But how much sugar is that?

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays and the Take Charge of your Health blog carnival.

I just visited a great site: sugarstacks.com which shows visual representations of how much sugar is in what we eat. It’s a brilliantly simple idea and perfect to use as a springboard discussion for kids. The site doesn’t differentiate between HFCS, honey, sugar, maple syrup or other forms of sweetening, but simply stacks up sugar cubes equivalent to the amount of sugar in the photographed item.

We recently used this site and a box of sugar cubes in a discussion with our family. We had each child list their favorite foods from the site and choose one. For most of my kids it was the pop tarts, but for me it was the Cinnabon. On an empty stomach, we ate the equivalent of sugar in plain sugar cubes of one serving of that item. It was hard to choke down that much plain sugar! We chatted for about fifteen minutes until one by one, they started noticing headaches, impatience and other physical and emotional symptoms. The daughter prone to mood swings started crying suddenly for no reason. We brushed our teeth thoroughly, had a little protein snack and came away with a huge lesson. They understand a bit more now both what sugar does to them personally and why we choose to limit it so drastically in our diet.

The site has an accompanying blog, Sugar Delirium. A recent entry asks “What’s the sugar cost of “low fat?” This is a rather new site, and I’m really looking forward to future offerings!