantly sweet.
Buy a yoghurt maker. You add milk, 5% of already existing yoghurt and whole fruit (berries are best). Leave overnight and now you have yoghurt with fruit and no added sugar. The fruits are whole so they have fiber and any natural sugar in them isnt going straight to your blood now.
I definitelly need to try that.
Thank you.
Did you use the calories or the grams of sugar to determine the amount?
Oh yeah - I’ve had to start watching my carbohydrate intake for health reasons and it’s amazing just how much of that stuff is in processed food: for example “American Style Onion Rings (frozen)” from Lidl is over 40% carbohydrates - so basically the 450g pack of it has 180g of sugars and the kind of stuff your digestive system will turn into sugars.
One would think it would be only starchy foods (like bread, pasta, rice and such) and cakes and sweets that have lots of it, but no, most processed food is loaded with carbohydrates, often already directly as sugars, probably because the cheapest ingredient to bulk it up is flour.
Mind you, lots of natural or lightly processed foods have quite a bit of it - for example natural yoghurt with nothing added has maybe 6% of carbohydrates (tough yoghurt with fruit is way worse, since the adding of fruit is generally mixing it with fruit jam which has a lot of sugar) and most fruits have quite a bit of sugar (for example, common varieties of apple have about 14% of sugar - so your run of the mill apple comes with 1 spoonful of sugar included - and some varieties have a lot more) which is why there’s this funny paradox that natural fruit juice has a lot more sugar in it than the same amount of Coca-Cola (since when you make the fruit juice you throw away the fiber and most of the protein leaving a much higher percentage of sugar than originally).
Generally, the kind of stuff that has almost no carbohydrates are veggies, like lettuce or broccoli.
Meat and cheese has no sugar/very low sugar too.
Yeah, but they have a lot of calories via fat (especially cheese) and what I’ve seen in my own diet (which includes regular checking of blood sugar levels), if I eat more of it (again, especially cheese) the sugar levels in the blood go up all else being the same.
Don’t ask me the exact details of how the human body does that, I’m not a specialist and this is just what I observe happens if start eating more cheese.
Which is a shame, 'cause I love cheese :(
Yeah the metabolism is crazy, crazily complicated too, we have mapped it out (badly) at around 15%…
The liver can make sugar (glycose) and there are a lot of ‘magic’ going on everywhere, but for me cutting out sugar and only eating veggies, meat and cheese was a great diet, have forgotten aboug it maybe I should check it out again…
What a shame for the cheese! Does it do that for all kind of cheese, like goat, sheep, roquefort, hard cheese (there are so many)?
Also, did you eat something specific around the same time you ate cheese?
I would get two of the local small (about 50g each) cured cheeses made out of goat and sheep milk a week and eat them, and was having trouble cutting down on blood sugar until I stopped doing it and that one change with all else being roughly the same consistently reduced the blood sugar level increases - since I have Type II Diabetes - between my “running days” (I run 10km twice a week, which by itself has a huge positive impact on it).
Around here there’s also what we call “fresh cheese” (basically cheese that hasn’t been cured) and I usually get a couple of those made of goat cheese and they don’t seem to be a problem.
Of course, this is all a bit so-so and anecdotcal since its pretty hard to control all other variables plus blood sugar seems to also be affected what you consumed days before (I’ve seen blood sugar go up long after the last meal and during a fasting period - so supposedly not because of sugar intake or digestion - which I suspect is due to the sugar stored in the liver or maybe yet another unexpected methabolic pathway).
In my experience of trying to control blood sugar levels with food and exercise, it is exactly as you said: metabolism is crazy, crazy complicated :/
It’s great that you found a diet that helps with your health and works for you!
You probably know this anyway and most likely implied it, but I just want to stress that carbohydrates per se are not bad. Yes, eventually everything is being broken down to sugar, but you should not reduce carbohydrates to this function only. Oats are mostly carbohydrates, but they are whole grain with a lot of fiber and are a great source for iron (if not eaten with dairy). Their GI is in the 50s but you would have to take the whole dish into account, as rarely you’ll just sit there munching oats like a horse. Buckwheat and quinoa are often praised for their high protein content (and it’s true, they have like 10-12g of protein per 100g) but they still consist mostly of carbohydrates. A slow breakdown of complex carbohydrates gives you long term energy without raising blood sugars too much.
Yeah, it it makes a massive difference the GI index of the sugars in the food one eats, so for example it’s a lot better to consume pulses (like chickpeas) than it is pasta, since the latter is pretty much just starch and (after cooked) water whilst the former is a far more complex food with also lots of protein and fiber (only talking about macronutrients here).
Mind you, this diet of mine is not because of overweight, it’s to keep Type II Diabetes under control with as little insulin as possible and to get it into remission (so far, it has worked very well having reduced the need of insuline by about 80%), so it’s based on studies that have been done on this and is much more tightly controlled with regular checking of blood sugar levels.
But yeah, a lot of it is to reduce the intake of low GI sugars (I used to be a big consumer of bread, for example, since I live in a country with really good bread, and that stuff is for special occasions only nowadays), which means quite a lot of cuting down on carbohydrates consumption but also means replacing some with better sugars (so, say, pulse or peas instead of potatoes or pasta)
Mind you, part of the problem is that my work is sitting down in front of a computer, so even with regular exercise I simply need a lot less sugars than I used to eat - if was naturally more physically active in most days beyond the whole walk to work and back thing and two 10km runs a week, cutting down so much on carbohydrate-rich foods would’ve been a bad thing.
Still, its pretty amazing by comparison just how much excess of sugars there was in my diet previously and that was even with some care with what I ate and quite a lot of sweets avoidance.
![This is how much sugar you are [possibly] eating.](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9694cd80-f133-4b02-80e3-1e937a78ea83.png){kind=link}