This is how much sugar you are [possibly] eating.

I might advise not downing an entire pound-and-a-half jar of spaghetti sauce in one go.

Stay away from me and my Prego Traditional chug jug.
- gf is prego
  
  we like to get kinky anyways
  
  one night things get particularly saucy
  
  i'm sticking my noodle in her when I notice weird fucking chunks coming out, so I turn on the lights
  
  wtf it's red everywhere and she's obviously not on her period
  
  i look up at her, she's got a glassy, jarred look on her face and she's not answering
  
  ohshitohshitohshitohshit
  
  i rush her into my car and speed all the way to the hospital
  
  she's still bleeding everywhere
  
  by the time we get there, she's not bleeding much anymore, but all the color has drained and she looks colorless and almost transparent
  
  oh shit, she looks like she's in a vegetative state
  
  storm into to the emergency room, cary her to the nearest doctor and explain eveything
  
  he takes one look at ther and says
  
  "sir, i'm sorry, there's nothing we can do"
  
  "WHY THE FUCK NOT???"
  
  "we don't operate on empty jars of spaghetti sauce"
- Leggo my prego?
Maybe it's saying instead of eating yogurt just slam 1.5 lbs of tomato sauce instead?
Now you tell me.
Come on now, spaghetti always begs for excessive consumption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cLAq01y9qU
The actual spaghetti you add it to has an even higher percentage of carbohydrates - in the form of starch which the human body easily turns into sugars - than the sauce so paradoxically you'll end up with less sugar in your blood stream by downing that sauce by itself than if you eat it with spaghetti.

(That said, this is for uncooked spaghetti: when you cook it it grows by absorbing water which reduces the fraction of carbohydrates in the final product, so depending on the type of spaghetti it might or not end up with more carbohydrates than the sauce).
?
I tried it once and vomited on my sweater
- But did you remember your notes after?
- Was it mom's?

Have I lost track of what memes are? Or is it the children who are wrong?

Yeah, you've probably grown accustomed to most memes using high fructose corn syrup which is clear and easier to hide.
Meme = a picture with some text
- Remember when those were called image macros?
- An element of culture which is passed on through society through non-genetic means.
- We need more child abuse

To be fair, if you make pasta sauce from scratch you're going to be using a fair amount of sugar to balance the acidity of your tomatoes, so I don't find pasta sauce a useful demonstration.

But you're still making a good point. Once you start making stuff yourself, you really see what isn't required.

I have never put any sugar in my from scratch sauce. But that's probably why I don't like jar sauce.
- You get it from different sources. Breakdown of onions and as someone else mentioned, carrots. Balsamic vinegar has some. There's other sources as well, I'm just blanking on them.
  
  But agreed, I rarely add actual plain sugar to my pasta sauces.
- Carrots?
- I can’t imagine putting sugar in my sauce. The sweetness comes from hour four of San Marzano tomatoes simmering in an enameled Dutch oven.
If you let the sauce simmer for long enough, 4-5 hours, or pressure cook it the starches of the tomatoes will break down and you won't need to add sugar. The acidity will also go down the longer it's simmered too.
- Starch in tomatoes? 🤔
Add me to the team that at least almost never adds sugar to any pasta sauce. In very rare occasions, I might add a tiny bit of honey, but I can't remember the last time I did that.
- And honey is sugar.
  
  The difference between it and table sugar is negligible from a glycemic response perspective.
My pasta sauce doesn't have any sugar in it, but it does have tomatoes, browned onions and wine, all of which contain natural sugar.
I have literally never once added a single granule of sugar to a pasta sauce. Heat and time on the stove are the only 2 things required to balance tomato acidity, and even this can be cheated with tomato paste. If you are putting sugar in pasta sauce, you don't now how to cook pasta sauce. It's shocking that your comment has upvotes...
the amount of sugar i put in my from scratch sauce doesnt compare to what usually comes with these premade satchets
If you can grow your own tomatoes, give Amish Paste Heirlooms a try.

They grow small, but a single plant can produce hundreds of low acidity balanced tomato fruits that are perfect for pasta sauce.
- Ooh, thanks, that sounds Intriguiging! Will try them next cycle (I have a couple small hydroponic setups).
People really need to find better tomatoes. Onions are all that's needed to balance the acidity, really.

Shout-out to Rao's for actually not having a whole lot of sugar and being genuinely one of the best pasta sauces you can get in a jar. Add a little Tabasco sauce and red wine and let that simmer for an hour or so and it's perfection.

Decently priced at the bulk shops too.

