Does Sugar Affect Immunity? Easy Pumpkin Custard

Let’s prepare for the Fall and Winter holidays by discussing how sugar and carbohydrate intake affect immunity and how you can help keep you and your children well through the festivities.  We will offer daily recipes at the bottom of each post.  We will return to the Bone Broth Marathon at the completion of this series.

Let’s start by looking at the normal carb and sugar intake of an average American eating the Standard American Diet.  If you don’t wish to read the info, you can scroll down to find today’s recipe at the end of the post.

What America’s Adults Consume

In 2000, the average American consumed about 152.4 pounds of dry weight refined sugar per year, mostly as table sugar (43% by dry weight) and high fructose corn syrup (42% by dry weight) as one part of a high-carbohydrate diet. This is a 39% increase over the 1950s. This amounts to an estimated 32 teaspoons of added sugars per person, per day!!  The USDA recommends only 10 teaspoons of added sugars a day.  In 2000, Americans consumed an average of only 1.5 pounds a year in sweeteners that weren’t derived from cane/beet or corn.  That includes unrefined sweeteners such as real maple syrup and honey.

In addition, most Americans consume large amounts of refined carbs other than sugar.  According to the USDA, the average American consumed about 200 pounds of flour and cereal grains per year in 2000, an average 10 ten servings a day PLUS manufactured foods such as cereal, biscuits and crackers, corn chips, popcorn and the like.  Of that consumption, only 7% of people are making 3 or more of those servings as whole grains.

Of course, these numbers are for 2000.  If you’d like to see the USDA report, which is a pdf file, which you can view here.  The National Center for Health Statistics released updated statistics for 2007-2008.  The report, which you can view here, states that carbohydrate consumption went down very slightly between 2000 and 2008.

So as we can see, the average American consumes about half of their daily calories in carbs- women consumes about 896 calories and the average many consumes about 1,199 calories a day in carbohydrates, including sugars and whole and refined grains.

What America’s Children Consume

Finding data on children was a little more difficult.  In 1988-1994, carbohydrate consumption was broken down in this study based on age, race and sex.  Looking at the numbers of the total population studied (this study excluded nursing children), we see:

I converted grams to calories by multiplying by four.  There are four calories per gram of carbs and protein and nine calories per gram of fat.

So we can draw the conclusion that children are taking in about the same percentage of carbs as total calories as their parents.  But what about sugar?  Those numbers were hard to pin down, as the studies separate it out to minutia and don’t really pull final numbers together.  I added it together here.

The percentage of carbohydrate calories was concluded by dividing the total grams of sugar by the mean intake in grams in the table above.

Using these statistics, it is safe to assume that about 25% of a child’s calories comes from sugar and about 25% comes from other carbs.

Let’s put these numbers into info you can grasp.  One pound of sugar has 453 grams.  That means that the average 12-15 year old child is consuming the equivalent of about .4 pounds of white sugar a day!!!  The other startling statistic out of this is the amount of artificial sweeteners consumed by children.  Sucrose is table sugar or white sugar.  Older teens consume half as much artificial sweeteners as sucrose!

In tomorrow’s post, we will look at the different types of carbohydrates and how your body processes them.

       Print    

Disclaimer: Some of the links in some of my posts are affiliate links. When you click them you allow me to cover a small portion of the cost of this blog. Blogging isn’t cheap and I appreciate your support so we can keep churning out awesome recipes. Using my affiliate link is like leaving a tip. Thank you. You can read more of our disclaimers here.

KerryAnn Foster runs Cooking Traditional Foods, the longest running Traditional Foods Menu Mailer on the internet, now in its seventh volume. KerryAnn has eleven years of traditional foods experience and is a former Weston A. Price Foundation chapter leader.  Read about KerryAnn’s journey to health through multiple miscarriages, celiac disease, food allergies and intolerances, obesity, adrenal fatigue and heavy metals.

Founded in 2005, CTF helps you feed your family nourishing foods they will love.  With two choices of Menu Mailers, multiple eBooks, Print Books and video-based classes, KerryAnn makes traditional foods easy, accessible, affordable and family friendly for everyone.

KerryAnn founded Nourished Living Network, a network for traditional food and natural living bloggers, in 2011. NLN provides support, publicity and networking opportunities for bloggers all across the traditional foods spectrum. Our Recipe Gallery features recipes from the fifty member blogs and growing.