Red Sauce or Ketchup
Sugar is everywhere and in everything, especially in sauces and condiments, red sauce as it is known in the UK or rather ketchup has sugar added as an ingredient and is made of tomatoes which themselves are high in sugar.
It may come as a surprise that tomatoes are not a vegetable, rather they are classed as a fruit. Regardless of the definition, tomatoes are high in sugar and having concentrated tomato in your diet, adding to this problem.
Take the classic breakfast of bacon and eggs. This type of meal has been wrongly criticized by some due to their claims that the bacon is in some way carcinogenic and that the cholesterol in the eggs will give you a heart attack, neither of which being true.
Ironically though, we as Brits and possibly elsewhere then splodge ketchup onto the bacon and eggs, rendering what was good nutritionally into a high sugar meal.
We don’t seem to link things that appear on the table as condiments to being a part of our overall food intake and failing to see the sugar payload just adds to the problem of over consumption of sugar.
Not using ketchup, or red sauce as we call it or for that matter, its twin sister ‘brown sauce’, much the same as the red but its brown was a simple way for me to reduce my sugar intake. I have not missed it when overall I came off sugar.
But if you’ve got sugar elsewhere in your diet this may seem difficult, even daunting. I once thought it would be impossible to give up sugar but I have to say now that I wish I had done it sooner. I’ve heard and read about sugar being addictive. If this is true it would be a reason for people missing it when cutting down sugar but if not cutting it out completely. It has to be a case of all or nothing perhaps to make the process as easy as it can be.
Having given up smoking over 20 years ago now, I have to say that my experience giving up sugar did not come close to the withdrawal symptoms of nicotine which truly is addictive.
We have likely become overly familiar with some food products and give them a free pass into our diets as they have seemingly been there forever. Now is the time to challenge wrongly held assumptions and cut out what is bad for us.