I quit eating sugar almost a year ago. Due to the change I decided to take an hour or so and look in my local grocery store at ingredients in foods. I do not eat processed foods any more but I wanted to know the ingredients any way. I like educating myself so I can pass the knowledge down to my kid and any one else who wants to listen.
My first food group was fat free stuff. I know now that healthy fats such as the ones we get from animals are healthy for us. Not just healthy but many hormones our body makes needs those fats. On top of all that our body needs cholesterol. Did you know that the brain needs cholesterol to function properly. Also our endocrine glands: adrenals and sex glands needs cholesterol. They produce steroid hormones. Steroid hormones in the body are made from cholesterol: testosterone, progesterone, pregnenolone, androsterone, estrone, estradiol, corticosterone, aldosterone and others.
My point is our body needs nutritional fat to survive. Somewhere along the line we were told fat and cholesterol kills and we should cut it out of our diet. So we did and Boy were we wrong. If you don't believe me do the research. So what happened when foods were stripped of all that good fat, it tasted bland, boring, and often disgusting. To make the foods taste good companies added sugar.
Some will argue but sugar is a poison to our body and it will slowly kill you. There have been studies that show that sugar is as addictive as cocaine. (1) Sugar companies know this and are profiting off our addiction. The global market for sugar in 2017 reached a 97.2 billion dollars. That is a lot of sugar, but it does not surprise me since it is in everything.
Even a bag of sugar has added sugar in it. :)
The next group I wanted to look at was the breakfast isle. You know all those boxes of cereals that are fed to kids on a daily basis. The worst so far I found was Raisin Bran Crunch with 20g per serving, and one serving was 1 cup. I know that from my days of eating cereal my bowls held at least 2 cups and I usually had 2 bowls. That was roughly 80 grams of sugar at breakfast. That was raisin bran the stuff that is supposed to be healthy for us.
Then I looked at the fruit juices, often given to kids because it is a healthy choice. I seen that one serving of apple juice had 39 grams of sugar in it. That is 10 teaspoons of sugar given to our kids, and more when adults enjoyed that refreshing healthy juice. Soda is just as bad because their is 39 grams of sugar in a 12 oz can, and 65 grams in a 20 oz bottle. If you really want to add salt to the wound. Those green healthy juices found in the health section are even worse. They are all veggies so that must make up for all the sugar.
I then looked at all the breads, whole wheat and white and you know what added sugar. Salad dressings and other condiments have added sugar in them. If I recall correctly you can find many brands of mustard and mayo that does not have sugar in it.
I stopped at the canned veggie isle and many of those cans had added sugar in them. The canned fruit was even worse. Everything that I picked up in the grocery store had added sugar in it. No wonder why diabetes is becoming an epidemic, all that damn sugar.
So what happens when we eat sugar? The sugar we eat raises insulin and when our insulin is raised our body stores fat for later. See when we eat sugar and carbs our body uses it as an energy source. Since our body is using all that sugar for energy it does not need to use fat. So it stores the fat for when we don't eat during famine or lack of.
So it is not nutritional fat that is making us fat. It is sugar and carbs making us fat. If you want to lose weight you will need to stop eating sugar and refined carbs. In order to stop eating sugar you will need to start reading nutrition labels on foods, because even the "health foods" have loads of sugar in them. I do hope you have the patience I do because you will be in the grocery store for a long time looking for foods with out sugar in them.