Tony Garcia vividly remembers his days as an addict: Craving that next fix after a stressful day on the job, pestering co-workers for a hit when he’d run out of his private stash, a series of bad decisions coming to a head as he was about to leave service that could’ve easy shortened his post-Army life.
But now, eight years after retirement, he’s off the stuff. And he wants to help the rest of the Army family get clean.
“I was addicted to sugar,” Garcia said in a Nov. 6 phone interview from Germany, where the retired lieutenant colonel serves as program manager for U.S. Army Europe’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness efforts. “As I left service, it was not unusual for my partner in my office and I to have a 2-pound bag of Red Vines, red licorice, in our office, in our desk at all times. We joked about it being addictive. When the little shopette ran out, it was a problem for us.”
Army medical and fitness leaders, supplemented by fact sheets and PowerPoints, have warned soldiers to avoid excess sugar. Health-themed presentations at the last two Association of the U.S. Army annual gatherings stressed the same statistic: The average American consumes more than 150 pounds of sugar per year, about seven times more than the 25-gram limit of added sugar per day recommended by the World Health Organization.
Garcia, who attended the 2014 AUSA speech, wants more.
“The Army should attack sugar addiction like it did high cholesterol in the ’80s,” the retired infantry officer said: Educate the Army community on the health risks, teach soldiers how to better monitor their food intake, and identify problem soldiers — either via tape test or other means — and track their path to improved health.
He also wants the Army to back the 25-gram standard by the WHO — a figure that take some effort for most soldiers to reach. The average American takes in about 15 percent of calories as sugar; cutting to WHO recommendations would drop that to about 5 percent for most people.
It would also involve very careful label reading — and maybe some guesswork.
Corporate clarity issues
Dieters are used to counting calories, and some careful eaters closely monitor different types of fats and carbohydrates. Tracking sugar, though, isn’t as simple.
While most labels have the amount of sugar in grams, they don’t distinguish between sugar that’s been added in the food-production process and what was there to begin with. Lactose, for instance, is a natural sugar in milk, and fruits contain natural sugar that’s processed better by the body thanks to the fruit’s fiber content, Garcia said.
Tony Garcia serves as the USAREUR Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program Manager in USAREUR G1 Ready and Resilient Division.
Photo Credit: Courtesy photo
The label won’t say how much of the sugar in your fruit smoothie or your cranberry-powered health bar comes from what part of the process. But it will offer hints.
Check the ingredient list, Garcia said: “If sugar is like No. 1 or 2, you’ve got a problem.”
That includes types of sugars that go by less-familiar names, like high fructose corn syrup or crystal dextrose.
Garcia said he believes the confusion isn’t an accident. It’s not in the manufacturers’ interest to reveal the amount of sugar they’ve added to products, he said, and sales benefit from food with an addictive, sugary taste.
“As much as I’ve personally studied, because I’m personally interested, I’m confident that our community isn’t going to get that educated on it,” Garcia said of the label nuances. “I’m still confused by it.”
Sugar strategies
Even with imperfect information on the package, Garcia had a few tips for those ready to cut down their sugar intake.
Have a plan. Regardless of your target intake, understand the sacrifices you’ll have to make to reach it but take a rational approach. You may find a candy bar and an energy bar have the same amount of sugar — if you just need a snack and aren’t in it for the workout fuel, eat what tastes better, Garcia said.
Have a budget. Be prepared to pay more for lower-sugar alternatives; Garcia said his grocery budget went up hundreds of dollars in the past year as he and his wife became pickier eaters.
Have a beer. Drinking to excess brings its own addiction-related health concerns, but beer is a very low-sugar option — a study commissioned by England’s Telegraph newspaper said a bottle of Stella Artois has less than 1 gram of sugar. Choose your booze wisely, though: That same study pegged a pint of hard cider at 20.5 grams, nearly an entire day’s recommended sugar allowance.
When it comes to sugar substitutes, Garcia said he avoids them, citing a lack of knowledge of their potential side effects.
The big push
“The Army does not have specific guidelines for the amount of sugar soldiers should consume,” Maj. Bethany Belanger, nutrition lead for the Army Performance Triad and a registered dietitian, said in a Nov. 7 statement. “However, we do have in place programs that promote selection of healthier options (those higher in nutrients, lower in calories, etc.)”
Belanger cited the Go for Green Program, in which food at dining facilities receives either a green, yellow or red label based on its nutritional value — green means more nutrients and less added sugar, red means highly processed and low on health benefits. Soldiers “are encouraged to ‘go for green,’ ” she explained.
Garcia seeks a different approach.
“We’re all about standards. Give us a standard,” he said. “Educate the adult community that sugar is bad for you. There’s still people that don’t believe that. …
I do see it turning around. I see that Americans are realizing their obesity problem, maybe only because of the media, and then they’re starting to raise their heads and take notice.”
Sugar overindulgence, and its effects, are examples of American exceptionalism that may not be all that flattering.
“I was at an airport, and the way I was able to find my gate [to head stateside], literally, was as I’m walking down the hallway, looking for the number, as soon as I saw all the fat people, I knew it was a Delta line,” Garcia said. “A large population were Americans, going back to the United States.
“How sad is that?”
Less-than-sweet news about sweets
News flash: Overindulging in sugar-filled food can be bad for you.
It’s not exactly a shocking concept, but more attention has been paid in recent months across multiple media types to the super-sweetened average American diet:
Film: “Fed Up,” a documentary stressing the problems caused by too much sugar and investigating food-industry attempts to limit regulation on the issue, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Co-produced by Katie Couric, now with Yahoo News, and Laurie David, one of the producers behind “An Inconvenient Truth,” the film is available on DVD and video-on-demand outlets.
One scene offers two near-identical medical scans — one showing the parts of a brain affected by sugar use, the other by cocaine use. About 56,000 people have pledged to go sugar-free for 10 days as part of the film’s “Fed Up Challenge,” and the film’s website offers a variety of sobering facts (“Kids watch an average of 4,000 food-related ads every year”; “More than 9 million adolescents … are considered overweight”).
Online: Multiple news outlets, including the BBC, CBS and The Washington Post, seized on a recent study by the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health that suggested one way of curbing sugary drink consumption would be to require a sign with a different style of warning label.
The signs, posted in corner stores located in low-income neighborhoods in Baltimore, advised patrons that they’d need to run 50 minutes or walk five miles to burn the 250 calories they were about to take in via sugary soda or fruit juice. Forty percent of the teenagers interviewed who’d seen the signs said they bought something else instead.
Satire: More than 3 million YouTube viewers have seen comedian John Oliver’s take on the subject presented via his HBO series, “Last Week Tonight,” since the clip went online Oct. 26. In addition to showing video of a rat whose sugar-addled brain nearly led to it drowning in a lab experiment, Oliver proposed manufacturers be required to include one picture of a circus peanut — “the most disgusting of all the candies,” he said — on their packages for every 5 grams of sugar inside.
