A conversation about added sugar and the strange difficulty of knowing how much we consume without noticing.
A friend and colleague told me he has stopped consuming products with added sugar for the last three months.
That sounds simple when said in one sentence.
Then you start thinking about what it actually means.
It is not only avoiding sweets. That is the obvious part. No dessert, no chocolate, no mithai, no sweet drink. Fine.
But added sugar hides in many normal things. Drinks. Packaged juices. Sauces. Biscuits. Protein bars. Cereals. Flavoured yoghurt. Snacks. Ready-to-eat foods. Things that do not even announce themselves as sweet.
Most of us are not consciously deciding to eat sugar all day.
We are deciding to have tea, ketchup, a cold coffee, some packaged snack, maybe a drink with lunch, maybe something small in the evening because the day was long.
Individually, each choice feels harmless.
Together, I am not sure most of us know what the total becomes.
That is the part I found interesting. Not the health lecture. I don’t want to turn this into advice because I am not qualified for that and also because food advice online quickly becomes annoying.
But awareness itself is worth looking at.
If someone asked me how much added sugar I consume in a normal day, I don’t think I would have a confident answer. I may guess. I may say “not much.” But that would probably be based more on feeling than on measurement.
And feeling is unreliable here.
Sugar does not always arrive as a big visible decision. It arrives as habit, packaging, taste adjustment, convenience, and small rewards that barely register.
Maybe the useful exercise is not to become extreme immediately.
Maybe it is simply to notice.
For one day, what did I consume that had added sugar? Which of those did I actually want? Which were just default? Which ones would I miss? Which ones would I not even notice if removed?
I am curious about this now.
Not in a dramatic way. More in the way you suddenly notice background noise after someone points it out.
How much sugar are we consuming without ever feeling like we are eating sugar?