Great question, how much sugar is in carbohydrates ?
Here is a YouTube video to demonstrate how many spoonfuls of sugar are in the carohydrates that we eat – shocking !!
LOOK AT THE Label by Susan Bowerman
Cream of Tomato Soup 400g
Nutrition Facts
Per 100g Per 1/2 can
Energy – kJ 237kJ 475kJ
– kcal (Calories) 57kcal 113kcal
Protein 0.9g 1.8g
Carbohydrate 6.6g 13.3g
(of which sugars) (4.9g) (9.8g)
Fat 3.0g 5.9g
(of which saturates) (0.2g) (0.4g)
Fibre 0.4g 0.8g
Sodium 0.3g 0.6g
Salt equivalent 0.7g 1.4g
One of the most important skills you can master is being able to read a food label in order to figure out exactly what you are getting from your foods. Let’s look at the example above.
Serving size per 100g and per portion:
Pay attention to this closely. Many people assume that small packages of biscuits or crackers, or medium sized cans and sachets are single servings.
But this might not be the case. For this example the can contains two servings of 200g but the nutrition information in the above is for one serving which equals half the contents.
Calories, Fat, Carbohydrate and Protein:
As with all the other nutrients, the figures are the amounts per serving.
In this example, one serving of Cream of Tomato Soup has 113 calories. But if you consume the whole can (two servings), you will have taken in 226 calories.
This label also tells you how much of the fat is saturated fat. “Carbohydrate” tells you, again, how much carbohydrate per serving. Keep in mind that this includes natural sources, such as natural sugars in milk or fruit, so it’s not always easy to tell from the line labelled “Sugars” where the sugar is coming from without looking at the ingredients list. If a cereal has little added sugar – but contains raisins – the sugar content may look high, but it’s from the natural fruit sugar.
Check on the ingredients list for sugar. Added sugars must be included in the ingredients list, which always starts with the biggest ingredient first. Watch out for other words that are used to describe added sugars, such as sucrose, glucose, fructose, maltose, hydrolysed starch and invert sugar, corn syrup and honey. If you see one of these near the top of the list, you know that the product is likely to be high in added sugars.
Sometimes food manufacturers use a number of sweeteners in a product – each in small amounts – so the ingredients are “sprinkled” throughout the ingredients list, but taken together they can sometimes add up significantly.
Fibre and sugars are part of the total carbohydrate count. A food with 5 grams or more of fibre per serving is a good source of fibre.
Recommended dietary allowance: (RDA) You will sometimes see RDA listed on food labels. These values are standard values developed for use on food labels. They can be useful to compare the amount of a nutrient in a food to the amount that is recommended per day. As they show the amount of energy or an individual nutrient that a group of people of a certain age range (and sometimes gender) needs for good health they can be used for guidance but shouldn’t be seen as an exact recommendation. You can still look at these values to see if a particular food is high or low in a nutrient that you are interested in.
Here are some things to visualise when you are looking at a food label:
Every 5 grams of fat is a teaspoon of fat (or a pat of butter). In the example above, each serving of soup has 5.9 grams of fat – that’s around 1 teaspoon or one pat of butter per serving. If you consume the whole can (two servings), then you are consuming the equivalent in fat of two pats of butter!
Every 4 grams of sugar is a teaspoon. The soup above has 9.8 grams per serving, or just over two teaspoons. But a pint bottle of a sweetened drink might have 30 grams per serving (and two servings per bottle). If you drink the whole bottle, you’ll be drinking 60 grams of sugar – that’s 15 teaspoons, or five tablespoons!
