3,100 Grams

 

One of my resolutions for 2025 was to reduce my sugar intake.

 

Why?

 

Well, for a whole host of reasons – the black clouds of potential diabetes, dental decay, weight gain, poor sleep, lack of energy, etc. But the biggest scare for me is something I heard at random about six months ago:

 

“Cancer feeds on sugar.”

 

Then, over the fall and winter, I heard it two more times on two unrelated occasions. I took this for a sign, as I’ve had a sweet tooth for … well … decades, to be honest.

 

So I figured at my age, entering the final third of my life, I should do something about this. Before it does something to me.

 

Last year I quit soda. Specifically, my two demons of choice, Diet Coke and Diet Dr Pepper. I’d consume about ten cans a week. Ever look at the ingredients? That’s a lot of aspartame, potassium benzoate, and caffeine I’d been ingesting. Right now I’m thirteen months free of that monkey.

 

But I gradually replaced my Diet Coke / Diet Dr Pepper drinks of choice with two others: Sparkling Ice and Pure Leaf Iced Tea. Sparkling Ice initially was satisfying, but something felt off with it. Yep, there’s that preservative potassium benzoate, which some but not all studies link to adverse health effects, including cancer. More importantly, the drink is sweetened with sucralose. Even more importantly, I would get headaches from drinking it (one or two 17 oz. bottles a day). So I stopped consuming them over the summer.

 

Man, though, did I get addicted to that Pure Life lemon flavored iced tea. And would you know it? One bottle contains 38 grams of sugar – added sugar, at that. 38 grams!  The American Heart Association recommends 36 grams of sugar – that’s 9 teaspoons – a day, max, for a man. And I was drinking about ten of these a week. So that’s an average of around 50 grams of added sugar a day, 40% more than what the AHA recommends.

 

And that’s not all. I eat a lot of cookies and ice cream, too. It’s comfort food, rewarding, stress-relieving, endorphin-releasing. It’s the same for you, also. Every day I’d have at minimum a handful of cookies or a generous scoop of ice cream. A trip to CVS for milk required the purchase of a heath bar. That candy bar alone has 68 grams of sugar. Yikes.

 

Now, there’s no way I can measure all that side sugar. So let’s make a good faith assumption. Based on my regular daily intake of 50 grams of sugar for the iced tea, lets conservatively double it to account for all these ice cream / cookie / candy bar snacks. That’s 100 grams of sugar a day. Some days I did worse, some days better. But an average of 100 grams daily seems a reasonable estimate.

 

On January 1 I quit the iced tea. Also, no sugary snacks. I also minimized or eliminated condiments and sauces which contain sugar, though not to a rigorous, spartan extent. Just eliminating those 100 grams of sugar a day, though, means that I DID NOT INGEST 3,100 grams of sugar this month.

 

3,100 grams is 3.1 kilograms. 1 kilogram is 2.2 pounds. Ergo, I did not eat 6.8 pounds of sugar this month!

 

Some things that weigh about 6.8 pounds –

   - A small to medium cat

   - A gallon of milk

   - A standard bag of All-Purpose Flour

   - A bag of potatoes

   - 20 bananas

   - A new-born baby (!)

 

Picture that amount in pure, white sugar. That did not go into my body this month. That’s less food and fuel for any nascent cancer cells within my aging carcass. That’s less food for plaque on my teeth. That’s less work my pancreas has to do to secrete insulin into my bloodstream.

 

Because I didn’t go cold turkey, I didn’t have any headaches. I only had one bad night of sleep this month, and that was due to unrelated circumstances. My energy level seems a little better, maybe 10 percent better (?), but that’s something I hope will improve as the sugar semi-fast continues on in 2025.

May I recommend it to you? There’s really no downside to it …