Do you know how much sugar you’re eating and drinking?

The true amount may surprise you. Sugar is sprinkled throughout our diets–not only in obvious foods, such as soda and desserts, but in many other surprising ones.

Ketchup, bread, lunch meats, even “healthy” fruit juices, all often include some type of sugar.

Orange juice, for example, can contain nearly twice the amount of sugar recommended in a daily diet in a single glass—making it more dessert than health drink.

Too much sugar can contribute to health problems common among Home Care Aides, such as diabetes and obesity, says Allison Hansell, health and safety program lead for SEIU 775 Benefits Group.

The Benefits Group launched “Shake the Sugar” in November, a pilot program designed to promote better habits around this sweet substance. Hansell says they are working on rolling out the full program based on the pilot results within a year.

Home Care Aides volunteered to eliminate a minimum of one sugary drink a day from their diets–many took that a step further and cut out more. “It’s something that everyone struggles with. We didn’t want to demonize sugar–just to have people learn more about it and have less of it,” Hansell says.

Based on guidelines from the World Health Organization, the Shake the Sugar program suggests limiting sugar to 7 teaspoons a day. There’s a lot more than that in many common drinks.

For example, 16 ounces of orange juice (one glass) has 12 teaspoons of sugar, 20 ounces of sports drink (one bottle) has 9 teaspoons. A 20-ounce Starbucks Frappuccino contains 16 teaspoons of sugar.

“We are hoping it will inspire small changes that will add up over time–it’s really intended for behavior change,” Hansell says. “You shouldn’t deprive yourself, just be mindful of what you’re eating.”

Home Care Aide Gina Denton with her mother and client Sandra Denton. (Photo by Paul Joseph Brown)

Gina Denton thought she had her sugar problem licked–as a person with diabetes, she has attended nutrition classes in the past and knows that sugary drinks, such as soda, are a big no-no for her.

“I am a big water drinker already, so I thought I couldn’t really be getting too many grams of sugar daily–but never actually tracked it.”

She found out how much daily sugar she was actually having when she joined the Shake the Sugar challenge in November, which asked participants to keep track of their daily drinking habits. Denton’s biggest surprise sugar culprit? Coffee.

“I like mine sweet and creamy. I was buying the flavored coffee creamers; I was amazed to discover that I was easily having three times the amount of grams of sugar recommended per day, just in my coffee! I had never bothered to actually look at the info until I joined the challenge.”

Cutting that daily creamer habit, along with her occasional “treat” soda, was the hardest part of Shake the Sugar for Denton.

Sports Drink
21 g sugar / 12 fl oz

Coconut Water
30 g / 16 fl oz

Orange Juice
42 grams sugar / 16 fl oz

Soda
41 g sugar / 12 fl oz

Frappuccino
45 g sugar / 12 fl oz

Flavored Tea
50 g sugar / 16 fl oz

But it was worth it. Denton says she realized “how much of a difference reducing sugar from just my drinks can improve my health. I am back on track now and starting to lose weight because of it.”

“The biggest thing I learned is that whether it is cane sugar, fruit sugars or high fructose corn syrup, the accumulative grams count and must be tracked, because they are so easy to overlook!”

Shake the Sugar encouraged HCAs to replace sugary drinks with water, adding fruit to make it more flavorful.

That can be as simple as adding a lemon wedge or cucumber slices to plain or sparkling water.

Inspired by those suggestions, Denton went further, experimenting with infusing her water with a variety of fruits and making large pitchers of it each evening for her and her consumer to drink the next day.

“It is a dual win by cutting out sugar and having a measured water intake,” she says.

Shake the Sugar was a revelation for HCA Dawn Scott, who turned 50 this year and was surprised when she took a hard look at her drinks.

“When I sat down and figured out my sugar consumption for the day it was like five times over the [recommended] amount–that’s just in beverages.”

Like Gina Denton, Scott started her day with coffee and a heaping amount of sugary creamer. She might then have a sweet iced tea later on, and one to two sodas in the evening, before bed.

While Shake the Sugar challenged volunteers to start with cutting out just one sugary beverage a day from their diets, Scott went all in, reconsidering everything from her drink habits to the bag of fun-sized candies she reached for regularly.

It was difficult in the beginning. Scott reports getting massive headaches in the first few days of trimming her sugar habit.

“The first week was rough and you do have cravings; sugar is addictive like crack. If you give your body just a little bit of it, it hijacks your hormones and makes you ravishingly hungry.”

But the positive benefits kicked in shortly after: “It’s not just the weight loss–I sleep better, feel better and have more energy during the day.”

Those perks led Scott to extend the idea of Shake the Sugar to other parts of her diet. “It makes you really more mindful of other things. You start looking at processed meats, like lunch meat,” she says.

“Ketchup and tomato sauces, processed and canned, prepared foods. It is amazing. You can eat one serving of pasta sauce and that will be your quota for the day of added sugars.”

She also started paying more attention to substitute sweeteners, such as sucralose (Splenda), saccharin (Sweet’N  Low) or aspartame (Equal), often used in diet sodas.

“You think you’re doing something good by [using] other sweeteners.” But, she explains, your body will burn sugar, including those sugar substitutes, before it begins to burn any fat.

“Without all the sugar my body uses what it’s supposed to for fuel.”

Shake the Sugar gave Scott a lifetime of tools for healthier eating. “It’s super interesting and once you start learning about [sugar], then you want to know what’s in everything you eat.”