Added sugars account for 13 percent of American calories

A new study shows that up to 13 percent of the daily caloric intake for an average American comes from added sugars. And contrary to conventional wisdom (that people get sugar from drinking Coke and other beverages), most of it comes from sugar which has been added to food.

The flip side of this is that if you stop eating everything that has added sugar, you could cut your daily calories by 13 percent! That's assuming that you could avoid sugar, of course, which is not a very easy thing to do.

I recently undertook to expunge all forms of sweetener from my diet. (Fruits and vegetables are OK; added sweeteners like honey and agave nectar - not OK.) This proved to be a lot more difficult than I had imagined.

It turns out that they (you know - "they") put sugar in pretty much everything. Unless you make it from scratch, it probably has sugar in it. Not for any particular reason, mind you. Sugar has no useful purpose in food. Sure, it tastes good in cookies and ice cream. But most people don't realize that just about everything they eat has been sweetened.

In reading the labels of things, here is a short list of some of the places I was surprised to find sweetener: Wheat Thins, artificial crab meat, canned clams, every salad dressing I have checked so far (including Ranch, Caesar and Italian dressings), dry roasted peanuts (not honey-roasted, just plain peanuts), mayonnaise, tartar sauce, mustard, bacon, hot dogs, sliced roasted turkey deli meat and rotisserie chicken.

On a case by case basis you might think "It's such a small amount, it hardly matters." But A) It adds up over the course of a day's eating, and B) If it's such a small amount, then why don't they just leave it out?

Image courtesy Flickr/Uwe Hermann