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.
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.
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
Oh that’s why yoplait is so fucking good
Damn, that’s a lot!
takes another swig of Prego
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Pretty much any fruit flavoured food that is not artificial will contain sugar from the fruit juice. But most companies add sugar anyway.
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
locustsswimmers 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.
Cool ad?
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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’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.
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.
Damn and I think my sauce is too sweet if I even add a whole tablespoon.
Check out how much sugar they put into frozen pizza. It’s basically a sweet.
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…
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.
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.
American issues
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.
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.
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.
Fruits healthfulness is commonly exaggerated. Consuming the fiber in whole fruit along with the sugar is better than just straight sugar, but it’s still something that should be moderated. Most fruits have way more sugar than fiber as well. Also that really only applies to whole uncooked fruit, using heat and mashing up fruit removes pretty much any of the benefit from the fiber.
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.
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.
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.
I feel exactly the same way, but I have to find time as often as I can. Most prepared food is garbage, and I’m cooking for people I care about.
Tomato puree has a lot of sugar, because tomatoes contain a lot of sugar. Pure 3-times concentrated tomato puree is 18% sugar.
![This is how much sugar you are [possibly] eating.](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9694cd80-f133-4b02-80e3-1e937a78ea83.png){kind=link}