Sugar problem?

Over the last couple days I've become both curious about and horrified by my sugar intake.

Today so far: 70g
2/20: 150g
2/19: 201g
2/18: 132g
2/17: 229g
2/16: 231g

Eeek! So that sounds like a lot to me, but grams aren't really that meaningful... so I converted to Cups.

Last week on average I ate 182g of sugar per day, (conversion factor 1 C = 196g), which is equal to 9/10 of a cup of sugar. Yuck!

I also wanted to compare this with what other people are generally eating... google gave me lots of estimates of what americans are eating vs what they should be eating in terms of added sugar, but not total dietary sugar (the numbers above are a combination of fruits, dairy, and also processed foods).

So I put the question to my loseit buddies, and lo and behold, even these other folks who have self-selected as having a weight problem they need to fix are only eating 40-60ish g of sugar per day. Shame on me!

Obviously sugary foods are a part of the problem, for sure. I have always had a sweet tooth. As I type this I'm eating a piece of my dad's leftover homemade birthday cake, 19g of sugar plus an unknown amount in the frosting/glaze I made out of, you guessed it, powdered sugar.

But another culprit, and one that I wasn't as aware of until now, cow milk. I grew up in a household where I was encouraged to drink nonfat milk all day, every day, even in the place of water, as a cheap source of animal protein. Most foods taste much better to me with milk as a chaser. Currently, nonfat milk is at the top of my "favorite foods" list on loseit, with 35 times that I've logged it in the last 4 weeks. And that doesn't even mean 35 cups, because usually I drink 1 1/2 to 2 cups at one sitting.

One cup of milk has 9 grams of protein and 12 grams of sugar. The sugar is lactase, and some people will tell you that because you are ingesting it along with some protein, it isn't as bad as eating just plain sugar.

There are *a lot* of websites about milk out there to try and dig through for accurate information. The dairy council pushes hard that cow milk is good for you and even aids in weight loss. Other sites make this out to be almost a conspiracy situation, pointing out that the purpose of milk is to make baby cows *grow* quickly, and no other animal on the planet drinks milk past early childhood.

I started researching other options. When I've tried soy milk in the past, it has tasted *too* sweet to me, which is saying something given my addiction to sweets. It does have less sugar than cow milk it looks like, about 5-8 g per cup. It seems strange to me that soy milk would taste so much sweeter to me but have less sugar than cow milk. Hmmm.

Unsweetened almond milk has ZERO sugar, but it also only has about 2 g of protein per cup, depending on the brand. Maybe a good approach, since I'm doing the whey protein mixes lately, would be to mix the whey powder with almond milk instead of cow milk.

And do my damndest to wean myself off the stuff as a drink. I have been trying to aim for herbal teas lately, which is doable in the chilly winter. And plain water, or water with a wedge of lemon.

Also, I need to be very careful when I'm shopping to check nutrition labels on salad dressings, jams, yogurts, pasta sauces, etc. Keep the sugar confined to just desserts. I really can't stand artificial sweeteners, and have a hunch that they give me headaches (and a suspicion that they are really bad for the body). So I'm going to try to reduce my sugar by actually cutting down on the amount of sweet, instead of substituting a chemical sweet.

It might be worth it to do a little exploring around stevia as well. Wikipedia says its extracts have 300x the sweetness of sugar but negligible effects on blood glucose. Sounds good to me.

I think this might be a good key toward my weight recovery, if I can get it under control.