Fage is definitely my favorite yogurt. I'm always like "how the fuck is this so God damn good? It has virtually no sugar or anything added"

Also in case you didnt know, for many reduced fat items they just end up adding more sugar.

Fage 2% with some low sodium mixed nuts and low sugar dried cranberries is one of my favorite breakfasts these days. No joke.
I love fage, mixed with some roughly chopped cherries is so good. I've switched to making my own yogurt recently but the original starter I used was fage and it hasn't let me down
It's good because fat tastes good too.

This is why I make my pasta sauce from scratch. Plus it tastes way better letting the natural sugars in the tomato get all roasty toasty.

I don't even get why sugar is added. Tomato sauce is already sweet on its own.

My wife and I like to get a local brand because it's honestly the best I've ever had. Each serving (3oz, 85g) is 15 calories.
- Removes acidic flavours
- It sorta depends on the ingredients you're working with, some tomatoes are sweeter or more acidic than others. Where I live tomatoes tend to be somewhat watery and lack a bit of intensity of flavour. If I'm making sauce at home I'll taste a bit and add some sugar and/or red wine vinegar to balance out the flavour.
Not only it tastes better every time, the flavors in the homemade sauce are way more pronounced than the ones that are supposed to be in the bought one
It honestly isn't that card to take a can of diced tomatoes and throw it on the frying pan, add some garlic, olive oil, salt, and herbs of your choosing, reduce to a suitable volume, good to go. I'm surprised more people don't do that.

Feel free to share your recipe though, I'd be curious how others do it
- even just a heap of "Italian seasoning" thrown in there makes a passable sauce. A can of crushed tomatoes and a can of tomato paste and a handful of Italian seasoning (with salt to taste) and you've got a decent college-kid budget sauce.

I love how none of these comments account for fiber, something you won't get from granulated sugar but which you will absolutely get from any actual fruit, which at least one of these yogurts actually references in its label.

Fiber is not only good for you on its own for your gut health but will slow the rate of absorption of sugars, preventing sugar crashes and allowing your body to make use of the carbohydrates over time. It affects the glycemic index and is why real whole wheat/grain bread doesn't give you a sugar crash.

Source: The ability to read and the knowledge of the existence of diabetes

I have a few pizza dough recipies specifically tailored around carb:fiber ratios for those reasons. Next step is better ingredients because currently I can make up to 6:1 but it doesn't really taste right until about 8:1. Hand picking the flours I used instead of on hand ingredients and whats avaliable at typical grocers should help me progress it.
- This is the way
I love how none of these comments account for fiber, something you won’t get from granulated sugar but which you will absolutely get from any actual fruit, which at least one of these yogurts actually references in its label.

It's definitely true that eating fruit is a very healthy way to consume sugar. But the amount of actual fruit in those fruit yogurts is pitifully small. Advertising aside, it's not like eating an fresh piece of fruit; and it is not why the yogurt has so much sugar it in.
- Modern fruit isn't especially healthy:
  
  At the Melbourne Zoo, the monkeys are no longer allowed to eat bananas. And the pandas are getting pellets instead of plums. In fact, fruit has been phased out completely. That's because the fruit that humans have selectively bred over the years has become so full of sugar the zoo's fruitarian animals were becoming obese and losing teeth. -source
Which brand would that be? It sure isn't the Yoplait or Chobani. The sugar content in those is mostly added in with HFCS.

Instead of sweet cereals, I switched to plain cereals and then add packets of sugar. Yes, it costs more for sugar packets than a bag of sugar, but I would end up rounding over a spoonful.

Anyway, each sugar packet is 2.5 g. At 3 packets, on a bad day when I'm eating my frustration, that's way plenty. And that's only 7.5 g of sugar. The sweet cereals have at least 20 extra g of sugar. Yikes!

That seems about right for sugar contents for such foods, especially since the yogurts have berries in them. I dont quite get what point is getting made, most fruits and berries have a good bit of sugar in them. There isnt anything inately bad about sugar, maybe when its high fructose corn zyrup but thats kinda its own thing. Also tomatoes are a berry.

There isnt anything inately bad about sugar

Well in moderation sugar isn't too bad. The problem comes when food manufacturers start adding sugar to foods so it will taste better and if you are not paying attention to the content you can consume a significant amount in a day.

In conclusion, very little scientific evidence exists that indicates a benefit of added dietary sugars; however, an overwhelming and growing body of evidence highlights the negative effects of excessive or prolonged sugar intake
- Fair enough, though I was mostly commenting on the above meme. The sugar content seems about right for everything involved, maybe on the higher end but not by a massive amount.
  
