By Penelope A. Domogo, MD
My mom had this pocket cookbook that contained perhaps a thousand recipes from soups to pastries, from entrees to desserts. I tried almost all the bread and pastry recipes… when I was younger. In that cookbook, a basic cake recipe called for 1 and ½ cup flour or 2 cups flour and 1 cup sugar. There are other ingredients but let us focus on the sugar part and let us practice our math. This basic cake recipe yielded 1 pan round cake measuring 9″x9″ which we usually sliced into 8 pieces (thats Igorot serving). There are 16 tablespoons in one cup. Meaning if I ate 1 slice of cake, I would have eaten also 2 tablespoons (or 10 teaspoons) of sugar. Some chocolate cakes which have icing even contain 15 teaspoons sugar per slice! But when I see this cake I dont see the sugar, right? Right. I only see the yummy cake and it doesnt look like sugar. So people generally dont count this sugar disguised as cake what they count is the sugar that they spoon in their coffee or tea. So when I tell them to cut down on their sugar intake, they protest “ But I dont use sugar!” And yet they eat cake… and cookies.
There are many more sugars hiding in what you put in your mouth. Soft drinks and those sugar-sweetened drinks contain as much as 12 teaspoons sugar per 12 ounces. Let us have more mathematical calculations. Many people, especially females, love the cake and Coke snack combination. One chocolate cake has 15 teaspoons sugar while one eight-ounce soft drink has 8 teaspoons. Thats a whooping 23 teaspoons sugar in just one sitting- even less than an hour! Then youll have another sugary snack in the afternoon. You did not yet count the 3-in-1 coffee or 7-in-1 tea that you drank after your meal. Some people think these are just coffee or tea. Well, dear friends, read again the ingredients. And they are sweet!
How about jams and jellies? Mom also taught us to make those- usual recipe is 1 cup sugar to 2 cups fruit juice but wed boil it down to half so that it would gel or get syrupy. So 1 tablespoon jelly is 5 teaspoons sugar. And then we love to slather this sugar to Philippine pandesal or loaf which is already sweet.
One person can easily down 50 teaspoons of refined sugar in a day. To think that we dont need even 1 teaspoon of refined sugar. We really should not be surprised why our people are getting overweight, diabetic, hypertensive and affected by many other sugar diseases. By the way, cakes, breads, cookies, jams, jellies and soft drinks are also considered processed foods.
Almost all other processed foods contain refined sugar junk food, ready-to-eat cereals, canned food, most peanut butter, even hotdogs. So parents and grandparents, be careful what you buy for your child or apo the label may say “whole grain” but is coated with sugar. Will you still buy it?
Manufacturers know that many people now are aware of the bad effects of too much sugar so they rename it under different aliases in the labeling. So when you see the list of ingredients, you may not see the word “sugar” but you will see “sucrose, dextrose, lactose, fructose, high fructose syrup, maltose, corn syrup”. A word ending with “-ose” means it is sugar. Then there is “sorbitol”, “aspartame” and other artificial sugars. Its hard to memorize all these technical terms so it is easier to just limit eating processed food because chances are it has a lot of sugar hiding in it.
Why are we so concerned about sugar? We discussed this in the September 27 issue of this newspaper.***
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“It is not good to eat too much honey, nor is it glorious to seek ones own glory.” Proverbs 25:27
