to think it's not possible to give up sugar

[enifing]

I have heard people suggest this from time to time. It's not possible with DCs, is it?

We've given up most cereal, but porridge has to have sugar or some sugar substitute.

Stewed fruit can't be fine without sugar.

Home baking, absolute no-no.

How dull would life be? I would probably overdose on salt instead...

wow just read some of the extreme replies to this thread, am running for my life

Smile i'd read those bagels as having 48.9g of sugar/carbs per 100g pretty much like cake....but they are lovely!
I don't see the nutritional benefit from starchy carbs - plenty of fibre in veg. In general we try to limit all starchy and sugary carbs as much as possible but bans have failed to be sustainable and has led to a return to disordered eating by me. We(I) are now more able to limit but not ban - but if you can ban outright without any disordered eating , well done!

It seems counter productive to me to not eat fruit because it has a high sugar content and obviously sugar is bad for your health. You are then missing out on some really micro nutrient dense food which is bad for your health. I know you can get vitamins and minerals from other places but a wide selection of foods is always going to be best.

I would put not eating fruit in the extreme category, personally. And nothing wrong with complex carbs as long as your portion sizes are sensible.

I also wouldn't be convinced by the link about unrefined sugar being better than refined sugar - all the minerals etc supposedly left in it are things you can get from fruit, veg and meat. And without the minerals it's still sugar - it's not lower in calories and it's not lower in fructose.

There are lots of recipe books and blogs out there claiming to have cut out sugar by replacing it with honey, maple syrup, pureed dates etc. It's a con, they are still sugar.

yeah you can eat fruit and obtain nutrients from doing so, eating veg is always going to be better for you....but maybe a lot less enjoyable if you have a sweet tooth....we all can't eat perfectly all the time, mostly we just do the best we can manage. There's no law here, just an exchange of views....I'm not convinced at all by the low fat lobby but I'm not able to commit to the primal way of eating either.

Why is veg better for you tho loaf? Like I said earlier healthy/ good for you is a subjective term IMO. It's solely down to your diet and what your trying to achieve.

I agree about the law thing to. It's interesting. I've been "low carb" ( low carb for me, which is about 100 to 150 grams a day) and I lost weight. I'm not convinced I lose any more weight or felt any better than when I lost weight recently eating things like oven chips a few times a week.

Today I have had:
2 eggs scrambled with butter, one 97% pork sausage, one roasted beef tomato for breakfast, a tin of tuna with mayo with cucumber wrapped in lettuce for lunch. 5 chunks of chicken tikka mixed with one avocado, the juice of half a lemon and a large dollop of Greek yogurt for my afternoon snack. Dinner was 3 slices of pork belly, one courgette, one pepper and a leek roasted with olive oil and herbs d'provence served with 5 large florets of broc and half a pack of spinach in butter served with garlic mayonnaise. 3 mugs of hot water and lemon, 2 litres of water, 3 cups of herb/green tea and a few glasses of white wine. Oh and a chunk of cheese. This is fine for me, I don't 'miss' anything and I have lost 23lb, my skin and hair is great etc.

These are the foods on my banned list: Okra( cos its slimy) artificial sweeteners, battery eggs and non free range meat, everything else i would eat or try ( somethings in very small quantities. I have performed in my sport at national level and have never been under or over weight. I do find nutrition fascinating and do look for tweaks and ways to improve my diet and performance. There have been some really useful tips and great sounding meals on this thread but also some worrying extremes. Low carb doesn't suit everyone and certainly not endurance athletes.

Take a look at the okinawan people & their diet/food pyramid. Also the 7th day adventurists US, both groups are renowned and researched for their longevity and low disease states. It makes quite compelling reading

Mide because with veg you get all the nutrients, in fact more nutrients without the high levels of sugar you get from fruit. Fruit is a treat, i certainly wouldn't be encouraging my kids to eat it if they were consuming adequate levels of veg but they don't and i see fruit as second best.

I don't really understand sweetening porridge. It's a savoury dish, so a pinch of salt makes more sense for flavour than anything sweet. You wouldn't add sugar to an omelette or baked potato, so not sure why you'd add it to porridge. Though I know a lot of people do.

