I was explaining this to my daughter in quite simplified terms the other day- we evolved to taste sugar and enjoy it because finding a sweet edible plant meant we had a source of energy to help us hunt that day. Pretty useful if you’re a hunter-gatherer.
So we seek out sugar. Now we can get it whenever we want it, in much more massive quantities than we are supposed to be processing. Most of us are addicted. I’m not an exception.
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.
Pretty much any fruit flavoured food that is not artificial will contain sugar from the fruit juice. But most companies add sugar anyway.
Right, bad healthcare, no pressure to make people’ lives healthier. I guess that’s why you still don’t have a less sugar novement?
Check out how much sugar they put into frozen pizza. It’s basically a sweet.
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.
Is that added sugar, or sugar from the other ingredients?
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.
Tomato puree has a lot of sugar, because tomatoes contain a lot of sugar. Pure 3-times concentrated tomato puree is 18% sugar.
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 😁
Makes sense. The only reason I know Yoplait is because I live in a neighboring country and speak French.
Eh preggo tomato sauce!
I might advise not downing an entire pound-and-a-half jar of spaghetti sauce in one go.
Maybe it’s saying instead of eating yogurt just slam 1.5 lbs of tomato sauce instead?
Come on now, spaghetti always begs for excessive consumption.
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
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.
Explains part of the reason why Rao’s tastes better than those other brands. I wish it had no sugar though.
Try making tomato sauce without sugar. Get back to me when you’ve tasted your horror.
Add cherry tomato while cooking pasta, season it, mix/mush, done.
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.
After reading the other comments for a bit, it may depend on the tomatoes. The tomatoes I tend to use don’t need to balance out as much, I suppose
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.
They also taste disgusting.
I’d rather eat sugar or nothing at all over that shit.
I haven’t either, but I think it would work pretty well. The nice thing about stevia is that there are different products to buy with different levels of sweetness. I always put a stronger stevia extract in my tea at home that I get from Amazon because the stevia packets they have in restaurants next to the other sweeteners do not even come close to as sweet.
Then I have to use the tiny little cocaine spoon that comes with the extract to put some in my tea, and less than a full spoonful because it’s so sweet.
I’ve also seen stevia products made specifically for baking, so that might be worth a try since I’m guessing they tried to get it 1:1 with sugar.
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.
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.
People really need to find better tomatoes. Onions are all that’s needed to balance the acidity, really.
the amount of sugar i put in my from scratch sauce doesnt compare to what usually comes with these premade satchets
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 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.
I don’t pit anything like that in my sauce. Tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, herbs and spices.
I think cooking it for hours tends to lower the acidity a bit.
But I think I just like it that way.
Your sauce will still have less sugar than others, but if I understand correctly, simmering for hours will break down the more complex sugars in tomatoes into simpler sugars resulting in a somewhat sweeter taste
I think cooking does also dull the percieved acidity of food though, hence lemon juice or other acids often being added at the end so as to keep the brightness. But I’m not actually sure if the pH changes or if it’s just a change in the tartness we associate with acidity, maybe someone can chime in with more information :)
Yes, but aren’t those sugars much different (read: better) than refined cane sugar (or worse: HFCS)?
Sugar is sugar, but it’s better that you’re getting vitamins and fiber from those plants as fiber will slow the rate of absorption.
Fair and excellent point.
What I failed to articulate originally was that a lot of food already naturally contains sugar in some form, so adding in more sugar (like cane sugar or HFCS) is what makes it bad for you.
Carrots?
Username almost checks out 😁
I’m a fraud
Carrots are common as a sweetener and thickener in some veggie based sauces. Melinda’s hot sauce uses them too
My grandma’s old recipe was just letting them soak in it all day and then taking them out rather than leaving them in. They’re a very nice snack after soaking in there. Very interesting flavor.
Nope.
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.
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…
i guarantee im not eating any of that sugar
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.
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
Fage 2% with some low sodium mixed nuts and low sugar dried cranberries is one of my favorite breakfasts these days. No joke.
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!
![This is how much sugar you are [possibly] eating.](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9694cd80-f133-4b02-80e3-1e937a78ea83.png){kind=link}