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Is sugar actually bad for you? You've been lied to · No Forking Nonsense - The Nutritionist UK

• 0:00
  @paulthenutritionist: Welcome to No Forking Nonsense, the podcast that slices through the nonsense and serves you straight talking nutrition advice that actually works. I'm Paul, a registered nutritionist and your host. And every episode, I'll be debunking diet myths, breaking down confusing food advice and giving you practical science backed tips to help you eat better, feel better and get your hedge back. There'll be no fads, no shite, just real talk that makes sense. Let's get stuck in.
• 0:30
  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Forking Nonsense, The UK's second most enjoyed nutrition podcast. And today we're talking about sugar. And when we talk about sugar being bad for you, we're not talking about all sugar. We're talking about specifically pre sugars and this is a distinction that the food industry does not quite want you to understand clearly because if you did you'd probably read food labels very differently. Free sugars are the sugars that have been added to your food or drink during manufacture and preparation.
• 1:10
  Plus sugar is naturally present in honey, syrups, fruit juices, smoothies and the keyword is free. They're not bound inside a food matrix. They hit your bloodstream quickly, they don't come with fibre or micronutrients and they cause rapid blood sugar response. Naturally occurring sugar is very different. The sugar in whole apple, in milk, in plain yoghurt.
• 1:36
  These are bound within the cellular structure of food. They come packaged fibre, water, protein, vitamins. Your body processes these completely differently and they don't spike your blood sugar in the same way the fibre slows the digestion and the sugar is released gradually. But here's the problem: when you look at the nutrition labelling food product, it tells you total sugars. It doesn't split out free sugars from naturally occurring sugars.
• 2:06
  So a plain yoghurt eight gs of naturally occurring lactose looks identical on the label to a flavoured yoghurt eight gs of added sugar. They are not the same product. They are not doing the same thing in your body, but the label treats them identically. There was a paper in 2013 in the British Medical Journal that looked at over 110,000 people and it found that it was specifically free sugar intake, not total sugar, that was associated with the increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes and essentially all cause mortality. Naturally occurring sugars showed no significant association, same molecule, completely different outcome depending on where it comes from.
• 2:54
  So the sugar in your apple is not the same as the sugar in your ribena. The label will treat them the same, the research does not. So when reading a label, total sugars is not the number you need. You need to look at the ingredients list for added sugar. Anything ending in -ose is syrups, honey, fruit juice, concentrate.
• 3:18
  If it's in the top three ingredients, it's likely that free sugar content is significant. So the guidelines, mean this is a bit, the SACIN is the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition and I was actually involved in the guidelines and it's a bit that's really frustrating because there is a significant disconnect between what the science says and what you're shown on food packaging. And SACIN is the independent government body that reviews the evidence and sets dietary guidance in The UK. And in 2015 Saken published a landmark report that I was involved in and it was on carbohydrates and health. It recommended that free sugars should make up no more than 5% of your total dietary energy.
• 4:09
  For an adult eating around 2,000 calories a day, that's approximately 25 grams of free sugar, roughly six teaspoons. That is a recommendation from the scientific body that reviews all evidence 25 grams of free sugar a day. Now look at the front pack of any item of food, the reference value used on those labels for sugars is all sugars, not free sugars, total sugars. And they say it's 90 grams. 90.
• 4:41
  That's the number that determines whether something gets green, amber or red. If a product has 20 grams of total sugar per serving, it an amber rate because it's only 22% of 90 grams. But if all of that is free sugar, you've just had 80% of your actual RDA of sugar in one product and the label showed you amber. The front of pat labelling system was designed in collaboration with the food industry. The sacking guidelines were designed by independent scientists.
• 5:14
  They are not the same number. They are not even the same ballpark. Ballpark. The one you see every time you go shopping is a food industry one. There was research in 2022 in the journal of PLOS medicine that analysed free sugar intake across The UK population and found that the vast majority of adults and almost all children were exceeding that 5% recommendation, largely because they had no way of accurately identifying free sugar content from food labels.