  Also added sugar is usually in an ideal situation would be for preservative and manufacturing reasons. But then again I dont actually get cooking as a whole, I can cook meat and thats about it.
Berries like raspberries blackberries blueberries and even strawberries don't have lots of sugar, maybe 5g per 100g. That's one level teaspoon.

The lactose in milk is almost all consumed in the fermentation process, so maybe a few more grams per 100.

The rest of the sugar in those glasses is just sugar manufacturers include to make their product more appealing.

One of the problems with sugar is that it represents empty calories.

Given my age, weight, and activity levels maybe I need x calories per day, any more and I'll gain weight. I also need protein and fibre and micronutrients. As you get older (like me) you get less good at extracting nutrients.

The challenge is, getting enough nutrients in few enough calories to avoid gaining weight.

In this context sugar is just dead weight.
The intrinsic sugar in fresh berries with fiber are different than free sugars. Excess sugar is problematic for several reasons, chiefly chronic metabolic and cardiovascular diseases [1]. The more well known among them is insulin resistance. Insulin is an essential hormone for metabolism; without insulin you die (as in the case of type 1 diabetes). The pancreas pumps insulin to get the cells to absorb blood sugar, but if cells don't respond to the insulin properly ("resistant"), the pancreas keep pumping insulin and eventually cannot keep up resulting in high blood sugar that damages your body [2]. That's why one should avoid spiking blood sugar. Like many physiological systems sugar triggers a homeostatic response, so the body "expects" a level of sugar consumption once it gets used to it. This is also why artificial sweeteners are problematic: they don't reduce the dependency on sugar and moreover they disrupt the blood-sugar response whereby you don't get the same satiety from carbohydrates, etc. [3]. But it's not all doom and gloom, exercise increases your insulin sensitivity and reducing your sugar intake will almost always result in weight loss [2]. Reducing sugar intake also reduces your sugar dependency but can take a few months.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10074550/

Interview with Prof. Jim Mann https://www.foodweneedtotalk.com/episodes/s02e22

Interview with Prof. Jotham Suez https://www.foodweneedtotalk.com/episodes/s4e1

These companies want to load every packaged food with sugar. They need to be regulated.

It's not necessarily the companies in this case at least not for the tomato sauce.

It's deceiving how much sugar is also in natural, unprocessed and healthy foods.

According to Google there's about 2.6g of sugar in a 100g tomato, and it takes roughly 2200g of tomato's to make a jar of sauce the size of a 680g jar of ragu, which according to their nutritional facts has about 43g of sugar in the jar, whereas the raw tomato's themselves would have contained about 56g of sugar.

It takes a lot of tomatos to make pasta sauce. Even a little sugar in one tomato adds up quick.
They are regulated - their nutrition label tells you exactly how much added sugars there are. You can't really regulate how much sugar can be in "sauce" before it's no longer considered a sauce (like subways bread being legally cake) because sauce is incredibly broad and already includes dessert sauces anyway.
- Candy is incredibly broad, make them call it that when it's over a threshold percentage.

If you eat Siggis yogurt, there is a full-fat option with barely any sugar that is way, way, better. I don't typically like yogurt, but like it. Add honey if needed.

I happen to be eating it right now.

And don't forget bread. So much sugar in the US..

Subway bread is considered cake in Ireland.
- I think some years back there was a lawsuit in New York about whether it should be classified as cake
The oats and honey you add makes up for the lower carb count.
I was going to say there's a lot of variation within brands.

Most yoghurts have a "greek" variant with about 5g per 100g carbohydrates.

Honey is more or less flavoured sugar IMO.

Berries are a great combo with yoghurt, also chopped nuts.
You can make yogurt in an instantpot with very little work (heat up milk, leave on the yogurt setting for 8-12 hours, done) in about 12 hours, highly recommend it. Only ingredients are milk and yogurt with live cultures (which you can buy once, then just freeze a few oz of your homemade yogurt to use for making more yogurt in the future), you can add as much or little sugar, honey, etc as you want. To make it into Greek yogurt or cheese, just strain through cheesecloth for different amounts of time. Can even use the drained whey for protein shakes if that's your thing.
- Kefir is also an option. It incubates at room temperature. Just need a scoby, container and milk.

This is why I make my own fresh tomato sauce. A single pound/half kilo of ripe tomatoes and about 15 minutes, you can have a fresh pasta sauce at home.

Them little old Italian Grandmothers ain't wasting all day to slow cook a tomato sauce. Unless they want to show off. They got lemoncello to make and drink.......

Tomatoes are about 95% water, 1% fibre, and 4% other carbs (sugars and starches). Even with no added sugar, any tomato sauce is basically all carbs and sugar (if you ignore the water).

