Why Diets Fail (Because You're Addicted to Sugar) by Nicole M. Avena Read Free Book Online Page A

given food, it’s important to understand how to interpret a nutrition label. These labels are often on the back of food packages, but sometimes, as in the case of chain or fast-food restaurants, this information is not readily available, and you may need to request it (or you can usually find it on the company’s website). An example of a typical nutrition label is shown on this page ; this one is for a package of Skittles candy.
    There have been efforts put forth recently to make calorie content and nutrition information more visible to people, in the hopes that providing such information will enable us to make moreinformed food choices. Has making this information more accessible worked? Unfortunately, it hasn’t. And this has nothing to do with intelligence or comprehension levels; adults with low levels of literacy and numeracy and those with higher levels of education have both been shown to have difficulty understanding nutrition labels. 5
A Sugar by Any Other Name …
Agave nectar
Barbados sugar
Barley malt
Beet sugar
Blackstrap molasses
Brown sugar
Cane crystals
Cane juice crystals
Cane sugar
Caramel
Carob syrup
Castor sugar
Confectioner’s sugar
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup
Corn syrup solids
Crystalline fructose
Date sugar
Demerara sugar
Dextrose
D-mannose
Evaporated cane juice
Florida crystals
Free-flowing brown sugar
Fructose
Fruit juice
Fruit juice concentrate
Galactose
Glucose
Glucose solids
Golden sugar
Golden syrup
Granulated sugar
Grape juice concentrate
Grape sugar
HFCS
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Icing sugar
Invert sugar
Lactose
Malt syrup
Maltodextrin
Maltose
Mannitol
Maple syrup
Molasses
Muscovado sugar
Organic raw sugar
Panocha
Powdered sugar
Raw sugar
Refiner’s syrup
Rice syrup
Sorbitol
Sorghum syrup
Sucrose
Sugar
Table sugar
Treacle
Turbinado sugar
Yellow sugar
    Part of the problem is that these labels are meaningless if we don’t understand how to interpret them. Also, as you will soon see, the way that the information is presented on the labels can be misleading. So, let’s dissect a label piece by piece so you can understand what all of this information means.
    PERCENT DAILY VALUE (%DV)
    The upper right of the label reads “%DV*,” meaning the percent daily value based on a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet. In essence, the numbers that are listed under this heading indicate how much a serving of that food contributes to the overall recommended daily intake of a particular category, whether the category is total fat, total carbohydrates, or a certain vitamin. For example, the label above shows that one serving of this item contributes 13 percent of the recommended daily intake of saturated fat that is suggested by the FDA.
    In addition to the %DV, the nutrition facts also tell you how many grams of fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrates, and protein are found in one serving size of the item. This label indicates, for instance, that one serving of Skittles contains 56 grams of carbohydrates, 47 of which are sugar. These two items, the number of grams of carbohydrates and the number of grams of sugar that come from carbohydrates, are both important when trying to determine if a certain food fits with your goal to reduce your sugar and carbohydrate intake. However, to make food-intake decisions easily (and without a calculator), we’ve compiled the Sugar Equivalency Table for you (see this page ), which will help you easily identify how much sugar is contained in a food and whether or not that food fits with your diet plan. We will explain in greater detail how to interpret and use this table in upcoming chapters.

    SERVING SIZE
    When using nutrition labels, determining the appropriate serving size can also be a tricky thing. Just glancing at a nutrition label can be misleading and dangerous. If you down an entire package of cookies thinking it is one serving, and it turns out the package contained four servings, then you just consumed quadruple the number of calories, carbohydrates, and