• 5:50
  The label is showing you a number that is nearly four times higher than the scientific recommendation. That isn't an accident. So if you ignore the percentage of the front of pack labels, it's based on 90 grams and is completely meaningless for managing your free sugars. Your actual target of free sugars is 25 grams, so use the ingredients list not the traffic light for your guide when it comes to your decisions. Obviously hidden sugars is a bit of a topic at the moment, most people think they know where the sugar is chocolate, biscuits, fizzy drinks and yep they are obviously high in sugar but the reason most people are exceeding 25 grams before lunch is because of the sources they're not thinking about.
• 6:34
  Flavoured joggers: a standard low fat flavoured jogger contains about 20 grams of free sugar but it's marketed as healthy, low fat, has a picture of fruit on the front and it probably has a green traffic light but it's also sixty-eighty percent of your free sugars in one pot. Fruit juices and smoothies, the NHS includes these in free sugars and the 250ml glass of orange juice contains 20 gs of sugar, which is virtually all of your sugar and the same as a can of coke, because the juicing process removes the fibre that would have slowed the absorption. So you wouldn't sit and eat four oranges, you'd drink the equivalent in about thirty seconds. Condiments and sauces: a tablespoon of ketchup has four grams of free sugar, a serving of sweet chilli sauce can have 10 grams. These add up invisibly because nobody counts condiments.
• 7:27
  It's super important that we are mindful of that. Healthy snacks are another one. Granola bars, protein bars less so, cereal bars. There was an investigation on action in sugar in 2023 and found that 40% cereal bars marketed to children contain more than 30% free sugar by weight. Some contain more sugar per serving than a normal chocolate bar, but the packaging is very clever because it says wholesome, natural, no artificial colours.
• 7:54
  But then the ingredients say glucose syrup. Breakfast cereals, even the ones aren't obviously sweet, gram flakes, muesli, healthy granola, many contain significant amounts of added sugar. 45 gram serving of some of the popular granola bands contains a disgraceful amount of sugar and that's before you've added anything to the bowl. The highest risk category for hidden free sugar is flavour joggers, fruit juice granola, cereal bars, cereal sauces and anything marketed as low fat because low fat almost always means high sugar. The fat has to be replaced with something to make it palatable.
• 8:33
  So let's talk about now what sugar is actually doing for your health and what the research says about free sugar and health because some of this is well known and some of it isn't. Dental health is obviously the most established and least disputed free sugars feed the bacteria in your mouth and then that damages your tooth and enamel. That's not controversial and the second report I referred to specifically highlighted dental kind of carriers as one of the primary drivers for reducing free sugars. In 2023 the office of health improvements reported that tooth decay is still the most common reason for hospital admissions in children aged six to 10, and it's almost entirely preventable. Metabolic health and type two diabetes, there was a large meta analysis in 2023 that looked at 85 randomised controlled trials and found that high free sugar intake, particularly from sugar sweet beverages, significantly increased fasting blood sugars.
• 9:39
  Insulin resistant, triglyceride levels, three are markers on the pathway to type two diabetes. Cardiovascular disease, that British medical journal paper I mentioned earlier found that people in the highest quintile of free sugar intake had seventeen percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease compared to those in the lowest. That's a pretty significant number and it held up after adjusting for total calorie intake, physical activity, smoking and other confounding variables. Mental health and mood as well this is newer and less established but worth kind of mentioning. There was a study in 2023 that followed over 23,000 people and found that those with the highest sugar intake had a twenty three percent higher risk of common mental disorders including depression, anxiety over a five year follow-up period.
• 10:36
  The mechanism is thought to involve blood sugar variability affecting nora transmitter production and that gut brain access that we've spoken about before. It's not definitive but it's consistent with what we're seeing across multiple data sets. Body weight and fat storage goes without saying free sugars are calorie dense, have low satiety value and they don't trigger the same fullness signals that whole food carbohydrates do. A systematic review published in 2022 found that reducing free sugar intake led to a reduction of body weight in adults and increasing it led to an increase. Calories in calories out obviously still matters, but free sugar makes the in part significantly harder.