Even though we think of tomatoes as a vegetable they’re actually a fruit. Eating a whole bunch of tomato sauce is not much different from eating a bunch of pureed strawberries. Tomatoes just don’t taste as sweet as the strawberries because because they’re more acidic.
- Yes that's true. But that's a very good reason to not add more.
If you want a sauce that adds a lot to anything you put it on, I recommend Alton Brown's tomato sauce, adding a decent amount of fresh basil to the recipe if it's in season near you makes it even better but isn't necessary https://altonbrown.com/recipes/pantry-friendly-tomato-sauce/

It's more work than just cooking down tomatoes, but it's so worth it. I do double, triple, or quadruple batches and freeze it in 32 oz mason jars. Great on eggs, pizza, pasta, base for soups, burgers, and anything else you want tomato flavor added to really
- I did that once and while it was great it took forever to process the tomatoes. Now I just brown some onions in a pan, deglaze with some wine, and dump the tomatoes in and simmer them while I work on the pasta. Way fewer dishes, too.
  
  I don't have any basil or oregano in my garden (yet) but the amount I get at the store is enough for five or six jars of sauce. So I portion out the rest and then wrap them in plastic wrap and store it in my freezer. That way as long as I've got tomatoes, onions, and garlic I can make sauce.
- Been there made that. The flavors are dulled a noticeable amount compared to a sauce made with fresh ripe tomatoes.

stares in European

I've heard of one of those brands but have never tried it myself (Chobani) and who impregnated the tomato sauce? 🤨

Yoplait is actually French.
- Fair. Still not available in my particular part of Europe, though.
  
  Here in Denmark we have so many domestic variants of yoghurt (big dairy producer per capita) that most grocery stores simply don't have room for/incentive to offer any imported ones, except for Greek yoghurt for the purists 😄
  
  In fact, there's a great Scandinavia and the World comic about how much we love yoghurt 😁
Eh preggo tomato sauce!

I wouldn't recommend consuming an entire jar of pasta sauce regardless of sugar content, it's just not economical.

I mean a jar can be as cheap as $2 -$3 if you're having that as a meal I'd argue it's pretty economical
- Not when you factor in the money spent on toilet paper needed to clean up the nasty shits you'll get from chugging a jar of tomato sauce.
  
  Edit: Not to mention how many meals you could have gotten out of it by eating it on pasta. $5 bucks can get you 5 meals, your way you gotta spend $15 for 5 meals and you don't get any pasta.
Challenge accepted
- SKULL SKULL SKULL SKULL!

If you use canned pasta sauce instead of making your own: screw these brands. Newman's Own is way better than all of these and is often cheaper. Bonus: 0 added sugar.

Sugar in many products such as yogurt is not very useful and just added for flavor. In pasta sauce though, the sugar is added in order to cut the acidity. No one buys pasta sauce for its sweetness.
- It's also fairly little for the size of jar.

Kinda misrepresentative using granulated sugar. Not all sugar is the same, nor does it have the same effect in your body.

Added sugar will be granulated sugar (or worse)
- Most added sugars are going to be HFCS these days. But also, that's under the assumption of added sugars, which the image doesn't make any specifications about; a lot of ingredients used in pasta sauces, for example, are going to have natural sugars already.
  
  I just take issue with the misleading image, which would have you believe that a cup of Yoplait is 45% sugar, even though you can read the label and do the math, yourself. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lot of sugar, but not "nearly half the product" levels.
Sugar is sugar, there's a lot of marketing trying to make it sound like it's not true. There is no good sugar, there is only less bad sugar. High fructose corn syrup is probably the worst, but honey is just liquid sugar.

Interesting, Rao's became my favorite brand of jar sauce once I tried them. I wonder if the difference is mostly the sugar content. Expensive though.

Damn, that's a lot!

takes another swig of Prego

Both yogurt and pasta sauce are extremely easy to make from scratch, and sugar doesn't belong as an ingredient in either. Yogurt literally makes itself. Stop buying processed foods that are designed by teams of people to be addictive?

Anything that exceeds the difficulty of a assembling a sandwich or put something on and off a grill, is something I'm gonna leave to the pros.
- I love a biscuit breakfast Sammy. I can buy one for 3 bucks, or spend 20 dollars and 2 hours making a less good one
- If you are capable of operating a motor vehicle to drive to buy sandwich ingredients or safely lighting a grill, then you're just being lazy.
A bit of brown sugar really helps bring a red sauce together and yogurt is good sweet or savory (granted I like my sweet yogurt to just be sweetened with fruit and no pure sugar added but that's a preference thing)

As per usual in my responses to comments like this, just because it is easy for you to make these things doesn't mean it is easy or practical for everyone to. From scratch takes longer, requires more knowledge which takes time to acquire, makes more dishes, requires more types of equipment, and in the case of yogurt can be a safety thing

It is on the companies making these products to do better not on the individual seeking to make a part of their life easier
- It is on the companies making these products to do better not on the individual
  
  I mean, it's literally not... What will make or pressure the companies to do "better"? If the answer to that question is something that does not exist or is not happening in real life, then no, it's genuinely not on the companies, you just wish it was.
  