My ds eats a limited amount of veg( keep trying!) but will eat a lot of fruit and meat. I am loathe to restrict the fruit as his diet would be mainly meat!

Also what is the official difference between fruit and vegetables, sweet potatoes and carrots are as sweet as some apples?

bike i am after variety but dc will only eat what they eat and i will pronote as much veg as possible....the official line is not necessarily the most up to date view....i tend to do my own research and leave officials to do their own thing - they generally take much longer to catch on.

Fair enough loaf, just a difference in opinion. I see calories as king ( not the only thing that matters but the most important)

I don't eat carrot or sweet potato as my veg.

I never really liked most fruit even as a child, I used to force it down when I got to adulthood because I was told it was healthy. In reality I'd much rather eat broccoli than an apple . Ds1 has taken after me in that he hates all fruit and won't eat carrots, sweetcorn or peas but eats spinach/broc/cauliflower etc everyday. He also refuses all dairy and pasta, couscous and rice. He does eat mashed spuds and sweet pots tho.

You're right Mide we see things very differently I see nutrition as key, calories are fairly irrelevant - imo sort the nutrition out and the calories sort themselves.

Smile i'd read those bagels as having 48.9g of sugar/carbs per 100g pretty much like cake....but they are lovely!

If you're choosing to look at total carbs instead of sugars specifically, then bagels are still more like the bread I linked (44.2g per 100g) than like madeira cake 57g per 100g.

If you want to talk about 'sugar', talk about 'sugar'. If you want to look at carbs, look at carbs. Don't compare the total carb content of one item to the 'of which sugars' content of another, though. This is getting tedious.

Try doughnuts then, tesco jam fuilled sugar doughnuts 49g of carbs, pretty much the same as the cinnamon and raison bagels. And i do see carbs and sugar as one in the same - same effect on blood sugar levels - same nutritional profile.

There we would have to disagree loafliner, there is plenty of evidence that sucrose has a totally different nutritional profile to complex carbs. Comparing a bagel to something covered in sugar and stuffed with jam is a bit

Loafliner if you were actually monitoring your blood sugar levels in real time like my DH with diabetes has to, you would understand the difference between complex carbohydrates and sugar. They are not the same. Different sugars work differently too.

If you are, in fact, sticking a lancet in your finger sometimes hourly, I apologise.

I didn't think white bread, as in bagels, counted as complex carbohydrates, though? Doesn't it have to be wholemeal to be complex?

Of course you can give up sugar, and while you're at it, you should drastically reduce the total carbohydrate content of your Diet :)

Why? Because modern dietary advice and "foods" are killing us (a lot of what's in the supermarket barely qualifies as food imo).

Try googling "half of Americans pre-diabetic" (rates are a little lower in the UK but still appalling). Around half of adults in the US are either diabetic, or have metabolic syndrome/prediabetes, and even more shockingly, around 1 in 4 teenagers are pre-diabetic (this number should be close to Zero!). This is a huge, huge red flag.

On a modern diet, whole populations are fat and sick and heavily medicated. Our levels of chronic sickness are not natural, but result from a diet so far removed from real, unprocessed food that most people can't accept the concept that low sugar, lower carb, minimally processed diets aren't some sort of unnatural diet - it's REAL FOOD!

Try a little research, find some wonderful recipes, at these free blogs. MarksDailyApple, Robbwolf paleo solution blog, dietdoctor.com lchf (the food revolution).

It's true that we can't fully replicate a single perfect Palaeolithic diet, because this varied from season to season and geographical location, but we know what the were eating (real food!).
Meat, fish, eggs, nuts, berries, leaves, root veg...
They wouldn't recognise about 80% of the junk in supermarkets as being food.

No we just all live too long, unlike paleo man!

Actually, the ones who survived childhood (no vaccines, no Heath and safety!), lived longer than we did, until very recently (without modern medications), were taller and had stronger bones than us.

Average age of death being 30ish doesn't reflect the longevity or health of those individuals who survived childhood.

The "cavemen all died age 30" bollocks is often repeated and wrong.