July 24, 2003
Sugar in diet foods: Better or just more costly?
You’ve been drinking a lot of sodas and eating more candy than usual, thanks to job stress, family stress and traffic stress. Now you’re looking at the scale and not liking the message it’s sending you. It’s time to shape up, lose weight and get back into the bikini or shorts before anyone notices those extra bits of flab here, and especially there, on your body.
You resolve to stop by the health food store and stock up on diet drink powder and a six-pack of canned diet formula on the way to work. Before you make that investment, though, you may want to consider just what you’re getting in that barrel of powder or those cans of tasty liquid.
“If you look at the various weight-loss products offered in health food stores, they are mostly sugar, $16 or so for a big can of sugar and vitamins,” says Dr. Adam Drewnowski, director of the Nutritional Sciences Program in the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine and member at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “When you decide to buy a product for weight loss, check the label!”
Just what is the difference between soft drinks and candy, which cause weight gain, and diet drinks, which supposedly cause weight loss? The main issue seems to be price, as well as the amount of sugar and the way it is packaged and marketed.
“In a bottle of soft drink there are 225 grams of sugar for about 89 cents. In a serving of a diet powder-based drink, 267 grams of sugar, at a much higher price,” Drewnowski says. “It’s interesting that we behave as if cheap sugar makes us fat, but expensive sugar in a diet drink makes us slim. How come? It’s still sugar, with a small amount of fiber.”
This doesn’t mean that all sugar is bad. Sugar is vital for the proper functioning of the body: food is processed into sugar by the body to nourish cells so that they can perform properly. Too much sugar is converted to fat. Drewnowski says that we have a physiological drive to consume sugar that goes all the way back to our caveman ancestors. They knew that the denser the calories, the easier it was to fuel up for those long hunts, even if they weren’t able to put the concept into words. We’ve kept the craving for sweets and fats, but discarded the rugged lifestyle that hard-wired that need for calories into our bodies.
The answer for weight maintenance is moderation, while the answer for weight loss is cutting back slightly on calories while adding moderate exercise to your day. Dropping as few as 500 calories a day and walking for as little as 10 minutes three times a day can make a gradual and important difference in your life and in your total health picture, without completely giving up everything that you like to eat, including smaller servings of candy or soft drinks.