  Reminder: grocery stores and industrial processed food are a very recent invention
Fruit yoghurt is pretty much yoghurt with fruit jam added, so it ends up with quite a lot more sugar than the natural stuff which has no added sugar, so ever since I've had to start watching out for my sugar intake I've started only eating the natural one and adding cinnamon or vanilla extract for flavour.

It's amazing how after a while of cutting sugars from your food you get used to it, don't feel the need for it anymore and even start finding the most sugary stuff (like certain kinds of sweets) unpleasantly sweet.
- Buy a yoghurt maker. You add milk, 5% of already existing yoghurt and whole fruit (berries are best). Leave overnight and now you have yoghurt with fruit and no added sugar. The fruits are whole so they have fiber and any natural sugar in them isnt going straight to your blood now.
sugar doesn't belong as an ingredient in either

Ya says who? Almost all sauces are made with a little sugar. It helps cut the acidity.

You don’t need to add a ton but to say you NEVER add sugar to sauce is ignorant.
- Heat and time on the stove are the only 2 ingredients required to balance tomato acidity, not sugar.

Explains part of the reason why Rao's tastes better than those other brands. I wish it had no sugar though.

I don't think you can make tomato sauce without any sugar.... Tomatoes have a fair amount.

Which kind of begs the question is this added sugar or?

(Please god stop adding sugar to your red sauces people. Fruits/vegetables bring their own)
- One of them does say no added sugar
- People will lose their mind when they learn that vegetables have sugar.
  
  As long as the sugar isn't separated from the fibers, that's fine.
It's pretty common to add a bit of sugar to tomato sauce tho.
- Like a teaspoon or less. That looks like more. But someone else mentioned that this could be the sugar content from the tomatoes, which is okay.
Rao's actually has the appropriate amount of sugar. That's very little per serving.

This is why I started making a lot of my own things. There are lots of options in the store for some items where you can get something without sugar that didn't need it. But then there's things like mayonnaise... Let me tell you that mayonnaise doesn't need any sugar and most brands that don't have sugar are like $11 for an 8oz jar. So I started making it myself at home. I also started making bread which later turned into a hobby, but now I can't eat the store bread because it's too sweet. I even make my own jam now and I know what you're gonna say "but jam is like... mostly sugar", but I'll have you know that jam tastes WAY better with half the sugar that it's typically made with. It's an art form to get it thick without adding more sugar, but it's worth it. Looking back, I know most people can't make all this shit and it's really sad that people can't buy things with less sugar at the store without paying an arm and a leg. It really says a lot about our society that this is true.

I made blackberry jam for the first time this year. I saw the suggested sugar to put in and was blown away, used 1/3 of that, it's still quite sweet
Diy is a lifestyle

Is that added sugar, or sugar from the other ingredients?

The Ragu one has 0g added sugar, so for that one it's just the tomato sugar, so it's misleading.
It doesn't ultimately matter, but it looks like total sugar. I don't believe fage has added sugar, but it has some left from the milk.
- But it does matter a great deal. The sugars innately in most fruits usually have a low glycemic index, so generally aren't really that bad for you.
  
  So presenting granulated sugar to represent the innate sugars in a tomato is misleading.
When you juice it, the natural sugar has the same effect as added sugar.

It's only better when it's locked in with the fruit solids because then it's a slow release rather than a fast sugar shock to your system, which can fuck with your insulin tolerance because that also needs to spike for your body to do anything with all that sugar.
The “other” ingredients is tomato puree, salt, and herbs like oregano. There isn’t any sugar except the processed sugar that they add to the sauce.

Tomato sauce is surprisingly easy to make. There’s virtually no need to buy sauce from a jar unless you just can’t be bothered to do anything yourself.
- Tomatoes have plenty of sugar in them… most fruits do.
- Or you have a busy life?
  
  I hate this mindset of, if you don't make all these things yourself you just can't be bothered to do anything yourself. Guy, I have a super busy day to day, I'm struggling to find time to work out every day, I'm not making all my food from scratch.
- Tomato puree has a lot of sugar, because tomatoes contain a lot of sugar. Pure 3-times concentrated tomato puree is 18% sugar.
- For example, the Ragu 'Simply' is only your "other ingredients". The only sugar in that sauce is innate to the Tomatoes used in the puree.
  