• 11:24
  The evidence across dental health, metabolic health, cardiovascular disease, mental health, dental health, body weight is consistent and it keeps getting stronger and free sugar is not a neutral nutrient. It carries real health costs at the amount that people are consuming. So here's the practical bit because none of this matters if you're not going to do anything useful. Firstly, stop using front of pack labels to guide your sugar. The percentage is based on 90 grams and your actual target is 25 grams of free sugar.
• 11:56
  The label is not designed to help you stay within your Sac and Recommendations. Second, stop flavoured yogurt, eat and flavoured yoghurt, swap it for plain. This is probably the highest impact single swaps you can make. Plain full fat Greek yoghurt with some actual fruit on top is completely different nutritional profile to a low fat flavoured yogurt. The natural occurring lactose in plain yogurt does not account to free sugars.
• 12:28
  The added sugar and flavour job it does. Eat fruit rather than drink it. I m always banging on about this, but the fibre in whole food changes everything about how your body processes sugar, and apple is not the same as apple juice. Read the ingredients list on anything that comes in a packet. Look for sugar in the first three to four ingredients and look for anything ending in -ose, glucose, fructose, sucrose, any syrup, any juice, any concentrate, honey, molasses.
• 12:59
  They're in the top three. The free sugar content is significant regardless of what the traffic light says. Also, suspicious of anything marketed as low fat. Low fat almost always means high sugar. Full fat plain yoghurt has less free sugar than low fat flavoured jogger.
• 13:17
  Full fat is not the enemy. A teaspoon of sugar is four grams, your daily sugar is roughly six grams, sorry six tablespoons. That sounds obviously quite a lot, but when you realise a single flavoured jogger has four of them, a glass of orange juice has five, this is why most people are usually over before lunch. Everything we talked about here requires you to think about food differently and I know that when you're busy, when you're tired, when you've got a million things on, thinking carefully about every food label is the last thing you want to add to your day. Which is why I've built the Meal Maker, it is a completely free resource that does the thinking for you.
• 14:01
  Every meal is built around real food, whole food, which means naturally occurring sugars rather than free sugars, high protein, properly balanced and designed to keep you full and your blood sugar stable. So you'll not count in grams of sugar, you're just eating food that's been properly put together. The breakfast options alone will change your morning. No flavoured joggers, no cereal bars, no granola with 20 grams of sugar. Actual food that fuels you through to lunch without the 10AM crash.
• 14:33
  You can download your free meal maker with the top link below this episode. It's completely for you. If this has made you look at sugar differently, the meal maker is going help you. You don't need to track every gram, you just need a framework that's going to help you make choices, really easy choices. So to close, the sugar isn't poison, it's not something you need to eliminate from your life, but free sugar at the amounts most people are eating it without realising carries genuine and well evidenced health costs.
• 15:07
  You now should know the difference between free sugars and naturally carrying sugars. You now know that front of pack labelling is based on a number that's four times higher than the science and you know where the hidden sugar lies. You now know what to do about it. Food industry has spent decades making this confusing and today hopefully I've made it a little bit less confusing. So if you found this episode good and you found it helpful, share it with somebody who still thinks free juice counts as one of their five a day and leave a review if you can be bothered.
• 15:41
  But if nothing else, click the top link below and you can download the completely free meal maker. I'll speak to you next week. That's it for this episode of No Forking Nonsense, where the fluff gets binned and the facts get served. If you found this helpful, share it with someone who could do some clarity from an expert. That's me, by the way.
• 16:00
  And make sure you hit follow so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you want more straight talking, no nonsense nutrition advice, come and find me on Instagram Paul, the nutritionist. Until next time, eat smart, feel human again and stop falling for the Forking Nonsense. See you next time.