Monday’s Healthy sELF challenge was to track the amount of sugar eaten throughout the day. Here are my approximate trackings on my meals…These are approximate as I didn’t weigh any of my food and all sugar content details came from the Tesco website.
BREAKFAST:
One portion of Tesco Special Flakes with Red Berries (6g sugar), two tablespoons of low-fat yoghurt (7.2g sugar) and a splash of pineapple and raspberry juice (4g)
SNACKS:
One granny smith apple (16g sugar)
LUNCH:
A carrot (5.9g sugar), lettuce (2g sugar), one tomato (2.5g sugar), 12 grapes (12g sugar), one matchbox size piece of mild cheddar (0.1g sugar), half an orange pepper (3.1g sugar) and half a pot of houmous (0.6g sugar) One slice of chocolate fudge cake (23g sugar)
TOTAL: 49.2g sugar


One half of a french stick (9g sugar) with Utterly Butterly (minimal sugar) and two sausages (0.3g sugar) with a squirt of tomato ketchup (4g sugar)
TOTAL: 13.3g sugar
TOTAL SUGAR FOR THE DAY: 95.7g sugar
FINDINGS:
I found it quite interesting how much sugar there actually is in the fruit and vegetables I eat. The apple I ate as a snack contained sixteen grams of sugar! I had cake in the middle of the day which isn’t a frequent occurance but I was amazed to see that this contained 23g of sugar, not a huge amount more than the apple I consumed! Stupidly I was surprised by how little sugar was contained in my sources of protein – both the cheese at lunchtime and the sausages for my dinner had hardly any sugar content, although they would have been high on the fat and protein had I been tracking either of these food types and it would be interesting to do this on another day in the future.
I found it difficult to find an exact guideline of sugar which I should be consuming per day. The Tesco nutrition labels worked on a percentage to 100 grams of sugar but I found several varying guideline amounts on different websites. This website panicked me a little when it started off by saying “40 grams is the maximum amount recommended…” Although on further reading, it was referring to added sugar and later on in the article also suggested that up to 100 grams a day was an appropriate amount, as long as no more than 40 grams came from added sugar.
WHAT NOW?:
I’m not going to change my eating habits as I feel that I do not consume excess sugar in my diet currently. This was really interesting to look at though and I would also like to track the amount of protein/fat in my daily diet at some point and return to my sugar in about a years time to see if anything has changed.
Has anyone else tracked their sugar content before? Were you surprised at the findings?…