  Sugars exist in all sorts of foods and when it's incidental to the fruit and/or vegetable content it's mostly fine.

Pretty much any fruit flavoured food that is not artificial will contain sugar from the fruit juice. But most companies add sugar anyway.

What is this referring to Natural sugar or added sugar? Normally the yoghurt doesn't have added sugars beyond what were presswnt are in the milk originally.

For sauces you can easily read the labels and find which ones contain added sugar, at least in europ it's mandatory listing that.

It's added sugar - and yoplait/chobani add a lot of sugar. Yogurt with no added sugar has no more sugar than the milk used to make it does and it is mouth-puckeringly tangy. I make my own yogurt and you pretty much need honey with it to make it palatable with fruit (some people eat unsweetened yogurt without the honey... Those people scare me)
- I de-sweetened my palate over time. I don't add any sweetener to my yogurt (made in an Instant Pot) . That said, I ferment it for 8 hours because I don't want it too tart. It's perfect for raita or tzaziki. For breakfast uses, I add cheap vanilla flavoring with fresh fruit. Not scary at all!
- Greek yoghurt (first picture) tastes fine with out added sugar but only the normal fat one 5%, if you remove fat then yes you need to add something..
Yoplait and Chobani definitely have extra added sugar.

Hmm that's super interesting.

Pretty bold to assume I'm not a hunter gatherer

You're perfectly right. And it's not just about energy, which there is a lot of in oils and proteins too. In nature, the sweetest things you'll get are different kinds of fruit - all packed full of vitamins, antioxidants, fiber and whatnot. And they're seasonal, so if you don't eat them right away, you're going to have to wait another year. So our taste makes us eat as much as we can. Sugar, of cours, is cheating.

(I just happen to be on my way to buy some pastries.)

The sweetest thing in nature is honey, nearly pure sugar that doesn't spoil. Honey tends to be available year round in Africa where our taste buds evolved.
- And with medicinal properties ;) A bit tricky to get though.

Did you use the calories or the grams of sugar to determine the amount?

i guarantee im not eating any of that sugar

Check out how much sugar they put into frozen pizza. It's basically a sweet.

Always check the labels for the ingredient list. The order of ingredients corresponds to how much of each ingredient there is.

When your "diet yogurt" has more sugar than milk ingredients, its not diet yogurt.

Oh that's why yoplait is so fucking good

Oh yeah - I've had to start watching my carbohydrate intake for health reasons and it's amazing just how much of that stuff is in processed food: for example "American Style Onion Rings (frozen)" from Lidl is over 40% carbohydrates - so basically the 450g pack of it has 180g of sugars and the kind of stuff your digestive system will turn into sugars.

One would think it would be only starchy foods (like bread, pasta, rice and such) and cakes and sweets that have lots of it, but no, most processed food is loaded with carbohydrates, often already directly as sugars, probably because the cheapest ingredient to bulk it up is flour.

Mind you, lots of natural or lightly processed foods have quite a bit of it - for example natural yoghurt with nothing added has maybe 6% of carbohydrates (tough yoghurt with fruit is way worse, since the adding of fruit is generally mixing it with fruit jam which has a lot of sugar) and most fruits have quite a bit of sugar (for example, common varieties of apple have about 14% of sugar - so your run of the mill apple comes with 1 spoonful of sugar included - and some varieties have a lot more) which is why there's this funny paradox that natural fruit juice has a lot more sugar in it than the same amount of Coca-Cola (since when you make the fruit juice you throw away the fiber and most of the protein leaving a much higher percentage of sugar than originally).

Generally, the kind of stuff that has almost no carbohydrates are veggies, like lettuce or broccoli.

It's great that you found a diet that helps with your health and works for you!

You probably know this anyway and most likely implied it, but I just want to stress that carbohydrates per se are not bad. Yes, eventually everything is being broken down to sugar, but you should not reduce carbohydrates to this function only. Oats are mostly carbohydrates, but they are whole grain with a lot of fiber and are a great source for iron (if not eaten with dairy). Their GI is in the 50s but you would have to take the whole dish into account, as rarely you'll just sit there munching oats like a horse. Buckwheat and quinoa are often praised for their high protein content (and it's true, they have like 10-12g of protein per 100g) but they still consist mostly of carbohydrates. A slow breakdown of complex carbohydrates gives you long term energy without raising blood sugars too much.
- Yeah, it it makes a massive difference the GI index of the sugars in the food one eats, so for example it's a lot better to consume pulses (like chickpeas) than it is pasta, since the latter is pretty much just starch and (after cooked) water whilst the former is a far more complex food with also lots of protein and fiber (only talking about macronutrients here).
  
