6 tips to reduce sugar consumption

If you want to consume less sugar, it’s tough. Sweetener is in almost everything these days. However, even small changes in daily life can help control and ideally minimize sugar consumption. Blick has collected six tips for you.

1. Keep a food diary

Most people don’t even realize how much sugar they’re consuming. If you want to change something about your consumption, you have to find the habits and let go.

The ideal way: keep a food diary. For example, write down everything you ate and drank for a week, including sugar content. This will allow you to quickly understand where all the sugar comes from and where consumption can best be reduced.

2. Clean the pantry

Sometimes you eat sweets just because you’re home. But if there’s no dessert in the pantry, you can’t eat anything. Cleaning is an important step if you’ve decided to eat less sugar. Of course, you don’t have to throw away the food, you can give it to someone else or donate it.

3. Pay attention to the packaging

It goes without saying that no one likes to read small print. However, it can be helpful to pay attention to how much sugar is in the things you buy when you go shopping.

But beware: Sugar isn’t always spelled like that. There are over 70 different terms for it. Searches for anything ending in -ose or -sirup. For example, terms such as fructose, glucose or sucrose, but also malt extract or sweet whey powder.

4. Avoid sweet drinks

Where it’s pretty easy to shave off a few grams of sugar is in drinks. Soft drinks such as cola or iced tea contain about ten grams of sugar per 100 milliliters. So if you drink a small bottle of Coke – 330 milliliters – you’ve already consumed more than half the recommended daily amount of sugar, or 50 grams.

5. Do not sweeten tea or coffee

Morning coffee and tea is a ritual for almost everyone. Here, too, sugar can be cut quickly. However, if you do not want to give up the sweetness here, you can also sweeten the tea with a little honey. Sugar alternatives like stevia or coconut blossom sugar are especially good in coffee.

6. Consume less finished product

If you want to go fast for lunch, one or the other likes to use ready-made products. Sometimes this is not a problem. But if you want to reduce your sugar consumption, don’t make it a habit.

For example, frozen pizzas or microwave plates, as well as ready-made salad dressings, marinades or sauces, are pure sugar traps. Anyone who cooks fresh has a better overview of what’s actually in the food.