Healthy Ingredients
Liz’s easy tips for eating less sugar, as seen on This Morning
Looking to cut down and eat less sugar in the New Year? Cutting back is an easy wellness New Year resolution that every member of the family can join in with for overall better health.
Here, Liz shares some of her simple swaps to help you cut down on carbs and eat less sugar.
How to eat less sugar
Eat darker chocolate
Good news – you don’t have to give up chocolate! If you’re looking to eat less sugar, an easy swap is to replace your regular chocolate for dark chocolate.
Look for the highest cocoa percentage as this has less sugar and more of the gut-friendly polyphenols that naturally occur in cacao. Dark chocolate is actually really good for the good gut bugs that help keep our microbiome in good shape.
It’s important to check the labels. For example, Cadbury’s Bourneville says it’s ‘dark chocolate’ but actually only has 36% cocoa solids. This is less than Green & Blacks milk chocolate, which has 37%.
Liz loves the Green & Blacks 70% bar and Montezuma’s Absolute Black, which contains 100% pure cocoa. These are both strong-tasting chocolate bars. Liz recommends weaning your sweet tooth off sugary chocolate slowly. Gradually work your way up the cocoa percentage. For example, start with 37%, then look for 50%, 65% and so on.
Drink kombucha instead of cola drinks
Switching sugar-laden fizzy drinks for kombucha is an easy way swap to make. What’s more, it couldn’t be easier nowadays to enjoy this gut-friendly drink. You can even make your own kombucha at home, which is a super cheap and easy option.
Alternatively, there are lots of bottled and tinned kombucha drinks around these days (read about our favourites here) that are all very low in sugar, especially when compared to popular fizzy drinks. For example, a can of Coke typically contains 39g of sugar whereas a can of Remedy Raspberry Kombucha has 0g.
What’s more, kombucha also has probiotic properties so is better for our good gut bugs – a win-win!
Switch to stevia
Switching to a herbal sweetener, such as Stevia, is a super easy way to eat less sugar. Stevia is a plant that belongs to the chrysanthemum family, which grows in Paraguay and Brazil. It contains no fructose yet is 300 times sweeter than sugar.
It’s sometimes blended with a naturally occurring nectar known as erythritol (commonly found in pears, watermelons, grapes and other fermented products like wine, cheese and soy sauce). Both stevia and erythritol have been used as natural sweeteners in many parts of the world for hundreds of years.
You can find good stevia-based chocolate chip cookies – previously only eaten by diabetics, and the choice is growing as people steer away from sugar and move to a higher protein, keto way of eating. There are lots to choose from now, including these Diablo Sugar-free Cookies, along with this Diablo Chocolate Snack Bar.
While these options are great while you’re on the go, it’s cheaper to make your own treats at home. You can buy bags of Stevia online, in some supermarkets or health shops such as Holland & Barratt. Use stevia instead of sugar when it comes to baking biscuits and cakes – Liz finds the brown sugar versions tend to work best.
