Most people eat way too much sugar. The Pew Research Center crunched USDA data and found that the average American eats more than 77 pounds of added sugar per year.
We’ll give you a second to pick your jaw up off the floor.
That breaks down to more than 90 grams of sugar per day, well above the 50-gram limit recommended by the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The good news is we’re eating slightly less sugar than before. Our collective sweet tooth peaked in 1999, when the average American ate more than 100 grams of sugar per day.
This report only looked at caloric sweeteners, so it doesn’t take into account the natural sugars you get from eating fruit and no-calorie sweeteners, such as aspartame, sucralose, and stevia. Americans could stand to eat more of the former and less of the latter.
Even without those factors taken into account, 77 pounds is enough to make us think twice about all the sugar we’re eating and where it may be hiding in our diets. Well, maybe after the holidays.
