By Meagan Barrett ’15

We often place the blame on food consumers for being overweight and letting their children get diabetes. Because with all the healthy food on the markets and food companies chopping the fat in half, it couldn’t possibly be anyone else’s fault.

And yet, if you take a look at any food label, you’ll notice that one of the only two nutrients that doesn’t have a listed percent recommended daily allowance (percent RDA) is sugar. The second, protein, is easy to explain, because there isn’t a general daily allowance that applies to everyone, since it isn’t based on caloric intake. But how much sugar you should have is based on how many calories you take in per day. According to the American Heart Association, the maximum amount of added sugars an adult male should eat per day is 150 calories a day, or 37.5 grams, and the maximum amount for women is 100 calories a day, or 25 grams. It equates to roughly nine and a half teaspoons a day.

The fact that there is a daily suggested value for sugar should make anyone skeptical of the fact that it’s not listed. What American consumers aren’t aware of is that they are on average consuming about 22 teaspoons of sugar every day. Hiding it from food labels is exactly how food companies make it possible.

See, the problem for food companies is that if they did list it, you might not eat their food. Keeping the daily suggested values in mind, imagine everyone’s favorite soft drink: a classic coke. For each 12-oz can there are 33 grams of sugar. That alone is over 100 percent of your recommended daily value of sugar. And that was just a drink. What’s more concerning is that while you would expect sodas and cookies to have obscene amounts of sugar, sugar is added to everyday conventional food items as well. These include barbecue sauce, which typically has eight grams in one ounce; flavored yogurt, which typically has 14 grams in 6 oz; granola which typically has 19 grams added to one cup … the list goes on to include spaghetti sauce, fruit drinks, ketchup, oatmeal and even milk and bread. It is quite literally in everything you eat.

This is where the food industry gets sneaky. As people educated themselves on how much sugar they should be eating, the food companies changed the name. Call it sugar, people won’t want to eat it. But call it “glucose solids,” “high fructose corn syrup,” or “maltodexterin” and consumers are none the wiser. In fact, in some products, rather than adding 15 grams of sugar companies will add 5 grams of date sugar, 5 grams of cane molasses, and 5 grams of corn syrup without being required to list all of it as “sugar.”

It may not even sound like a big deal, but that’s only because no one knows what sugar really does to you. Because on top of leading to diabetes and metabolic syndrome, sugar has also been linked to hypertension, high blood pressure, hypoglycemia, depression, headaches, fatigue, acne, skin irritation, stiffening of arteries, and also violent behavior. On top of that, sugar is just as addictive—if not more addictive—than cocaine. The only reason we don’t notice we are addicted is because it’s already in everything we eat, and it comes in the form of craving food.

If legislation was passed to require all food production companies to list the percent RDA of sugar, and required all forms of sugar to be blatantly designated as a form of sugar, then people could properly make informed decisions about the foods they were eating. Only then can the consumers be blamed for health problems in the United States.