  Mind you, this diet of mine is not because of overweight, it's to keep Type II Diabetes under control with as little insulin as possible and to get it into remission (so far, it has worked very well having reduced the need of insuline by about 80%), so it's based on studies that have been done on this and is much more tightly controlled with regular checking of blood sugar levels.
  
  But yeah, a lot of it is to reduce the intake of low GI sugars (I used to be a big consumer of bread, for example, since I live in a country with really good bread, and that stuff is for special occasions only nowadays), which means quite a lot of cuting down on carbohydrates consumption but also means replacing some with better sugars (so, say, pulse or peas instead of potatoes or pasta)
  
  Mind you, part of the problem is that my work is sitting down in front of a computer, so even with regular exercise I simply need a lot less sugars than I used to eat - if was naturally more physically active in most days beyond the whole walk to work and back thing and two 10km runs a week, cutting down so much on carbohydrate-rich foods would've been a bad thing.
  
  Still, its pretty amazing by comparison just how much excess of sugars there was in my diet previously and that was even with some care with what I ate and quite a lot of sweets avoidance.
Meat and cheese has no sugar/very low sugar too.
- Yeah, but they have a lot of calories via fat (especially cheese) and what I've seen in my own diet (which includes regular checking of blood sugar levels), if I eat more of it (again, especially cheese) the sugar levels in the blood go up all else being the same.
  
  Don't ask me the exact details of how the human body does that, I'm not a specialist and this is just what I observe happens if start eating more cheese.
  
  Which is a shame, 'cause I love cheese :(

Always spend the extra buck or two for the better sauces. Actually I've started making a mean meat sauce as I found a fantastic place to get red bell peppers (for a dollar more but huge difference); their sweetmess easily offsets the acidity of the tomatoes (although better sauces use better tomatoes or cook longer). Also don't overcook your garlic, it's sweetest when it's less cooked.

This is good advice. And also carrots.
Just make your own sauce. It’s super easy especially for someone who is open to cooking.

Damn and I think my sauce is too sweet if I even add a whole tablespoon.

I really need to quit chugging ragu... That's so much sugar.

Oh, I didn't know there was a reduced sugar Ragu.

And yet somehow still with a lot of sugar.
- No added sugar doesn't mean no sugar. Ripe fruits like tomatoes and peppers contain more than trace amounts of sugar.
- A cup of pure tomato paste has 32g of sugar, since tomatoes are fruits that contain sugar. It doesn't look like that sauce has any added sugar at all based on the ingredients, but it does have carrots, which are also high in sugar (for a vegetable)
- I know it’s a huge shock to you but yes tomatoes have NATURAL sugar in them.
  
  Veggies have sugar too. Mind blowing right?

Make your own yogurt! It's the best

I've never done that, but I've made cheese out of yogurt by putting it in cheesecloth and letting all the liquid drain out of it over a day or so. Mix it with some chives and it's amazing on crackers.
- Making your own everything isn't feasible for most people, but if you are at home more than not it's doable. My 4 siblings and I grew up with a mother that insisted that we make bread, pasta, and everything else from scratch. Thankfully we had an automatic bread maker, and waking up to a fresh baked ¼ or ½ loaf of bread, daily, is amazing. The pasta maker wasn't as fun, but it wasn't the work that we went through at Grandma's house, with her manual pasta maker.
  
  We all are relatively tall and skinny, though we all have some form of a "beer belly, love handles, etc." I can tell you from experience that the other kids knew we were getting "the good stuff," even though it was all healthy food. Apparently this saved them a lot of money when all three of us boys joined the swim team, and they had absolutely ravenous ~~locusts~~ swimmers in the house for a total of a decade.
  
  It also led me to being able to get jobs as a line cook, and eventually a chef, when I needed a second or third job.
  
  Edit: sorry, my point was that this is an excellent way to limit the added artificial sugars in all your food, and it will help create healthy eating habits that stick with your kids, even if they have to eat cheap junk for a few years.

Right, bad healthcare => no pressure to make people' lives healthier. I guess that's why you still don't have a less sugar novement?

There is a bit of a grass roots one, but part of the problem is that it's entirely on the consumption side, as in people deciding to have less sugar. Even proposed legislation solutions involve controlling the consumption side, though at the final product production level.

Which means that sugar producers are still trying to produce the maximum amount of sugar to make the most profit and the lowered demand just ends up driving the price down and makes it more attractive to others to add more sugar. If that lower price is still profitable, then sugar producers can continue full steam ahead.

