Healthy Hams

A 12-year battle with cancer that started as colon cancer makes one a veteran in the eating wars. My wife does make sure we eat healthy .. lots of fish, chicken, limited amounts of red meat, veggies, salads, fruits. I've learned a lot from her about what to eat and what to avoid. It has paid off for both of us, but we did get a dietary shock this week!

We monitored the trans-fats, the fat grams, and the sodium in our foods. But we had not really paid much attention to the sugar. So even though we were diligent, we were still surprised.

One of our favorite cereals (that we thought was a healthy choice) came up in a magazine article as high in sugar. It turns out that this popular and well-regarded cereal (KASHI brand) had the equivalent of 3.25 teaspoons of sugar in a 1-cup serving! Well, that is a lot of sugar to take in at one sitting, so we started checking out other things in our daily diet.

One of our other favorite cereals is Raisin Bran. Seems safe enough, right? Well the box in the cupboard showed 24 grams of sugar in one-half cup - YIKES! Just to compare, we did a little math and came up with 4 grams of sugar equals 1 teaspoon. So a 1-cup bowl of this cereal was a whopping 12 teaspoons of sugar.

We decided we would go back to our winter staple of oatmeal for breakfast and try to save the sugar for desserts!

So for Healthy Hams all around, check out the sugar in your daily diet - may not be earth-shaking, but this is something we can control!

...AR