Experts advise on whether or not you should ditch sugar from your diet.
Sian Butcher / Via BuzzFeed
Well, yes, it can be. But that depends a lot on where you're getting the sugar, and how much of it you're eating.
Too much sugar in your diet is associated with a host of health problems: weight gain, obesity, and associated diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiac heart disease, and cancer, says dietician Sharmain Davis. But that doesn't mean that eating any amount of sugar is going to cause these problems.
"There's no bad food, only a bad diet," says dietitian Gaynor Bussell. "So sugar is not necessarily bad if it's balanced with other good things in a food."
Sian Butcher / Via BuzzFeed
According to the NHS, no more than 10% of your daily intake of energy (measured as calories) should come from sugar. That means roughly 70g for men and 50g for women.
To put that into context, this is the amount of sugar some popular foods contain:
A small apple: 15g of sugar.
2 chocolate digestives: 9.2g of sugar.
A standard bar of 45g Dairy Milk chocolate: 25g of sugar.
2 slices of white toast: 2g of sugar.
2 slices of wholemeal toast: 1.6g of sugar.
A cheeky Nando's (half a chicken with a regular chips and coleslaw): 9.6g of sugar.