I've noticed something similar with plastics. Demand is lowered in some areas by legislation (like no plastic straws or single use bags), but plastic is still being produced at volume, so prices go down and other products switch from non-plastic packaging to plastic. I'll call out Betty Crocker homestyle instant mashed potatoes specifically here, that went from a cardboard box containing two paper/metal pouches to a single plastic pouch, which also means it's more of a pain to make only half the package and more likely to create more food waste in addition to plastic waste.
There's a bit of a sugar replacement movement, which isn't necessarily healthier. Most of the sugar replacements have been linked with stuff like dementia if consumed regularly for a long period. And most of them taste a bit off. The other part of the problem is that when you eat something sweet, your body expects sugar. When it doesn't get the sugar it's expecting, it will feel like you are still hungry even though you just ate something.

Cool ad?

Flavor aid

And this applies to salt as well to a lesser extent.

How do we break the habit?

Evolving back to not having this inborn acquired taste?

No but seriously, just sheer will and keeping an eye on what we eat. Buy raw ingredients and cook for yourself. Make high quality food with what you can afford. (Basic ingredients are cheaper anyway.)

Sugar is half bad, half good: the glucose part causes no harm and whole body can use it. The fructose part on otherhand is bad and has to/can only be processed by the liver first.

I always find it interesting that our ancestors were for the most part fruitarians (fruits, grasses) about 3.5 million years ago. As we evolved, we expanded our diets to include vegetables, meats, and grains, leading to a better balanced diet, which is good especially considering we don't hunt and gather like they once did.

as we evolved

In the last 12,000 years since the invention of agriculture? Barely. People, exactly like yourself, have been walking around for 250,000 years. This is all brand new.
- You can actually see genetic pressure away from adult lactose intolerance in populations where milk and cheese are historically consumed

I don't eat any of those. I definitely eat a lot of stuff that's bad for me, but I've been eating less on purpose and walking more with my dog. I've lost a lot of weight because of it

American issues

Pretty much any food you buy that comes from a box or a jar is going to be littered with sugar.

If you want to cut sugar out of your diet you need to start eating whole food that you prepare yourself.

Most people are too lazy for this so they scarf down processed foods that slowly kill them.

Everyone is going to die.

You can sit in the corner of a padded room and live off protein supplements to maximize your chances of staving off the inevitable by a few extra years, usually the worst ones anyway according to most that get there always volunteering "don't get old" safely existing, or you can live.

No wrong answers, it's a personal choice. Just know you're almost certainly filled with life shortening microplastics regardless of your decision.

Sure, but a change in behavior can make the latter half of those years a lot more enjoyable. I used to work with nurses and the stories they'd tell of 30/40 somethings living like invalids visiting dialysis clinics three to five times a week is heartbreaking.
- This. I've watched too many people I care about suffer horribly and die prematurely from largely preventable illnesses. My own health went to hell from some genetic predispositions until I worked out I could absolutely not tolerate a standard American diet. Obviously some people can get away with it more than others for longer. But that's not me. Found I wanted more life and a better quality of life. Fortunately I had the resources to change my diet and lifestyle. I realize that is a luxury not available to everyone.

Try making tomato sauce without sugar. Get back to me when you’ve tasted your horror.

This is ridiculous, I hardly ever make tomato sauce with (added) sugar and it tastes delicious. I suppose if you're used to sugar being in everything it may taste odd, but it is far from horrendous
- Nah, a small amount of sugar improves tomato sauce. It cuts the acidity.
If you can afford it, using good quality Italian tomatoes really make a difference.

I don't add any sugar in my sauce and it is pretty good and the acidity is at a good level.
- I only use Cento san marzanos as the base for my sauce. And i learned to make sauce from my italian grandfather. A small amount of sugar always improves the sauce.
- Do they contain more sugars by default perhaps?
- What makes a tomato from Italy better?
Counterpoint:

https://www.raos.com/products/marinara-sauce

**Ingredients: **Italian Whole Peeled Tomatoes, Olive Oil, Onions, Salt, Garlic, Basil, Black Pepper, Oregano.
I have done that, it's not bad, a bit bitter but still pleasant in my opinion.

Though I do like my coffee black so maybe I just have a liking of bitter tasting items.
Do recipes using stevia count?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10097272/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7600789/
- I’ve never tried stevia in tomato sauce. I’ll give it a try sometime. I’d worry about making it too sweet though since a lot of sweeteners are thousands of times sweeter than sugar.
- No.
Add cherry tomato while cooking pasta, season it, mix/mush, done.