How Much Sugar in a 20-Ounce Coke? 16 Teaspoons!

My husband will often drink a Coke while he is driving a long distance; the caffeine and sugar give him a jolt that helps him stay alert. But when I had a look at the nutrition label of a 20-ounce bottle he was drinking recently and told him how much sugar was in it, he was shocked.

It's not that he had never looked at the label before. But the label lists the amount of sugar in grams, and how many people know how much sugar weighs a gram? We use teaspoons to measure sugar into our coffee and tea, and it's in terms of teaspoons that the amount of sugar has some meaning.

I had recently looked up this question and found the answer: 4.2 grams of sugar equals 1 teaspoon.

Which means, I told him, that a 20-ounce bottle of Coke has 67.5 grams of sugar, equal to SIXTEEN teaspoons or 1/4 cup!

My husband drinks his coffee black, so thinking about someone pouring 16 teaspoons of sugar into that bottle was a powerful image.

He has never been obese and drinks very little soda, but many experts say soft drinks are a major contributor to the obesity epidemic.

It might be easier to convince people to cut back on soda pop if the nutrition labels on them (and on all other food as well) expressed the amount of sugar in terms people can understand--like teaspoons. Furthermore, as nutrition expert and author, Marion Nestle, points out, we also need to know how much of the sugar content of a food is there naturally--as in pure fruit juice--and how much was added by the food processor. She is hoping that the FDA under Obama will provide that information.

(By the way, many experts don't believe there's anything intrinsically more harmful about high fructose corn syrup than cane sugar. The problem is that government corn subsidies have made the syrup incredibly cheap, making it possible for manufacturers to super-size containers of soda and still keep the prices low enough to encourage consumption--which, by the way, is going down, despite their best efforts.)

Another peculiar aspect of sugar labeling is that there's no Recommended Daily Allowance. The amount of every other substance is given in grams or milligrams (for sodium) and then as a percentage of what the government believes is the desirable amount for an adult eating 2,000 calories a day.

But how much sugar should you eat? No guidance is given.

Absent that information, all you can do is first, look closely at the number of calories per serving, being careful to notice how many servings are in the package.

And, second, convert the grams of sugar into teaspoons that you can see with your mind's eye getting poured one after the other into your food: 4.2 grams of sugar = 1 teaspoon.

Antioxident Vitamins C & E Can Have Negative Effects

Put the word "antioxident" on a packaged food, and folks are a lot more likely to buy it, say market researchers. And, since food companies' goal is to entice you to buy their products, they've been busy taking advantage of that reaction.

The problem is, there's little proof that added antioxidents help us stay healthy; instead some new evidence suggests they actually interfere with some of the benefits of exercising and losing weight.

Nutritionist Marion Nestle, who monitors the sins of the food industry from her perch at New York University, says hundreds of products now tout the presence of antioxidents, but that we're being fooled. In her blog, she says there's a "lack of evidence" of the benefits of artificially adding antioxidents to your diet in the form, for example, of vitamins C & E.

(In case you've been living in a bubble, antioxidents appear to play a powerful role in fending off cancer and diabetes and fighting the effects of aging.)

Today came the news that if you're on a weight reduction program and/or exercise regularly, taking vitamin C & E for their antioxident effects may, in fact, work against your health.

The study, reported in The New York Times, found that our bodies' natural reaction to exercise and weight loss is not only to mobilize our built-in natural antioxident defenses from free oxygen, but also to make us more sensitive to insulin. When the two vitamins were added to the diets of study subjects who were exercising and losing weight, the study showed they short-circuited our natural responses.

There's no debate that unprocessed foods in their natural state--like berries, broccoli, garlic, tomatoes and spinach--contain potent antioxidents in combination with many other nutrients. This combination isn't replicated by supplements. Also, while our bodies have evolved to handle the amounts of antioxidents present in fruit and vegetables, ingesting large amounts via supplements changes our bodies' reaction.

The bottom line is the same old boring one: spend your money on eating more fruit and vegetables instead of buying expensive packaged products with added antioxidents of dubious value.