Podcast
Lived for some time stern-Editor Alexandra Kraft with almost no sugar. How is she doing and what has changed for her as a runner – a field report.
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My record was just bad. That became very clear to me when I ate a Bircher muesli with cherries in the morning. After that, I had an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach. Heavy, crowded and grumpy. And the sweet taste in the mouth wouldn’t go away even after brushing your teeth. Pretty soon after that, I was hungry again. I was craving something to eat. Funny, I thought. Shouldn’t muesli fill you up for at least a few hours? Irritated, I fished the packaging out of the trash can. The 100 gram portion in the health food store cost almost four euros. “Tastes great, the best we have,” the cashier had given me on the way.
When I looked at the bottom, where the ingredients were hidden and in small print, then the shock. Of the 100 grams, 45 grams was sugar. The World Health Organization recommends a maximum of 25 grams per day for adults. Anything above that is harmful to health. With the two spoons of sugar that I had stirred into my tea as always, I had already consumed double the portion of the sweet crystal before I left the house in the morning. A real shock that made me think. Today, the excessive consumption of sugar is considered to be the main driver for the development of particularly unhealthy belly fat.
Even if you are not overweight you can live an unhealthy life
I’m not overweight, I run two, sometimes three times a week and cycle to work. I felt that this gave me the best possible protection against cardiovascular diseases or diabetes. But that was a mistake. I did the math in my head. A can of Coke every few days. In between a few toffifee, the sugar in the tea, a small chocolate pudding for dessert at lunch, gummy bears and so on. It really added up to something. I honestly had completely lost the feeling of how much sugar I was consuming each day. Open or hidden, every now and then. After my little extrapolation, it quickly became clear to me: clearly too much. Many in Germany are like me. On average, a person in this country eats 35 kilos of sugar per year.
Because it affects so many, we have joined forces in the new episode of our running podcast “She runs. He runs.” concerned with how regular and excessive consumption of the sweet substance makes us sick. My co-host Mike Kleiss was also addicted to sugar. “I even got up at night to get candy from the fridge,” he reports. We also share the fact that at some point we decided to dramatically reduce our sugar consumption. Mike tries to avoid it whenever possible. I’ve been avoiding it since now Almost three years of sugar mostly completely. How a life without sugar works and what the effect of doing without the mileage – you will find out that and much more in the new episode of the podcast.
