IDEO - TRY - Recommended sugar intake

After researching this project it became clear to me that while I have always considered myself a healthy eater, I myself may be consuming more than the recommended 6 teaspoons of sugar a day. While I don't have a sweet tooth, tend to stay away from chocolate or lollies, as a student I do tend to enjoy fast, easy meals. For one week I ate no more than 6 teaspoons a day to discover how we can make this achievable for the user. Throughout the journey I made the following discoveries.

Savoury food has added sugar. 

While iv been consuming savoury meals such as canned tomatoes and baked beans, thinking these are a healthy alternative, I discovered this was contributing to my sugar for the day. I found in order to stay within the healthy limit, I had to cook more from scratch and replaced my canned tomatoes for fresh tomatoes and baked beans for kidney beans (which definitely didn't taste as good). 

Quick meals always contain sugar. 

I had been making stir fries with ready-made sauce for years, thinking that this was a healthy option yet discovered the masses amount of sugar added to sauces. This meant making sauces from scratch which took a lot longer. 

Natural sugars are great to reduce cravings. 

By day 2 I was craving sweet things, I missed sugar in my tea and on my cereal. I found fruit such as bananas and berries to be helpful in reducing these cravings. I started experimenting with dates and natural cacao for a healthy alternative to sweet food to see how easy this would be. I made refined sugar-free "snickers bar" with nuts, oats, dates and cacao. While these were relatively easy to make, they did take time so I can see the appeal of fast snacks for students. 

Drinks contain large amounts of sugar. 

In order to stay within the allowed amount daily, I found that I had to stick to water or tea as many drinks contain large amounts of sugar. After a few days I got accustomed to this and started using lemons in water instead of lemonade or flavoured water. 

Overall, 

I learnt that though I had a relatively savoury and healthy diet I was still well over the daily limit without even realising. I discovered that canned or easy food was a no-go for sugar which made it hard for when I wanted a fast meal after a day at uni. This made me think how its a shame there isn't a cheap range of canned food without added sugar. It also made me realise there must be thousands of people like me who are unaware of the sugar we are consuming which makes me feel annoyed and frustrated at the companies adding the sugar. It also made me realise sugar is addictive however after one week I found that my cravings lessened and I became more accustomed to less sugar. This shows that small changes can make way for good habits however I feel companies are supermarkets are definitely letting the consumer down with added sugar. While sugar content is shown on the products, this is often in grams and isn't relatable to a scale that consumers are aware of. After this experience I feel sugar awareness is a huge must as there will be many youth like me who were previously unaware.