Journalist Anneke Bots decided to scrap all added sugars from her diet for 30 days. You can read about it in Issue 18, below we share a snippet of the feature.
According to Patricia Schutte, a spokeswoman for the Netherlands Nutrition Center, the problem with sugar in particular is that it contains no nutrients. In other words, it fills the stomach with empty, fattening calories, making us feel less likely to eat healthy food containing vitamins, minerals, fiber and other substances essential for our bodies. “Sugars occur naturally in many products,” she explains. “For instance, the starch in bread, pasta and rice gets converted into sugars in our body. Dairy products are full of lactose, and fruit is full of sugars, but besides these sugars, these products have healthy nutrients. Added sugars are completely empty.”
Are people paying more attention to nutrition nowadays, or does it just seem like that? “With the rise of social media we have more channels available to us, making information more intrusive and allowing it to come at us from all sides,” Schutte says. “And the trend in healthy and mindful living has also increased the focus on eating properly – but we want to make doing so as easy as possible. That’s why so many people are looking for a quick fix.”
- You can find the article ‘Thirty days without sugar’ in Issue 18.
Text Anneke Bots Portrait photo Margriet Hoekstra
