October, 2013. At Chiripa, we have often featured brilliantly decorated sugar skulls like those you might find during Day of the Dead festivities in Mexico. Mexican popular art reveals a fatalistic, magical, and often humorous attitude toward the great mystery of death. The sugar skulls are just one example. Kids and grownups love them.
But in Mexico, as in the United States, there is also a less whimsical connection between sugar and death. A recent public health campaign in Mexico includes billboards showing 12 heaping spoonfuls of sugar next to a 20-ounce bottle of soda. The ads ask, “Would you eat 12 spoonfuls of sugar? Why would you drink soda?”
The ad campaign is part of a movement to rein in a sugar-fueled epidemic of obesity and diabetes that is raging on both sides of the border. Mexico and the United States are now ranked 1 and 2 among the world’s fattest nations, according to a U.N. report. According to Mexico’s latest health survey, 7 out of 10 Mexicans are overweight and roughly 9% have diabetes.
In Mexico, as in the U.S., there is a huge market for Coca Cola and other soft drinks. Enormous sums are spent on soda, often in places where there is little funding for sanitary public water supplies. Discarded soft-drink containers often litter the roadside. In some remote places, Coca Cola is even venerated as a sort of god. The former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, was previously the chief executive for Coca Cola in Mexico (and Latin America). Soft drinks have clout, and that clout is not always healthy.
On our recent trip to Mexico, we started looking for sugar content disclosures on food and beverage labels. One of the difficulties, both in Mexico and the U.S., is that sugar content is expressed in grams. And nobody knows how much a gram is. We also noticed that reduced-fat products often contain more sugar to compensate for the reduction in tasty fats. Some sugar is natural to the product (such as lactose in milk, or fructose in fruit), but much of the sugar in processed foods is added.
Things snap into better focus when you think in teaspoons. There are nearly 5 grams of sugar per teaspoon. So, if your soft drink or flavored "low-fat" yogurt contains 35 grams of sugar per serving, that means nearly 7 teaspoons of sugar per serving.
On the other hand, we all deserve a few sweets in our lives. In those moments when you really NEED something sweet, think of a deep, rich Venezuelan chocolate bar from Chiripa (14-19 grams of sugar per serving). They are, as the saying goes, "to die for...." -JM
On the other hand, we all deserve a few sweets in our lives. In those moments when you really NEED something sweet, think of a deep, rich Venezuelan chocolate bar from Chiripa (14-19 grams of sugar per serving). They are, as the saying goes, "to die for...." -JM
